Mike Nussbaum, the late-blooming Chicago actor who portrayed the aging salesman George Aaronow in the original Broadway production of Glengarry Glen Ross, just one of his many collaborations with David Mamet, has died. He was 99.
Nussbaum died Saturday — six days shy of his 100th birthday — at his home in Chicago, his daughter, Karen, told the Chicago Sun-Times.
He acted on Windy City stages for more than a half-century and received a lifetime achievement award from the League of Chicago Theaters in 2019.
On the big screen, Nussbaum played the book publisher Bob Drimmer in Fatal Attraction (1987), a school principal in Field of Dreams (1989) and the alien jewelry store owner Gentle Rosenburg in Men in Black (1997).
Nussbaum and Mamet first met in the late 1960s, and the future Pulitzer Prize winner would cast him as Teach in the 1975 premiere of his three-man drama American Buffalo at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. He also played Albert Einstein in Mamet’s Relativity.
He shared a Drama Desk award in 1984 for his turn as Aaronow (Alan Arkin had the role in the 1992 movie adaptation) in Glengarry Glen Ross and was another salesman, Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon in the film), in another acclaimed run at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre.
“It’s wonderful to work with Mike because, like any artist, like any actor, he’s just unusual,” Mamet said in a 2014 profile of Nussbaum in Chicago magazine. “You’re constantly saying, ‘My God, where did that come from?’ It’s not coming out of a bag of ‘acting moments.’ That’s all bullshit. It’s coming out of — who the hell knows where? You either got it, or you don’t, and Mike certainly does.”
The son of a fur wholesaler, Myron Nussbaum was born on Dec. 29, 1923, and raised in the Albany Park area of Chicago. He graduated from Von Steuben High School, then left the University of Wisconsin to enlist in the U.S. Army, where he served under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower as a teletype operator.
Back home, he worked in a family exterminating business for nearly two decades before deciding when he was in his 40s to pursue a full-time career as an actor. He did not earn his Equity card until the early ’70s.
Nussbaum first made it to Broadway as the director of the 1982 musical comedy Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?, but that lasted just five performances. He was back four years later with a role in John Guare’s The House of the Blue Leaves.
Nussbaum also played a con artist and mafia boss, respectively, in the Mamet films House of Games (1987) and Things Change (1988).
His onscreen résumé included Harry and Tonto (1974), Losing Isaiah (1995) and Steal Big Steal Little (1995), and TV turns in The Equalizer, 227, L.A. Law, Brooklyn Bridge, Frasier, The Commish, The X-Files and Early Edition.
In the Chicago magazine profile, he noted that he did 50 push-ups a day and drank a double shot of rye before bed every night.
Survivors include his second wife, Julie, whom he married in 2004; his children, Jack and Karen, and seven grandchildren. His first wife was Annette Brenner; they were married from 1949 until her death in 2003.
“I think that being an actor in Chicago, over a number of years, is the most satisfying life I could imagine,” Nussbaum told the Sun-Times in 2019. “I found New York and L.A. to be … antithetic to art. The desire for fame, the desire for glory, for money, is overwhelming in both cities. Although I had some success in both cities, I decided my life was more balanced here. I enjoy getting on the bus to go downtown and have someone come up and say, ‘I loved you in such-and-such.’”
Mort Engelberg, who was a producer on films including Smokey and the Bandit and The Big Easy before transitioning into politics as an “advance man” for Bill Clinton and other presidential candidates, died Saturday in Los Angeles of natural causes. He was 86.
“He was a wonderful person, a wonderful husband. He loved the movie business, and he loved his work with President Clinton,” his wife, Helaine Blatt, told The Hollywood Reporter. “He told the best stories of anyone I ever met, the best jokes.”
Born and raised in Memphis, Engelberg graduated from the University of Illinois and then spent a year working on a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Missouri. He left school before completing that degree and worked as a journalist for a few years before moving to Washington in 1961 to work for Sargent Shriver, the director of the then-newly formed Peace Corps, and later followed Shriver to the Office of Economic Opportunity, the headquarters of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.
But when the Vietnam War began pulling funding away from Johnson’s programs, Engelberg left politics, relocated to New York and landed a job at MGM in 1967. He moved on to United Artists, where he assisted on multiple James Bond films. The studio later transferred him its Los Angeles office, where he worked as assistant to the president of production.
Engelberg eventually moved into a producing role, where he worked on the Smokey films, starring Burt Reynolds, 1986’s The Big Easy, starring Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin, along with Steve McQueen starrer The Hunter (1980).
His other credits include 1985’s The Heavenly Kid; the 1979 Dom DeLuise comedy ‘Hot Stuff’; 1987’s Maid to Order and Three for the Road; and 1988’s Fright Night Part 2. He was an exec producer on 1988’s Remote Control and There Goes the Neighborhood, which was his last film.
In 1984, he turned to politics in a big way, volunteering as the advance man — someone who handles publicity for political candidates, scouting locations for campaign stops, generating big crowds and making sure events go off without a hitch — for Walter Mondale’s presidential run in 1984 and again for Michael Dukakis’ presidential bid in 1988.
While neither won their campaigns, in 1991, Engelberg again volunteered as an advance man, this time for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, which he would go on to win. He continued working with Clinton on his second presidential campaign as well as post-presidency.
“He traveled a lot with Clinton; he loved that man,” Blatt said, pointing out that he never took any money for his work on the campaigns. “He always volunteered. He always said, ‘They can’t fire me.’”
In 1992, he was asked why he made the switch from filmmaking to devote himself to the grueling schedule of a political campaign. He toldThe Los Angeles Times that he found the work “therapeutic” and a “wonderful relief” from the entertainment industry.
“For one thing, it’s not entirely altruistic,” he said. “L.A. is a one-industry town, and everything here is ‘how did your picture do’ or ‘how did your friend’s picture do’ or ‘are you gonna make this deal or that deal?’ You have one constituent in the movie business and that’s yourself. Whereas in politics — and I know this sounds pretentious — but politics is about something. Picking the next president, that’s a pretty important thing.”
Years later, he was asked again about his role in politics, noting how much he enjoyed his work.
“It’s a big responsibility, but it’s an awful lot of fun,” Engelberg told The New York Times in 2016. “It’s something I have really come to love over the years.”
Until his death, Engelberg told anyone who asked about retirement that he wasn’t retired: “He would say he was a producer,” Blatt said, noting his love for Hollywood.
In 2016, he married Blatt, his longtime love, after 26 years of dating, when he was 79. “On my 75th birthday, I convinced him to marry me. He said, ‘OK, we’ll get married, but no wedding.’ It was a tiny little thing, a party with all my girlfriends,” she reminisced fondly.
The couple had no children. In addition to Blatt, Engelberg is survived by his brother and “best friend,” Steve Engelberg; a niece, Liza Pahlberg; and a nephew, Danny Engelberg.
Marisa Pavan, the Italian actress and twin sister of Pier Angeli who received an Oscar nomination for her performance as the daughter of Anna Magnani’s seamstress in the 1955 drama The Rose Tattoo, has died. She was 91.
Pavan died Wednesday in her sleep at her home in Gassin, France, near Saint-Tropez, Margaux Soumoy, who wrote Pavan’s 2021 biography, Drop the Baby; Put a Veil on the Broad!, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Pavan also portrayed the French queen Catherine de’ Medici in Diane (1956), starring Lana Turner; an Italian girl who had an affair years ago with a corporate exec (Gregory Peck) in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956); and the love interest of a former cop (Tony Curtis) investigating the murder of a priest in the film noir The Midnight Story (1957).
In Paramount’s The Rose Tattoo (1955), an adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play that won four Tony Awards, including best play, Pavan was memorable as the headstrong Rosa Delle Rose alongside Magnani, Burt Lancaster, Jo Van Fleet and Ben Cooper. Williams adapted the screenplay with Hal Kanter.
The film, directed by Daniel Mann and shot in Florida by James Wong Howe, was nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, and won three. Pavan lost out on Oscar night to Van Fleet — who won not for The Rose Tattoo but for East of Eden — but she did get to the podium at the Pantages, accepting countrywoman Magnani’s trophy for best actress.
Marisa Pavan with Ben Cooper in 1955’s ‘The Rose Tattoo’
Courtesy Everett Collection
Maria Luisa Pierangeli and her sister (birth name Anna Maria Pierangeli, who was older by a few minutes) were born on June 19, 1932, in Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy. Their father, Luigi, was an architect and construction engineer, and their mother, Enrica, was a homemaker who once dreamed of being an actress.
“My mother adored Shirley Temple and took us to see all her movies,” Pavan said in Jane Allen’s 2002 book, Pier Angeli: A Fragile Life. “She even dressed us like Shirley Temple, hence the big bows in our hair.”
The family moved to Rome in the mid-1930s and was threatened when the Nazis occupied the city.
When she was 16, Anna was strolling along the Via Veneto on the way home from art school when she was discovered by Vittorio De Sica, and she portrayed a teenager on the verge of a sexual awakening opposite him in Tomorrow Is Too Late (1950). That brought her to the attention of MGM, which cast her in Teresa (1951), signed her to a seven-year contract and gave her the stage name Pier Angeli.
Angeli and her sister then moved to Los Angeles, and Maria, with no acting experience, was signed by Fox. Newly christened Marisa Pavan, she made her big-screen debut as a French girl in John Ford’s World War I-set What Price Glory (1952), starring James Cagney and Dan Dailey.
Pavan then appeared in 1954 in the film noir Down Three Dark Streets and in the Western Drum Beat, starring Broderick Crawford and Alan Ladd, respectively, before she broke out in The Rose Tattoo.
Pavan also co-starred in a pair of epic adventures released in 1959, playing Robert Stack’s love interest in John Farrow’s John Paul Jones (1959) and the servant Abishag in King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba (1959). In the latter, she worked alongside Yul Brynner, who joined the film in Spain after the sudden death of Tyrone Power.
Pavan worked mainly in television after that, with stints on such shows as The United States Steel Hour, Naked City, 77 Sunset Strip, Combat!, The F.B.I., Wonder Woman, Hawaii Five-O and The Rockford Files.
Marisa Pavan and Tony Curtis on the set of 1957’s ‘The Midnight Story’
Courtesy Everett Collection
In 1976, she appeared as Kirk Douglas‘ mentally ill wife in the Arthur Hailey NBC miniseries The Moneychangers, and she played Chantal Dubujak, mother of crime lord Max DuBujak (Daniel Pilon), in 1985 on the ABC soap opera Ryan’s Hope.
Angeli, who dated James Dean before she married singer Vic Damone and portrayed the wife of champion boxer Rocky Marciano (played by Paul Newman) in 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, died in 1971 at age 39 of a barbiturate overdose at a Beverly Hills apartment. It was never firmly established whether she died by suicide or suffered a reaction to prescribed medication.
Pavan was married to French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont (her castmate in John Paul Jones) from 1956 until his 2001 death. Survivors include her sons, Jean-Claude (a cinematographer) and Patrick, and her younger sister, Patrizia Pierangeli, also an actress.
It is not unfair to say that Henry Kissinger, who died Wednesday, November 29, at age 100, owes his role in history to one man: Richard Nixon. It is also not unfair to say that their partnership ranks as one of the most productive, complicated, paranoid, and downright weird relationships this side of Martin and Lewis. At times, each man loathed the other, often for showing the exact same insecurities he himself possessed.
What would Kissinger have become if Nixon had not telephoned him shortly after winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, and asked him to be on his foreign policy advisory group? Here was Nixon reaching out to a man who not only had been a close adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon’s rival for the nomination, but who had made no secret of his antipathy for the nominee. And, in fact, Kissinger said no, preferring to advise him personally. How much of that he actually did during the campaign remains murky, since Kissinger also sent friendly signals to the camp of Hubert Humphrey during the general election.
Humphrey later would tell The New York Times that if he had been elected president, he would have made Kissinger his national security adviser, just as Nixon had. It never would have worked, of course. Humphrey was too happy a person to connect with Kissinger in the way Nixon did. As Walter Isaacson points out in Kissinger, his 1992 biography that remains the best and most definitive account of the man, Nixon himself saw even his own partnership with Kissinger as unlikely: “the grocer’s son from Whittier and the refugee from Hitler’s Germany, the politician and the academic.” But what the two had in common was a deep love of foreign policy, not just in the way it is discussed at the Council on Foreign Relations, but in the dark and complex ways that diplomacy and force are practiced, complete with stabbed backs and revenge served ice-cold. “My rule in international affairs,” Nixon once told Golda Meir in a meeting with Kissinger, “is, ‘Do unto others as they would do unto you.’” Added Kissinger, with impeccable timing, “Plus 10 percent.”
This made for a particularly activist presidency, as evidenced not just by the Vietnam War and the endless peace talks and the bombing campaigns (including the secret ones in Cambodia), but by genuine and dramatic outreach, most notably Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 and, to a lesser degree, détente with the Soviet Union. There is a much darker side, of course, perhaps best exemplified by the overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected Socialist leader, Salvador Allende, in a 1973 coup engineered by the CIA. In Robert Dallek’s astute study, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, he describes the two men discussing the result, with Kissinger complaining about press coverage (as he often did) and Nixon proudly saying that “our hand doesn’t show on this one.”
We know about this conversation thanks to transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls. As The New York Times pointed out in a 2007 profile of Dallek, “this most secretive of presidencies had gradually become the most transparent” thanks to the gradual release of tapes, transcripts of phone calls, and diaries kept by Nixon, Kissinger, and others. Little of this casts Kissinger in a kinder light, especially in his obeisance to Nixon in person and his mocking of him to others. Mr. “Meatball Mind” somehow does not have the same ring as “Mr. President.”
The struggle between these two men for credit may be best illustrated by the tussle over who would be Time’s Man of the Year in 1972: Nixon alone, as Nixon unsurprisingly preferred, or Nixon and Kissinger. As recounted in Isaacson’s book, Nixon got wind of talk that Kissinger might be Man of the Year and complimented Kissinger by note; behind the scenes, he felt otherwise, as John Ehrlichman’s notes from a Camp David meeting that fall make clear: “President’s genius needs to be recognized, vis-à-vis HAK.”
Frances Sternhagen, the Tony Award-winning stage and screen actor known for playing memorable matriarchs on Sex and the City and Cheers, has died at age 93. Her son, John Carlin,announced on social media that she was in her New Rochelle, New York, home at the time of her passing on Monday, November 27. “Fly on, Frannie,” he wrote, “The curtain goes down on a life so richly, passionately, humbly and generously lived.”
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Sternhagen won a pair of Tony Awards for roles in 1973’s The Good Doctor (a Neil Simon comedy) and 1995’s revival of The Heiress, in which she starred as the widowed Aunt Lavinia opposite Cherry Jones. Over the course of her Broadway career, Sternhagen earned seven Tony nominations and became known for playing major roles on stage that would later become immortalized on film: characters in On Golden Pond, Driving Miss Daisy, and Steel Magnolias that were played in the movies by Katharine Hepburn, Jessica Tandy, and Olympia Dukakis, respectively.
When asked in 1992 if she was disappointed about being passed over for the film versions of some stage projects, Sternhagen said: “Absolutely. As you say, it’s marquee value, and it’s money. I mean, making a movie is a very expensive proposition, and if they can get Katherine Hepburn, they’re going to take Katherine Hepburn.” She added, “It hurts a little, but I’ve gotten very used to it, really.”
Born on January 13, 1930, in Washington, DC, Sternhagen found renown onscreen for playing maternal figures on popular TV shows. She played Esther, mother of John Ratzenberger’s Cliff, on Cheers; Gamma Carter, grandmother of Noah Wyle’s John on ER; and Willie Ray, mother of Kyra Sedgwick’s LAPD Deputy Chief Brenda, on The Closer. She received three Emmy Award nominations—two for Cheers and one for arguably her most infamous role as the meddlesome WASP Bunny MacDougal on Sex and the City.
With her invasive VapoRub techniques and habit of casting harsh judgment on Kristin Davis’s Charlotte York, Bunny quickly became one of the worst women on the HBO series and mother to one of the more debatable men (Kyle MacLachlan’s Trey MacDougal). “Anytime I got to work with Frances Sternhagen was a joy because the situations that they had us in as mother and son were so uncomfortable,” MacLachlan said in 2018. “There was one scene in particular when I’m taking a bath and she’s sitting on the toilet smoking a cigarette and we’re having a conversation. And Charlotte comes in, and of course, Kristin Davis has got the greatest look on her face of shock and disgust and, ‘Now what do I do?’ That was a particularly fond memory.”
In the same interview, MacLachlan praised Sternhagen’s ability to shape-shift into the role, which she would play across three seasons of SATC. “She played this Upper East Side matron and she would come to work in Birkenstocks and jeans and a blouse and straw hat. She was very bohemian,” he said, “And then she would transform into this fantastic character from the Upper East Side.”
Of her performance, Sternhagen told the Los Angeles Times in 2002: “I must say it’s fun to play these snobby older ladies. It’s always more fun to be obnoxious. I have known women like that, and I can imitate them, I guess.”
Sternhagen also appeared in movies including Starting Over, Independence Day, Misery, Julie & Julia, and Bright Lights, Big City. Her final onscreen appearance was 2014’s And So It Goes, opposite Diane Keaton and Michael Douglas.
After starring in multiple theater projects together, Sternhagen married fellow actor Thomas Carlin; they were married until his death in 1991. Sternhagen is survived by their six children.
Victor J. Kemper, the veteran cinematographer who shot more than 50 features, including Dog Day Afternoon, Eyes of Laura Mars, The Jerk and Slap Shot, during his four-decade career, has died. He was 96.
Kemper died Monday, the American Society of Cinematographers announced. No other details of his death were immediately available.
Kemper earned his inaugural cinematography credit on Husbands (1970), written and directed by John Cassavetes, then shot Elia Kazan‘s final feature, The Last Tycoon (1976) and Tim Burton’s first, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985).
Kemper also did six films for director Arthur Hiller — The Tiger Makes Out (1967), The Hospital (1971), Author! Author! (1982), The Lonely Guy (1984), See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) and Married to It (1991) — and three in a row for Carl Reiner: Oh God! (1977), The One and Only (1978) and The Jerk (1979).
The New Jersey native said he had to wear ice skates when he photographed the hockey scenes in George Roy Hill’s Slap Shot (1977) and frequently found himself the victim of a practical joke when the actors who played the Hanson brothers (Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson and David Hanson) used their sticks to trip him.
The heady list of directors with whom Kemper also worked included Michael Ritchie on The Candidate (1972), Peter Yates on The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Sidney Lumet on Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Elaine May on Mikey and Nicky (1976), Robert Wise on Audrey Rose (1977), Irvin Kershner on Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) and Norman Jewison on … And Justice for All (1979).
Kemper was adept at various genres but showed a particular flair for comedy on Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972), National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), Mr. Mom (1983), Beethoven (1992), Tommy Boy (1995) and Jingle All the Way (1996).
Kemper served as president of the ASC from 1993-96 and 1999-2001 and received the guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998.
Born in Newark on April 14, 1927, Kemper graduated from Seton Hall University and was hired by a local television station, where he operated a sound boom, mixed sound and served as technical director for live studio programs.
His boss denied his request to take a couple of weeks off to go to California to train in the use of videotape, which had recently been invented — so he quit.
In 1954, Kemper landed a job as a video camera operator for EUE, a television commercial production company in New York, then went to work as an assistant cameraman and operator for top cinematographers including Arthur Ornitz.
On his very first day on Husbands — he came on after the original DP, Aldo Tonti, decided to leave after a week — Kemper was challenged to light a scene in a men’s bathroom in which the walls were painted black and all the actors in it were wearing black overcoats for a funeral.
“Cassavetes came out on the set and wished me good luck on my first time out,” he recalled in a 2009 interview. “I said, ‘John, will you please tell me how do you expect me to light this set?’ … He said very simply, ‘You’re the cinematographer, I’m the director, you figure it out,’ and he walked away. That’s how I got thrown in head-first into the steaming hot water.”
They spent 12 weeks in New York and 10 in London shooting Husbands, double the time that was budgeted. “Cassavetes was always more interested in getting the film right,” he said, “than worried about the dollars spent.”
Kemper’s film résumé also included They Might Be Giants (1971), Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971), The Gambler (1974), Stay Hungry (1976), Coma (1978), Magic (1978), Xanadu (1980), The Four Seasons (1981) and Clue (1985).
He was nominated for an Emmy for his work on the 1987 CBS telefilm Kojak: The Price of Justice and shot the acclaimed 1985 CBS miniseries The Atlanta Child Murders.
Kemper said that his job required a bit of instinct.
“Part of being a cinematographer is learning the craft,” he said in 2008 when he was named a cinematographer in residence at UCLA. “But there is also something that whispers in your ear and tells you to move the camera a foot in a particular direction while putting a face in shadows and a sparkle in someone’s eyes.”
Ross McDonnell, an Irish Emmy-winning filmmaker, who is most known for his cinematography on The Trade, has died. He was 44.
His family announced in a notice on RIP.ie that McDonnell died “unexpectedly” on Nov. 5.
“He will be very sadly missed by his loving parents, sister, niece, aunt, uncles, cousins, extended family and his many dear friends, LJ, and also his colleagues in Ireland, U.S.A. and around the World,” the notice read.
This comes more than a week after NBC News reported that a body was found at a New York City beach on Nov. 17. Law enforcement sources told the outlet that the “remains appeared to be of filmmaker Ross McDonnell,” who had disappeared earlier this month. Police responded to a 911 call about a torso with human legs attached found lying at Breezy Point Beach in Queens.
McDonnell was last seen on Nov. 4, riding a bicycle after leaving his apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, the outlet reported. The bike was then found later, locked up at Fort Tilden Beach in Queens.
The New York City medical examiner’s office will determine his cause of death. Sources told NBC News that no foul play is suspected and there is no indication of suicide.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, McDonnell has worked as a cinematographer on several projects, including Colony, Dollhouse, Snake Dance, Life Is Sacred, Forever Pure, Elián, No Stone Unturned, One Million American Dreams, The First Wave and Edge of the Unknown with Jimmy Chin.
But it was his work on the Showtime series The Trade, which ran for two seasons, that won him an Emmy Award for outstanding cinematography: documentary in 2021. The following year, he won an Emmy for cinematography for Matthew Heineman’s COVID-19 doc, The First Wave.
He also served as a co-producer on The First Wave and The Trade.
McDonnell is survived by his parents Maureen and Nicky, his sister Louise and niece Eva.
Joss Ackland, the British actor known for Lethal Weapon 2, Mighty Ducks and White Mischief, has died. He was 95.
Ackland died peacefully of old age, surrounded by his family Sunday morning, his longtime rep and friend Paul Pearson told The Hollywood Reporter. “He was lucid, erudite and mischievous to the end,” the rep added. “I loved him deeply, and, for me, he is the reason we have the word Magnificent in the dictionary.”
The actor was described as a “beloved father,” in a family statement obtained by BBC. It read, “With his distinctive voice and commanding presence, Ackland brought a unique intensity and gravitas to his role. He will be remembered as one of Britain’s most talented and beloved actors.”
In addition to his film roles in Lethal Weapon 2, Mighty Ducksand White Mischief, Ackland was known for parts in The Hunt for Red October, Daisies in December and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. He starred alongside stars like Sean Connery, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Emilio Estevez. He also appeared in TV shows like Shadowlands, where he portrayed C.S. Lewis, and Midsomer Murders.
Born on Feb. 29, 1928, Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland was the son of Sydney Norman Ackland, an Irish journalist, and Ruth Ackland, a maid. He studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama before joining the Old Vic. Ackland made his stage debut at 17 years old in The Hasty Hart.
The actor made his first credited debut in a supporting role in Vernon Sewell’s 1952 film, Ghost Ship, but after that, it took almost a decade for him to return the big screen. He spent the time in between honing his craft in local theatrical companies, taking on roles like Captian Hook in the musical version of Peter Pan in London’s West End and Juan Peron in Evita.
Before his film career really began taking off in the 1970s and ’80s, he also had memorable turns as Falstaff in William Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 and as Captain Shotover in George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House.
He married fellow actor Rosemary Kirkcaldy in August 1951. She died in July 2002. The couple had seven children, one of whom died of a heroin overdose in 1982 when he was 29. Ackland’s survivors include his six other children, 32 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
It’s hard to remember now, due to both the rosy hues of time and the personalities and pratfalls of subsequent First Ladies, but Rosalynn Carter, wife of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, was one tough customer. History has smoothed her edges so that many recall her, vaguely, as a sweet but sturdy Southern woman—if not a belle, then someone who seemed nice enough but was in no way a world-beater, nothing like the forever-thwarted Hillary Clinton or the supremely confident Michelle Obama.
Part of this misguided legacy has to do with geographical bias. Rosalynn Carter—who passed away Sunday, November 19, after having been diagnosed with dementia—came from small-town Georgia, like her husband, and upon their taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, political Washington came down with a bad case of what the writer Nicholas Lemann has called rubophobia. The Carters were dismissed as rednecks, pure and simple. They spoke with Southern accents. They had run a peanut farm. Rosalynn wore the same dress she had worn to her husband’s 1971 Georgia gubernatorial ball for his presidential fête in 1977. (Worse, it came from someplace called Jason’s in someplace called Americus, Georgia.) The couple banned hard liquor from White House dinners. “I just don’t want to,” Rosalynn told a skeptical reporter for The New York Times. “Not for religious reasons. I just don’t want to. Besides, I’m saving the taxpayers’ money.” In fact, the Carters were big on praying too, and, perhaps worse, in the eyes of their detractors, they were sincere in their faith. Maybe it’s no wonder that the excesses of the Reagan years came as something of a relief in the Carters’ wake, and why Rosalynn’s fuddy-duddy reputation persists.
But she never was that, really. It is useful to recall that in 1977 and 1979 a Gallup poll designated Rosalynn the most popular woman in the world among Americans, and in 1980 she tied for the same honor with Mother Teresa, whose reputation has since suffered blows. Reading over several biographical accounts in recent days, what has come through most is how Rosalynn Carter managed to be both partner and individual. She was a woman of a generation that could (almost but not quite) operate independently, a bridge between the First Ladies who were silent helpmates and those who could (almost) act as individuals in their own right. Though it isn’t frequently noted, the Carters presaged the package deal later offered by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
She was the right person at the right time for that societal shift. Eleanor Rosalynn Smith (pronounced “Rose-a-lynn,” never “Roz-a-lynn”) grew up in modest circumstances in Plains, Georgia, wearing clothes made by her dressmaker mother. She was devoted to her father, an auto mechanic and bus driver, who encouraged her to excel in high school, which she did, and to go on to college and find wider horizons. He died of leukemia when Rosalynn was 13, and she was driven to fulfill his ambitions for her. (“My childhood really ended at that moment,” she would later write in her autobiography, First Lady from Plains, of the moment he told her about his illness.)
The road to that wider world appeared in the form of a US Naval Academy student by the name of James Earl Carter Jr., whom she started dating in 1945. (They had met years before, when Carter was three, and his mother, an enterprising nurse who came to be known as “Miz” Lillian, helped deliver Rosalynn.) Their love-at-almost-first-sight story became a staple of news reports from the time Jimmy started running for public office, and, by the time he was elected president, was part of a romantic gloss that feature writers so adore. The tale has staying power because it was true. Yes, Rosalynn was royally peeved when, in 1953, Jimmy gave up his naval career (and the travels she loved) to run the family’s peanut farm in Plains after Carter’s father died. However, that was the beginning of the collaboration that eventually landed Jimmy in the Georgia State Senate and then the governor’s mansion. “We developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business, and it continued when Jimmy got involved in politics,” Rosalynn told the Associated Press. “I knew more on paper about the business than he did. He would take my advice about things.” Jimmy didn’t argue. “The best thing I ever did was marrying Rosalynn,” he said in a Carter Center interview in 2015. “That’s the pinnacle of my life.”
John Bailey, the cinematographer on Ordinary People, Groundhog Day, As Good as It Gets and dozens of other notable films who endured two “stressful” terms as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, died Friday. He was 81.
Bailey diedin Los Angeles, his wife, Oscar-nominated film editor Carol Littleton (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), announced.
”It is with deep sadness I share with you that my best friend and husband, John Bailey, passed away peacefully in his sleep early this morning,” she said in a statement. “During John’s illness, we reminisced how we met 60 years ago and were married for 51 of those years. We shared a wonderful life of adventure in film and made many long-lasting friendships along the way. John will forever live in my heart.”
They worked on more than a dozen features together.
The Southern California-raised Bailey served as the director of photography for director Paul Schrader on American Gigolo (1980), Cat People (1982), Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Light of Day (1987) and Forever Mine (1999) and collaborated with Lawrence Kasdan on The Big Chill (1983), Silverado (1985), The Accidental Tourist (1988) and Wyatt Earp (1994).
He had another fruitful relationship with director Ken Kwapis, working with him on six films: Vibes (1988), The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005), License to Wed (2007), He’s Just Not That Into You (2009), Big Miracle (2012) and A Walk in the Woods (2015), where he reunited with Ordinary People director Robert Redford.
Bailey also shot Michael Apted’s Continental Divide (1981), Stuart Rosenberg’s The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire (1993), Robert Benton’s Nobody’s Fool (1994), Sam Raimi’s For Love of the Game (1999) and Callie Khouri’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002).
In a 2020 interview for American Cinematographer magazine, Bailey said his philosophy was “imbued with an international perspective” — one of his touchstone movies was the Vittorio Storaro-shot The Conformist (1970) — and that he had “a singular focus on the kinds of films I wanted to make, even from the time I was an assistant and [camera] operator.”
“I did not want to do tawdry films,” he added. “I did not want to do exploitive films or violent ones. I really held out, sometimes at great personal expense, literally, in terms of money, to do films that I knew were building a résumé that when I did become a director of photography, that was part of who I was.”
A member of the American Society of Cinematographers since 1985, he received a lifetime achievement award from the group in 2015.
John Bailey (right) with director Lawrence Kasdan on the set of 1983’s ‘The Big Chill’
Bailey also was a longtime board member at the Academy when he followed Cheryl Boone Isaacs as AMPAS president in August 2017, becoming the only one to come from the cinematography branch. He won reelection the next summer before being succeeded by David Rubin in August 2019.
His tenure was marked by a huge increase in members, especially for international and non-Hollywood folks; the ousters of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski from the Academy; a Kevin Hart hosting imbroglio; and three moves meant to boost Oscar TV ratings that were torpedoed amid great criticism: the creation of a “popular Oscar,” the elimination of three live best song performances on the show, and the sidelining of four winners’ speeches to commercial breaks.
“I had no idea how stressful that job was going to be,” he said.
The son of a machinist, John Ira Bailey was born on Aug. 10, 1942, in Moberly, Missouri, and raised in Norwalk, California. He edited the school newspaper at Pius X High School in Downey, California, then attended Santa Clara University and Loyola Marymount University, graduating in 1964.
He decided to pursue cinematography while spending two years at USC in a new graduate program for film studies.
Bailey spent more than a decade as an apprentice cinematographer/camera operator for the likes of Néstor Almendros, Vilmos Zsigmond and Charles Rosher Jr. on such films as Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1976) and Robert Altman’s The Late Show and 3 Women, both released in 1977.
The first studio feature he shot as D.P. was Boulevard Nights (1979), directed by Michael Pressman.
Bailey broke through when two films he worked on back-to-back — the stylish neo-noir American Gigolo, just the third film that Schrader directed, and the restrained Oscar best picture winner Ordinary People, Redford’s directorial debut — were released within seven months of each other in 1980.
Boulevard Nights producer Tony Bill had recommended Bailey to Redford. “Not that many first-time directors back then would have hired an inexperienced cinematographer,” Bailey said in 2015 on an ASC podcast, “but Redford certainly had the experience and the confidence [from his years as an actor] to do that.”
For Bailey, the script was always paramount when it came to taking a job, and he had great screenplays to work with on Groundhog Day (1993), co-written by director Harold Ramis, and the best picture Oscar nominee As Good as It Gets (1997), co-written by director James L. Brooks.
His cinematography résumé also included Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), That Championship Season (1982), Without a Trace (1983), Racing With the Moon (1984), Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986), Swimming to Cambodia (1987), My Blue Heaven (1990), Extreme Measures (1996), Living Out Loud (1998), The Anniversary Party (2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), The Producers (2005) and The Way Way Back (2013).
Bailey also directed a handful of films, including Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1991), China Moon (1994), Mariette in Ecstasy (1996) and Via Dolorosa (2000).
Bailey said he sought the Academy presidency primarily to support the organization’s film archive, the Margaret Herrick Library, the Nicholl screenwriting programs and international cinema. “I didn’t want to worry about the Oscars so much,” he said in 2021. “The studios are invested in the Oscars, the studios are going to make sure the Oscars take care of themselves, one way or another.
“Everybody seems to have an idea — and they think their idea is best — about what the Academy Awards should be. The absolute inanity, coupled with the hubris that comes with it sometimes, especially on the part of certain trade and media critics … it just really bothered me that whole Oscar season, day after day, having to read the drivel by some of these journalists that said they knew how to fix the Oscars.”
He and Littleton, who is to receive an honorary Oscar at the delayed Governors Awards in January, had no children.
“All of us at the Academy are deeply saddened to learn of John’s passing,” Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy president Janet Yang said in a joint statement. “John was a passionately engaged member of the Academy and the film community. He served as our president and as an Academy governor for many years and played a leadership role on the cinematographers branch. His impact and contributions to the film community will forever be remembered. Our thoughts and support are with Carol at this time.”
Donations in his memory can be made to the Academy Foundation.
Bailey said his formative years in Hollywood taught him that becoming a successful cinematographer had more to do with just learning how to operate the equipment.
“It’s about learning how people work together, forging relationships, dealing with the stresses and the sort of unexpected accidents and gifts that you’re given day to day and developing a perspective that when you go to work in the morning, you’re not executing a blueprint based on storyboards or discussions or anything,” he said. “You are in a living, changing, spontaneous, human flux. Anything can happen at any given moment.”
Peter White, who portrayed Linc Tyler on the ABC soap opera All My Children over four decades and starred in the original stage production and film adaptation of The Boys in the Band, has died. He was 86.
White died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles of melanoma, his All My Children castmate Kathleen Noone (Ellen Shepherd Dalton on the show) told The Hollywood Reporter.
White also played Arthur Cates, the attorney for Sable Colby (Stephanie Beacham), on the first two seasons of the ABC primetime soap The Colbys in 1985-86, and he recurred as the deceased doctor dad of the characters played by Swoosie Kurtz, Sela Ward, Patricia Kalember and Julianne Phillips on the 1991-96 NBC drama Sisters.
White first portrayed Lincoln Tyler, son of stern Pine Valley matriarch Phoebe Tyler (Ruth Warrick), from 1974-80 — he was the third actor in the role, starting with James Karen — then returned for stints in ’81, ’84, ’86, ‘95 and 2005.
White starred as Alan McCarthy in Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, which opened off-Broadway at Theater Four in April 1968. The drama revolves around a group of gay men attending a birthday party in a Manhattan apartment for their friend Harold (Leonard Frey), though it’s left unclear whether Alan was/is gay.
Until then, most gay characters in American theater had been veiled or demonized.
“Opening night, none of us knew what we had,” White recalled in a 2008 interview. “We all just thought, ‘It’s a play, it’s something new, it’s different and it’s good.’ It was a 100 percent gay audience — and then the next day, it went crazy!
“We got a call to come to the theater early, because there was such a crowd around the theater, you couldn’t get near it. Everyone at the time wanted to call it a gay play — [I always thought] it wasn’t [so much] a gay play [as] it was a play with gay characters.”
When Crowley produced and adapted his drama for the landmark 1970 film that was directed by William Friedkin and released through National General Pictures, White and his co-stars came along for the ride.
Born in New York City on Oct. 10, 1937, White started out on soaps by playing Jerry Ames on CBS’ The Secret Storm in 1965-66, then guest-starred on an episode of N.Y.P.D. in 1968.
He was working alongside Myrna Loy in a touring production of Barefoot in the Park when he was offered the Boys in the Band opportunity.
“Things were sort of really moving for me; I was doing so well, and I thought, ‘I don’t need this kind of risk,’” he recalled. “I talked to Myrna — she became my mentor — and she said, ‘Peter, if you are going to be an actor, you are going to have to take some risks in your life.’”
The play would run for more than 1,000 performances.
White returned to the soap world in 1971 with a turn as Dr. Sanford Hiller on CBS’ Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, and he also appeared in the Robert Mulligan-directed film The Pursuit of Happiness that year.
He made it to Broadway in 1975 in P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, though that play lasted just 16 performances.
White guest-starred on dozens of TV shows over the years, from Cannon, Hill Street Blues, The Jeffersons, Dynasty and Knots Landing to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Mad About You, The X-Files, The West Wing and Cold Case.
His film résumé also included Dave (1993), Mother (1996), Flubber (1997), Armageddon (1998), Thirteen Days (2000) and First Daughter (2004). In recent years, he served as an acting coach for those preparing to audition.
Noone said White was not married and had no children. His death was first reported by the SoapHub website.
Shannon Wilcox, a character actress who appeared alongside Willie Nelson in Songwriter, with Dudley Moore in Six Weeks and opposite Al Pacino in Frankie and Johnny, has died. She was 80.
Wilcox died Sept. 2 in Los Angeles, her daughter, actress-director Kelli Williams — she played attorney Lindsay Dole on The Practice — told The Hollywood Reporter.
A life member of The Actors Studio, Wilcox also portrayed the mother of Elisabeth Shue’s Ali Mills in John G. Avildsen’s The Karate Kid (1994) and worked in many other notable films, among them Tony Richardson’s The Border (1982), Ivan Reitman’s Legal Eagles (1986), Mark Rydell’s For the Boys (1991) and David Fincher’s Seven (1995).
Wilcox was the resigned ex-wife of Nelson’s Doc Jenkins in Alan Rudolph’s Songwriter (1984) and the wife of a California politician (Moore) caught up with a woman (Mary Tyler Moore) and her sickly child (Katherine Healy) in Tony Bill’s Six Weeks (1982). And in Garry Marshall’s Frankie and Johnny (1991), she played a prostitute hired by Pacino’s lonely character to spend the night.
Marshall would keep her busy over the years, also putting her in Exit to Eden (1994), Dear God (1996), The Other Sister (1999), Runaway Bride (1999), The Princess Diaries (2001) and its 2004 sequel and Raising Helen (2004).
Born Mary Kay Wilcox in Ohio, she was raised on a farm in Indiana with her siblings, Bob, Caudie and Janny. She attended high school and college in Boulder, Colorado, before moving to Paris to become a dancer. She ultimately settled in Los Angeles and started her career as an actress.
Wilcox made her onscreen debut on a 1976 episode of Starsky & Hutch and appeared on such other shows as Kaz, Hawaii Five-O, Family and Hart to Hart before landing her first movie, the Mac Davis-starring Cheaper to Keep Her (1980).
In 1981, she was among the inaugural group of actors and filmmakers invited by Sydney Pollack to study at the Sundance Institute.
She portrayed the ex-wife of a Texas surgeon played by Dennis Weaver — she still loves him but had to leave him because he was just too focused on his work — on the 1987-88 ABC drama Buck James, but that show lasted just 19 episodes.
Shannon Wilcox with Willie Nelson in the 1984 film ‘Songwriter’
TriStar Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
On Dallas in 1990, she recurred on the two-part finale of the 13th season and on the first three episodes of the 14th season in a continuing story arc that had J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) stuck in a psychiatric hospital.
Wilcox also appeared on episodes of Remington Steele, Cagney & Lacey, Magnum, P.I., L.A. Law, NCIS: Los Angeles and Grey’s Anatomy and in films including Hollywood Harry (1986) and There Goes My Baby (1994).
She and Williams played mother and daughter on the 2004 Hallmark Channel telefilm A Boyfriend for Christmas.
Wilcox “was quick to laugh, lit up every room she entered and loved traveling and making friends all over the world,” her daughter said. “She spoke French, Spanish and Italian. One of her greatest passions was dancing tango and salsa, which she continued to do beautifully well into her 70s. Her dance card was always full.”
Wilcox was married to plastic surgeon John Williams from 1965 until their 1984 divorce and to Godfather actor and Emmy winner Alex Rocco from 2005 until his July 2015 death at age 79.
In addition to her daughter and brother, survivors include her son, Sean Doyle, a writer and producer, and grandchildren Kiran, Sarame and Ravi. A private celebration of life is being held in her honor this month.
Ady Barkan, an attorney and influential activist who used his years-long battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to advance healthcare rights, has died. He was 39.
His wife, Rachael Scarborough King, shared the news on X (formerly Twitter) Wednesday that Barkan “died from complications of ALS.”
“You probably knew Ady as a healthcare activist. But more importantly he was a wonderful dad and my life partner for 18 years,” she wrote in a statement. “Ady fought for the 24/7 care he needed to be home with us until the end of his life. It’s impossible to thank his incredible caregivers enough for their labor and care, which allowed us to live as a family through Ady’s health challenges. Everyone should have that chance.
Her statement continued, “Thank you to everyone who has supported Ady and our family over the years—from the amazing caregivers who became family to us to the activists facing their own health challenges who joined the movement he was building [Be A Hero].”
Hi all, this is Ady’s wife, Rachael. I’m devastated to share the news that Ady has died from complications of ALS. You probably knew Ady as a healthcare activist. But more importantly he was a wonderful dad and my life partner for 18 years. [1/4] pic.twitter.com/KZ8k73Gujp
Barkan, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2016, used his own fight for access to healthcare to become a leader in the effort to save the Affordable Care Act.
His story was also featured in the 2021 documentary Not Going Quietly, directed by Nicholas Bruckman. It followed him through his progressive advocacy work as he embarked on a national campaign for healthcare reform, including when he testified before Congress.
Barkan also made headlines when he confronted U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake on a plane in 2017, asking him to vote no on a tax bill that would hurt programs that help people like Barkan who have ALS.
In 2018, he co-founded the nonprofit Be A Hero, which works to expand access to healthcare.
The organization’s co-executive director Jamila Headley shared in a statement on social media, “The Be A Hero team shared in the profound grief of all who knew and loved Andy. We’ve always known we wouldn’t have enough time with him. While we don’t know how to imagine a world without him learning, strategizing, fighting and laughing alongside us, we do know that through Be A Hero and the movement of patients we are building, Andy’s work will live on.”
Barkan is survived by his wife Rachael, and their two children, Carl and Willow.
Joan Evans, the daughter of screenwriters and goddaughter of Joan Crawford, who starred opposite Farley Granger in her first three films and with Audie Murphy in a pair of Westerns, has died. She was 89.
Evans died Oct. 21 in Henderson, Nevada, her son, John Weatherly, told The Hollywood Reporter.
She also toplined the Charles Lederer-directed On the Loose (1951), playing a suicidal teenager in the drama written by her parents, Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert; portrayed Irene Dunne’s daughter in the fantasy It Grows on Trees (1952); and enlisted in the U.S. Navy with Esther Williams in the musical comedy Skirts Ahoy! (1952).
Evans played the love interest of Granger’s character in the title role of Roseanna McCoy (1949), a drama loosely based on the family feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. The two worked together again in the 1950 releases Our Very Own and Edge of Doom, a bleak film noir directed by Mark Robson.
The actress later starred with Murphy in Column South (1953), helmed by future Tonight Show director Fred De Cordova, and No Name on a Bullet (1959), helmed by Jack Arnold.
From left: Joan Evans, Vivian Blaine and Esther Williams in the 1952 film ‘Skirts Ahoy!’
Courtesy Everett Collection
Named for Crawford, Joan Katherine Eunson was born on July 18, 1934, in New York. Her mom had begun her career as a Hollywood journalist and publicist at MGM, where Crawford first found fame, and she would go on to write many articles about the actress while at Photoplay magazine.
“They were best friends,” Evans noted in an entertaining interview with Foster Hirsch in 2013.
Evans had been on the stage but was only 14 when she went to work on Roseanna McCoy for producer Samuel Goldwyn. He had signed her to a contract in 1948 and put her in the movie after firing Cathy O’Donnell, who had married the brother of William Wyler, who left Goldwyn to launch his own production company.
While director Nicholas Ray was doing reshoots on the film, Evans was “accidentally shot very, very seriously” in the arm by Granger when a gun he was carrying discharged in the hills outside Columbia, California, she told Hirsch. She needed emergency surgery and was hospitalized.
Joan Evans with Farley Granger in 1949’s ‘Roseanna McCoy’
Courtesy Everett Collection
Days after she had turned 18, Evans and her boyfriend, car dealer Kirby Weatherly, then 26, were invited to Crawford’s Brentwood home for dinner, and after their meal, the Mildred Pierce star decided that the couple should get married — that night. Crawford called a judge over to perform the ceremony, and Evans and Weatherly were wed minutes after midnight on July 24, 1952.
“The head of publicity at Goldwyn had said to me, ‘Joan, I don’t care what you do, just don’t call me in the middle of the night and tell me you’re married,’” she said. “So, I called him in the middle of the night and told him I was married.”
Her parents did not want this to happen and were furious with Crawford, never to speak with her again.
Some speculate that Crawford went against Eunson and Albert’s wishes because they had recently written the screenplay for The Star (1952), which featured Bette Davis in an Oscar-winning turn as an aging, washed-up actress desperate to reignite her career. Davis said she based the character on her bitter rival, Crawford.
Evans and Weatherly were together until his death on Jan. 1. Their marriage “wasn’t the mistake that my parents foretold,” she said.
Meanwhile, she remained close with Crawford until her 1977 death and said she never witnessed any evidence of “Mommie Dearest” behavior from her.
“I saw a wonderful, darling friend who was generous to the max to everyone, certainly to me,” she told Hirsch. “When I was a little girl, I traveled on the train from New York to California with Joan; now that would bring out the worst in any great actress, [and it didn’t].”
Evans also appeared in such other films as The Outcast (1954), A Strange Adventure (1956), The Flying Fontaines (1959) and The Walking Target (1960), and on TV shows including Climax!, The Millionaire, Cheyenne, 77 Sunset Strip, Wagon Train, Zorro, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Tall Man and Laramie.
She stepped aside from acting in the early ’60s to care for her family and later was an editor of Hollywood Studio Magazine and a teacher at the Carden Academy in Van Nuys.
All along, her parents, who were also playwrights and novelists, kept writing, with their credits including All Mine to Give (1957), Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) and several episodes of Leave It to Beaver.
In addition to her son, survivors include her daughter, Dale, and a grandson, Chris.
Elaine Devry, an actress who appeared in such films as The Atomic Kid and A Guide for the Married Man and on dozens of TV shows after becoming the fourth of Mickey Rooney’s eight wives, has died. She was 93.
Devry died Sept. 20 in her home in Grants Pass, Oregon, according to a notice placed on a local funeral home website.
Devry married Rooney in Las Vegas in November 1952 and made her first onscreen acting appearances the next year in the Rooney-starring comedy film A Slight Case of Larceny and on an episode of the Ronald Reagan-hosted CBS anthology series General Electric Theater.
In the Republic Pictures sci-fi comedy The Atomic Kid (1954), directed by Leslie H. Martinson, she was introduced as “Elaine Davis (Mrs. Mickey Rooney),” and her character, a nurse, marries her husband’s Barnaby “Blix” Waterberry at the end of the movie.
In A Guide for the Married Man (1967), directed by Gene Kelly, she portrayed a seductive divorcée who has a rendezvous in a motel room with Walter Matthau’s Paul Manning that doesn’t go off as she’d hoped.
Over the years, Devry showed up as a guest star on everything from Bourbon Street Beat, Bachelor Father, Perry Mason, Death Valley Days, 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye to Bonanza, I Dream of Jeannie, My Three Sons, Family Affair, Marcus Welby, M.D., and Cannon before leaving acting in the late 1970s.
Elaine Devry and then-husband Mickey Rooney in a promotional photo for 1954’s ‘The Atomic Kid’
Courtesy Everett Collection
Thelma Elaine Mahnken was born on Jan. 10, 1930, in Compton, California. She did some modeling while attending Compton High School and Compton Community College, then moved to Butte, Montana, where she wed high school sweetheart Dan Ducich, a standout basketball player, in 1948.
A year later, Ducich was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to probation, and the couple divorced in 1952. In June 1954, he died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in a room at the Sahara in Vegas. He was 28.
Devry returned to California and met Rooney at a driving range in Woodland Hills, and they tied the knot when she was 22 and he was 32. He had already been married to actress Ava Gardner, singer Betty Jane Phillips and actress Martha Vickers.
In 1956, Edward R. Murrow interviewed the couple from their home on CBS’ Person to Person.
While separated from Devry, Rooney met actress Barbara Ann Thomason and began a romance with her. He divorced Devry in Mexico in December 1958 — the end of their marriage was not publicly disclosed for several months — and their breakup would prove to be quite contentious.
Rooney went on to marry Thomason, who was murdered by her lover, Milos Milos, in the Rooneys’ Brentwood home in 1966. After her death, he tied the knot with writer Marge Lane, secretary Carolyn Hockett and actress-singer Jan Chamberlin before dying in April 2014.
Devry also appeared in such films as China Doll (1958), Man-Trap (1961), The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961), Diary of a Madman (1963), With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), The Cheyenne Social Club (1970), Bless the Beasts & Children (1971), The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973) and Herbie Rides Again (1974).
In 1975, she married actor Will J. White. They first met in 1961 on NBC’s The Dick Powell Theater; their episode, with Powell starring as millionaire investigator Amos Burke, served as the pilot for the ABC series Burke’s Law. (Rooney was on the episode, too.)
White died in 1992. His sister, actress Suzanne Alexander, died by apparent suicide in 1975 at age 44.
Bobby Charlton, an English football icon who survived a plane crash that decimated a Manchester United team destined for greatness to become the heartbeat of his country’s 1966 World Cup-winning team, has died. He was 86.
A statement from Charlton’s family, released by United, said he died on Saturday surrounded by his family.
An extravagantly gifted midfielder with a ferocious shot, Charlton was the leading scorer for both United (249 goals) and England (49 goals) for more than 40 years until being overtaken by Wayne Rooney.
“Sir Bobby was a hero to millions, not just in Manchester, or the United Kingdom, but wherever football is played around the world,” Manchester United said.
“He was admired as much for his sportsmanship and integrity as he was for his outstanding qualities as a footballer; Sir Bobby will always be remembered as a giant of the game.”
Alex Ferguson, who managed United from 1986-2013, said before Charlton’s death that he “is the greatest Manchester United player of all time – and that’s saying something”.
“Bobby Charlton is absolutely without peer in the history of the English game,” Ferguson said.
Charlton was also renowned for his humility, discipline and sportsmanship. He was never sent off in 758 appearances for United from 1956-73 or 106 internationals for England from 1958-70.
Charlton played with George Best and Denis Law in the so-called “Trinity” that led United to the 1968 European Cup after surviving the 1958 Munich crash that wiped out much of the celebrated “Busby Babes” team. He won three English league titles at United, and one FA Cup.
“For a footballer, he offered an unparalleled combination of grace, power and precision,” said former United defender Bill Foulkes, another survivor of the Munich air crash.
“It added up to a greatness and something more – something I can only call beauty.”
Charlton’s England scoring record stood for 45 years until Rooney scored his 50th goal for the national team in September 2015. Three of Charlton’s England goals came in the World Cup in 1966, during which he played every minute for the team and stood out particularly in the semifinals when he scored twice against Portugal to lead England to a first major final.
England beat West Germany 4-2 after extra time in the final.
Fans in front of an image of Charlton at Old Trafford stadium, Manchester [File: Phil Noble/Reuters]
Although Ryan Giggs beat Charlton’s appearance record for United in 2008, his scoring record for the club lasted another nine years. It was only in 2017 – 44 years after Charlton last wore the famous red jersey of England’s most successful club – that Rooney scored his 250th goal for United.
After retiring in 1973, Charlton went into coaching and founded a youth scheme that included David Beckham, a future United and England great, among its participants.
After brief spells in charge of Preston, Wigan and Irish side Waterford, Charlton returned to United in 1984 as a director and persuaded the board in 1986 to appoint Ferguson, who delivered 38 trophies during nearly 27 years in charge.
Knighted in 1994 by Queen Elizabeth II, Charlton remains a mainstay at Old Trafford, featuring alongside Best and Law on a statue outside United’s stadium.
‘He was everything I wanted to be’
Robert Charlton was born October 11, 1937, in the coal-mining town of Ashington, northeast England, and his talent was obvious from a young age.
“We realised Bobby was going to be a bit special as a player when he was about five years old,” said older brother Jack, who played for Leeds and won the World Cup alongside him. “He was always kicking a football or a tennis ball against a wall and when it bounced back it stuck to him like a magnet.”
Charlton wrote in 2007 that his family sometimes relied on illegally caught salmon or rabbit to ward off hunger, while his father – also named Robert – gathered coal washed up on local beaches and sold it to bolster his income.
His father’s commitment to his mining colleagues meant that, in 1966, he missed Charlton scoring both goals against Portugal in that World Cup semifinal because he didn’t want someone else to have to cover for him in the pit. He was, however, persuaded to attend the final when the Charlton brothers lifted the trophy.
Charlton’s playing career began far from home in Manchester after leaving school at 15, making his United debut three years later against Charlton in 1956.
Within two years, tragedy struck the tight-knit group of United players whose relationship was forged as trainees in austere conditions. The team was still celebrating winning at Red Star Belgrade to secure a place in the European Cup semifinals when their plane caught fire on its third attempt to take off in heavy snow after a refuelling stop in Germany.
Charlton miraculously emerged from the smouldering wreckage with only light head injuries and picked his way through the wreckage to help survivors. Spotting manager Matt Busby groaning in agony on the smoke-shrouded runway, Charlton rushed to help the father figure who had promoted him to the first team.
But eight members of the Busby Babes team packed with bright prospects were among the 21 fatalities. They included Duncan Edwards, considered one of England’s most talented players at 21.
“Sometimes it engulfs me with terrible anger and regret and sadness – and guilt that I walked away and found so much,” Charlton wrote in 2007.
Charlton became driven by a lingering obligation to preserve the memories of the Munich dead, returning to action less than four weeks later and helping a hurriedly assembled team of survivors and stand-ins reach that season’s FA Cup final.
Busby rebuilt his team around Charlton, adding the 1965 and 1967 English league titles to the championship they won in 1957.
“There was always one great hope – the return to greatness of my beloved club,” Charlton said.
Charlton was the leading scorer for both United (249 goals) and England (49 goals) for more than 40 years [File: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Photo]
The biggest prize of his club career arrived in 1968 as United became the first English club to become champion of Europe. Charlton scored twice in a 4-1 extra-time win over a Benfica team containing Portugal great Eusebio.
But Charlton is perhaps best known for being part of the England team that won the World Cup. It remains England’s only major title in men’s football.
Charlton and his brother fell out over Jack’s public assertion that Bobby’s wife caused him to become estranged from his mother. But the pair reconciled and Jack presented Bobby with a lifetime achievement trophy at the 2008 BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award.
“We have had our public disputes, proving that in any family discord can sometimes disrupt the force of love and blood, but throughout that time I never lost the sense of wonder and gratitude that we were together in 1966 on such a great day in the history of our nation’s sport,” Bobby Charlton said.
In November 2020, it was announced that Charlton had been diagnosed with dementia, the same disease that afflicted his brother – who died in 2020 at age 85 – and another World Cup winner, Nobby Stiles.
“This man, from day one, was everything I wanted to be,” United striker Marcus Rashford wrote of Charlton after hearing about the diagnosis. “Kind, professional, caring, talented.”
He is survived by his wife, Norma, whom he married in 1961, and his two daughters.
Judy Balaban, the daughter of a longtime studio mogul who dated Montgomery Clift and Merv Griffin, married Tony Franciosa and served as one of Grace Kelly’s bridesmaids at her wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco, has died. She was 91.
Balaban died Thursday night in a hospital in Los Angeles, her friend, author and documentary filmmaker Cari Beauchamp, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Balaban was a champion for civil rights, serving on the board of directors for the ACLU of Southern California for decades.
In a 2010 piece for Vanity Fair that she and Beauchamp co-wrote, Balaban described using LSD (then legal) as a form of therapy in the early 1960s when her good friends Cary Grant and his third wife, Betsy Drake, were using it, too.
“What I had with Cary and Betsy was a kind of soul-baringness that the culture didn’t start to deal with until years later,” she says in the story. “We continued to have that even when our lives went off in different directions.”
Balaban also talked about those days during an appearance in the 2017 Showtime documentary Becoming Cary Grant.
Her 1961-67 marriage to Franciosa (A Hatful of Rain, The Name of the Game) was sandwiched between her marriages to high-profile Hollywood agent Jay Kanter from 1953-61 and to actor Don Quine (The Virginian) from 1971-96. All three ended in divorce.
Judith Rose Balaban was born in Chicago in October 13, 1932, to Tillie and Barney Balaban. Her father co-owned a chain of theaters before he was elected president of Paramount in 1936, and he would preside over the studio through 1964.
Her brother was noted jazz musician Red Balaban, and her half-brother was Burt Balaban, a producer of films including 1960’s Murder, Inc.
She and her family moved to New York when her dad took the Paramount job, and she attended high school in Washington, D.C., before returning to Manhattan to work in the fashion industry.
Balaban, who was in the gossip sheets as dating Clift in the early ’50s when he was making films like A Place in the Sun, was going out with Griffin and watching him sing at a nightclub when she was introduced to Kanter. Their marriage brought her to Hollywood.
Balaban became fast friends with Kelly through Kanter, who was the actress’ agent (he also represented the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando and Paul Newman during his career). The star of High Noon, Rear Window and The Country Girl called her “Judybird”; she called Kelly “Graciebird.”
When Kelly and Rainier wed at Saint Nicholas Cathedral in Monaco on April 18, 1956, Balaban was there alongside fellow bridesmaids Maree Frisby, a high-school friend of Kelly’s; Sally Parrish and Bettina Thompson, classmates from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts; Carolyn Scott, a modeling companion; and actress Rita Gam, Kelly’s onetime roommate in Hollywood.
All traveled to Monaco with the bride-to-be aboard the SS Constitution. (Ava Gardner, who starred with Kelly in 1953’s Mogambo, reportedly declined to be a bridesmaid.)
Balaban wrote about the experience in her 1989 book, The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, and Six Intimate Friends.
She described Kelly’s dress — created by MGM costume designer Helen Rose — as “twenty-five yards of silk peau de soie, another twenty-five of light silk taffeta, ninety-eight yards of silk tulle and nearly three hundred and twenty yards of Valenciennes lace.”
Balaban also appeared in 1983 and 2018 documentaries about Clift and one about Kelly in 1987 and was interviewed for Mark Cousins’ acclaimed 2011 doc series The Story of Film: An Odyssey.
Survivors include her daughters, Amy, whom she had with Kanter, and Nina, whom she had with Franciosa; and a cousin, Oscar-nominated actor Bob Balaban. Victoria, her other daughter with Kanter, died in June 2020.
Suzanne Somers and husband Alan Hamel took the “til death do us part” portion of their vows very seriously, demonstrating their love for one another until Somers died a day shy of her 77th birthday on October 15.
“I can’t imagine a night without him,” Somers told People in 2017. “It sounds corny, but we are one.”
The Three’s Company actress had battled cancer for more than 23 years.
Hamel was just as besotted with his wife, whom he met on the set of the show The Anniversary Game, which he hosted and on which Somers was a model, in 1969 before they wed in 1977. Hamel was by his wife’s bedside when she died in her sleep Sunday morning, and one of the last things she heard, Somers’ reps said, was a love poem Hamel had written for her in celebration of her birthday. He shared it with her early in light of her worsening condition.
As Somers’ rep told People of the poem, he “gave it to her a day early and she read the poem and went to bed and later died peacefully in her sleep.”
Written in all capital letters, Hamel’s ode explores the depth of his love for Somers, struggling to find a way to describe it and reading in part, “55 YEARS TOGETHER, 46 MARRIED AND NOT EVEN ONE HOUR APART FOR 42 OF THOSE YEARS. EVEN THAT DOESN’T DO IT. EVEN GOING TO BED AT 6 O’CLOCK AND HOLDING HANDS WHILE WE SLEEP DOESN’T DO IT. STARING AT YOUR BEAUTIFUL FACE WHILE YOU SLEEP DOESN’T DO IT.”
Somers’ representatives shared the late star’s reaction to the poem, which she had planned to share on social media Monday for her birthday alongside the poem’s text, with Vanity Fair.
“Speaking of love… my beautiful Alan, wrote this for me for my birthday,” Somers said. “WOW. Could I be any luckier to have this epic love in my life? It’s only about who you love and who loves you… and I love you.”
Read the full text of Hamel’s poem below.
LOVE I USE IT EVERY DAY, SOMETIMES SEVERAL TIMES A DAY. I USE IT AT THE END OF EMAILS TO MY LOVING FAMILY. I EVEN USE IT IN EMAILS TO CLOSE FRIENDS. I USE IT WHEN I’M LEAVING THE HOUSE.
THERE’S LOVE, THEN LOVE YOU AND I LOVE YOU!! THEREIN LIES SOME OF THE DIFFERENT WAYS WE USE LOVE. SOMETIMES I FEEL OBLIGED TO USE LOVE, RESPONDING TO SOMEONE WHO SIGNED LOVE IN THEIR EMAIL, WHEN I’M UNCOMFORTABLE USING LOVE BUT I USE IT ANYWAY.
I ALSO USE LOVE TO DESCRIBE A GREAT MEAL. I USE IT TO EXPRESS HOW I FEEL ABOUT A SHOW ON NETFLIX. I OFTEN USE LOVE REFERRING TO MY HOME, MY CAT GLORIA, TO THINGS GLORIA DOES, TO THE TASTE OF A CANTALOUPE I GREW IN MY GARDEN. I LOVE THE TASTE OF A FRESHLY HARVESTED ORGANIC ROYAL JUMBO MEDJOOL DATE. I LOVE BITING A FIG OFF THE TREE. I LOVE WATCHING TWO GIANT BLACKBIRDS WHO LIVE NEARBY SWOOPING BY MY WINDOW IN A POWER DIVE. MY DAILY LIFE ENCOMPASSES THINGS AND PEOPLE I LOVE AND THINGS AND PEOPLE I AM INDIFFERENT TO.
I COULD GO ON AD INFINITUM, BUT YOU GET IT. WHAT BRAND OF LOVE DO I FEEL FOR MY WIFE SUZANNE? CAN I FIND IT IN ANY OF THE ABOVE? A RESOUNDING NO!!!! THERE IS NO VERSION OF THE WORD THAT IS APPLICABLE TO SUZANNE AND I EVEN USE THE WORD APPLICABLE ADVISEDLY.
THE CLOSEST VERSION IN WORDS ISN’T EVEN CLOSE. IT’S NOT EVEN A FRACTION OF A FRACTION OF A FRACTION. UNCONDITIONAL LOVE DOES NOT DO IT. I’LL TAKE A BULLET FOR YOU DOESN’T DO IT. I WEEP WHEN I THINK ABOUT MY FEELINGS FOR YOU. FEELINGS… THAT’S GETTING CLOSE, BUT NOT ALL THE WAY.
55 YEARS TOGETHER, 46 MARRIED AND NOT EVEN ONE HOUR APART FOR 42 OF THOSE YEARS. EVEN THAT DOESN’T DO IT. EVEN GOING TO BED AT 6 O’CLOCK AND HOLDING HANDS WHILE WE SLEEP DOESN’T DO IT. STARING AT YOUR BEAUTIFUL FACE WHILE YOU SLEEP DOESN’T DO IT.
I’M BACK TO FEELINGS. THERE ARE NO WORDS. THERE ARE NO ACTIONS. NO PROMISES. NO DECLARATIONS. EVEN THE GREEN SHADED SCHOLARS OF THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS HAVE SPENT 150 YEARS AND STILL HAVE FAILED TO COME UP WITH THAT ONE WORD. SO I WILL CALL IT, ‘US’, UNIQUELY, MAGICALLY, INDESCRIBABLY WONDERFUL ‘US.’
Dianne Feinstein, whose three decades in the Senate made her the longest-serving female US senator in history, has died following months of declining health. She was 90.
Feinstein’s death, confirmed to CNN by a source familiar, will hand California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom the power to appoint a lawmaker to serve out the rest of Feinstein’s term, keeping the Democratic majority in the chamber through early January 2025. In March 2021, Newsom publicly said he had a list of “multiple” replacements and pledged to appoint a Black woman if Feinstein, a Democrat, were to retire.
News of Feinstein’s death also comes as federal funding is set to expire, as Congress is at an impasse as to how to avoid a government shutdown, though Senate Democrats still retain a majority without her.
Feinstein, a former mayor of San Francisco, was a leading figure in California politics for decades and became a national face of the Democratic Party following her first election to the US Senate in 1992. She broke a series of glass ceilings throughout her political career and her influence was felt strongly in some of Capitol Hill’s most consequential works in recent history, including the since-lapsed federal assault weapons ban in 1994 and the 2014 CIA torture report. She also was a longtime force on the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees.
In her later years, Feinstein’s health was the subject of increasing scrutiny and speculation, and the California Democrat was prominent among aging lawmakers whose decisions to remain in office drew scrutiny, especially in an age of narrow party margins in Congress.
A hospitalization for shingles in February led to an extended absence from the Senate – stirring complaints from Democrats, as Feinstein’s time away slowed the confirmation of Democratic-appointed judicial nominees – and when she returned to Capitol Hill three months later, it was revealed that she had suffered multiple complications during her recovery, including Ramsay Hunt syndrome and encephalitis. A fall in August briefly sent her to the hospital.
Feinstein, who was the Senate’s oldest member at the time of her death, also faced questions about her mental acuity and ability to lead. She dismissed the concerns, saying, “The real question is whether I’m still an effective representative for 40 million Californians, and the record shows that I am.”
But heavy speculation that Feinstein would retire instead of seek reelection in 2024 led several Democrats to announce their candidacies for her seat – even before she announced her plans. In February, she confirmed that she would not run for reelection, telling CNN, “The time has come.”
Feinstein was fondly remembered by her colleagues on Friday.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters that he will address Feinstein’s death on the Senate floor later Friday morning, calling it a “very, very sad day for all of us.” North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis called her a “trailblazer” and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said “she was always a lady but she never backed down from a cause that she thought was worth fighting for.”
“We lost one of the great ones,” Durbin said.
San Francisco native and leader
Feinstein was born in San Francisco in 1933 and graduated from Stanford University in 1955. After serving as a San Francisco County supervisor, Feinstein became the city’s mayor in 1978 in the wake of the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician from California to be elected to office.
Feinstein rarely talked about the day when Moscone and Milk were shot but she opened up about the tragic events in a 2017 interview with CNN’s Dana Bash.
Feinstein was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors then, and assassin Dan White had been a friend and colleague of hers.
“The door to the office opened, and he came in, and I said, ‘Dan?’ ”
“I heard the doors slam, I heard the shots, I smelled the cordite,” Feinstein recalled.
It was Feinstein who announced the double assassination to the public. She was later sworn in as the first female mayor of San Francisco.
Her political career was marked by a series of historic firsts.
By that time she became mayor in 1978, she had already broken one glass ceiling, becoming the first female chair of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
California’s first woman sent to the US Senate racked up many other firsts in Washington. Among those: She was the first woman to sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the first female chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, and the first female chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Feinstein also served on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and held the title of ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2017 to 2021. In November 2022, she was poised to become president pro tempore of the Senate – third in line to the presidency – but declined to pursue the position, citing her husband’s recent death.
Feinstein reflected on her experience as a woman in politics in her 2017 interview with Bash, saying, “Look, being a woman in our society even today is difficult,” and noting, “I know it in the political area.” She would later note in a statement the week she became the longest-serving woman in US history, “We went from two women senators when I ran for office in 1992 to 24 today – and I know that number will keep climbing.”
“It has been a great pleasure to watch more and more women walk the halls of the Senate,” Feinstein said in November 2022.
Led efforts on gun control and torture program investigations
Though she was a proud native of one of the most famously liberal cities in the country, Feinstein earned a reputation over the years in the Senate as someone eager to work across the aisle with Republicans, and at times sparked pushback and criticism from progressives.
“I truly believe that there is a center in the political spectrum that is the best place to run something when you have a very diverse community. America is diverse; we are not all one people. We are many different colors, religions, backgrounds, education levels, all of it,” she told CNN in 2017.
A biography from Feinstein’s Senate office states that her notable achievements include “the enactment of the federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994, a law that prohibited the sale, manufacture and import of military-style assault weapons” (the ban has since lapsed), and the influential 2014 torture report, a comprehensive “six-year review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program,” which brought to light for the first time many details from the George W. Bush-era program.
Feinstein’s high-profile Senate career made its mark on pop culture when she was portrayed by actress Annette Bening in the 2019 film “The Report,” which tackled the subject of the CIA’s use of torture after the Sept. 11 attacks and the effort to make those practices public.
In November 2020, Feinstein announced that she would step down from the top Democratic spot on the Senate Judiciary Committee the following year in the wake of sharp criticism from liberal activists over her handling of the hearings for then-President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
While Democratic senators could not block Barrett’s nomination in the Republican-led Senate on their own, liberal activists were angry when Feinstein undermined Democrats’ relentless attempt to portray the process as illegitimate when she praised then-Judiciary Chairman and South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham’s leadership of it.
Feinstein said at the time that she would continue to serve as a senior Democrat on the Judiciary, Intelligence, Appropriations, and Rules and Administration panels, working on priorities like gun safety, criminal justice and immigration.
Jimmy Buffett, the tropical troubadour whose folksy tunes celebrated his laid-back lifestyle, inspired legions of devoted fans and spawned a lucrative business empire, has died, according to his official website and multiple media outlets.
He was 76.
“Jimmy passed away peacefully on the night of September 1st surrounded by his family, friends, music and dogs,” a statement released on his social page reads.
“He lived his life like a song till the very last breath and will be missed beyond measure by so many,” the statement continued.
No cause of death was released.
The singer-songwriter was briefly hospitalized in May following a trip to the Bahamas. “I had to stop in Boston for a checkup but wound up back in the hospital to address some issues that needed immediate attention,” he told his followers in a social media post.
Buffett posted a day later that he was soon headed home from the hospital, and thanked his followers for the “outpouring of support and well wishes.” He did not share what was ailing him, but said that he’d be going on a “fishing trip with old friends, along with paddling and sailing and get myself back in good shape” upon his return home from the hospital.
Mourners paid tribute on social media Saturday, including country superstar Kenny Chesney, whose own sun-kissed approach owes a lot to Buffett.
Chesney tweeted, “So goodbye Jimmy. Thanks for your friendship and the songs I will carry in my heart forever. Sail On Sailor.” And he shared a video of himself singing Buffett’s song “Son of a Son of a Sailor” on a beach.
“The pirate has passed. RIP Jimmy Buffett. Tremendous influence on so many of us,” wrote Toby Keith.
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys wrote, “Love and Mercy, Jimmy Buffett.”
Elton John wrote on Instagram: “Jimmy Buffett was a unique and treasured entertainer. His fans adored him and he never let them down. This is the saddest of news. A lovely man gone way too soon.”
Paul McCartney shared his fond memories of Buffett as “one of the kindest and most generous people” on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
“Right up to the last minute, his eyes still twinkled with a humour that said, ‘I love this world and I’m going to enjoy every minute of it,’” McCartney wrote.
“So many of us will miss Jimmy and his tremendous personality, his love for us all and for mankind as a whole,” he said.
Amiable grooves and clever wordplay
Buffett was born on Christmas Day 1946 in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and raised in the port town of Mobile, Alabama. He moved to Key West, Florida, where he found his voice, his website says.
One of his first songs to draw attention was “Come Monday,” from his 1974 album “Living & Dying in ¾ Time.”
Years later he told David Letterman, “This is a song that kept me from killing myself in a Howard Johnson’s in Marin County. It hit, I paid the rent, got my dog out of the pound. … and the rest is history.”
It notably included the line, “I got my hush puppies on, I guess I never was meant for glitter rock ‘n’ roll,” staking his claim to going his own laid-back way.
In pictures: Singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett
An amiable singer-songwriter with a penchant for clever wordplay, Buffett largely ignored pop music trends and was never a hitmaker or an MTV darling. His “Gulf & Western” style married country and Caribbean music.
He famously put “Margaritaville” on the map in 1977. It was his only Top 10 song and became his signature.
Its opening lines became instantly identifiable: “Nibbling on spongecake, watching the sun bake, all of the tourists covered with oil …”
And the chorus has been part of countless singalongs: “Wasted away again in Margaritaville, searching for my lost shaker of salt… Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame, but I know, it’s my own damn fault.”
Buffett built an enormous cult of fans, affectionately known as “Parrotheads,” after the legendary Deadhead fans of the Grateful Dead.
“The audience are so much fun for me to look at,” he said. “I mean, they’re as entertaining to me as I hope I am to them.”
Other must-play concert tunes included “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” “Fins,” “Volcano” and “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”
His followers lovingly embraced his vision of life spent in flip-flops, full of beaches, boats, booze and weed.
“From New Orleans to the Gulf Coast down into St. Barts and other places, I still can find magic in most of those places where people think there isn’t any left,” he said.
A savvy marketer, Buffett later parlayed the “Margaritaville” mythos to power his career through decades of lucrative concert tours – and branding of restaurants, casinos, retirement communities, bestselling books and even a musical.
His worth was estimated at $1 billion, according to Forbes.
Buffett, who was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006, won two Country Music Association awards during his career and was twice nominated for Grammy Awards.
A rare misstep came with a 2018 Broadway show, “Escape to Margaritaville,” shaped out of his best-known tunes.
Even the brutal New York Times review noted the irony of Buffett’s slacker image against his staggering success: “Mr. Buffett, Margaritaville’s prototype and mastermind, has a wife and family and 5,000 employees; he works nonstop.”
Before his death, Buffett was preparing to release a new record, with songs previewed weekly on Radio Margaritaville, according to his website.
Loyal to his party credo until the end, he left a forthcoming song titled, “My Gummy Just Kicked In.”
Buffett leaves behind his wife, Jane Slagsvol, and three children.
