Anita Gates

His family announced the death in a statement.

Hedison was also well known for having played Felix Leiter, Agent 007’s CIA friend, in two James Bond movies, 16 years apart, opposite two different Bonds: “Live and Let Die” (1973), starring Roger Moore, and “Licence to Kill” (1989), starring Timothy Dalton.

But “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” which had its premiere on ABC in 1964, gave him his star-making role. It went on to become the decade’s longest-running science fiction series with the same characters — as opposed to “The Twilight Zone,” which was an anthology show. At first, “Voyage” featured storylines about the Cold War and natural disasters; it moved on to mummies, werewolves, extraterrestrials and mutated plankton. All four seasons were set in the future (the 1970s and ’80s, that is).

Hedison admired his co-star, Richard Basehart, who played an admiral, and professed to enjoy the series experience. “The memories are, all in all, quite pleasant except some of those shows later, in the fourth year, with the monsters — I didn’t like doing those particularly,” he said in a 1992 interview that appears on his website. “I didn’t mind when I had to turn into one. I thought that was a lot of fun.”

Albert David Hedison Jr. was born on May 20, 1927, in Providence, Rhode Island, where his father was in the jewelry business. His parents, Albert and Rose (Boghosian) Hedison, were both from Armenia, where the original family name was Heditsian.

Their son first became involved in theater at Brown University in Providence, and later studied acting at both the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio in New York.

He began his career under the name Al Hedison and made his Broadway debut as a page in a 1952 production of “Much Ado About Nothing.” Four years later, he won a Theater World Award for his role as Belyaev the tutor in an off-Broadway staging of Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country.”

Moving on to Hollywood, he made his television debut on “Danger,” a mystery anthology series, in 1954. His first film was “The Enemy Below” (1957), a naval-battle drama starring Robert Mitchum.

His second is probably more vividly remembered.

He was the doomed scientist — the brother of Vincent Price’s character — experimenting with teleportation and getting mixed up (literally) with an insect in the original version of the horror movie “The Fly” (1958). “The lead character spent a lot of time with a cloth over his head,” Hedison said in an interview, recalling that he really liked the script nonetheless.

He was first billed as David Hedison when he starred as an undercover agent working in Europe in the short-lived drama series “Five Fingers” (1959-60) and as a newspaper reporter on an expedition, complete with angry dinosaurs, in the Irwin Allen film “The Lost World” (1960).

After his success on Allen’s “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” Hedison was offered the lead in a forthcoming prime-time sitcom, “The Brady Bunch,” but he said he wasn’t interested. “I turned it down because after four years of subs and monsters, who needs kids and dogs?” he told one interviewer. (Robert Reed took the role.)

Hedison went to London instead, to star onstage in Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke” opposite Lee Remick. A television movie of the production was shown on the BBC.

During a 6-1/2-decade career, Hedison took on more than 100 film and television roles, but he often said that theater was his first love. In the 1990s and early 2000s he appeared in regional theater, often in Massachusetts and Maine.

His wife, Bridget (Mori) Hedison, died in 2016 after 48 years of marriage. Hedison’s survivors include their daughters, Alexandra and Serena Hedison.

Hedison had recurring roles on the daytime dramas “Another World” and “The Young and the Restless.” He appeared in seven episodes of “The Love Boat” and six of “Fantasy Island.” His last movie role was in “Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk” (2017).

He never claimed to be particularly proud of the acting jobs he did primarily to pay the mortgage.

There are many of his movies that “I avoid like the plague,” he confessed on his website. “And when I know they’ll be on TV, I have a dinner party and invite my friends over — so they can’t see them.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/arts/television/david-hedison-dead.html" id="9207baa8-b95e-3159-a614-ceb963a394fe">The New York Times</a>.

David Hedison, the tall, dark and handsome actor who rose to fame as the by-the-book submarine captain on the prime-time series “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” died Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 92.

David Hedison, Actor Who Found Fame in a Submarine, Dies at 92

Her death was confirmed by her New York office, which said Kramer had contracted pneumonia while visiting Lyford Cay in the Bahamas last month.

Kramer’s first Tony was for Edward Albee’s “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” (2002), the unexpected story of a married architect who falls in love with a female of another species. It was named best play. Her last was for “Hello, Dolly” (2017), the widely praised Bette Midler production about Thornton Wilder’s 19th-century larger-than-life widowed matchmaker. It was named best musical revival. (She and Midler had worked together before, on the 2013 solo show “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat With Sue Mengers.”)

In between, Kramer won Tonys for two shows that featured drag performers as major characters: “La Cage aux Folles” (2004), best musical revival; and “Kinky Boots” (2013), best musical. She also produced the family drama “The Humans” (2016), which won four Tonys, including best play.

Although she kept her awards in her Manhattan home, she was better known for her Florida residence. When La Follia, her Palm Beach estate, was put on the market last fall for $135 million, it was said to be the most expensive American property ever listed. The Italianate villa, facing both the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway, covers more than 37,000 square feet, with 13 bedrooms, a movie theater and its own fitness center.

“I’ve been to it,” Cindy Adams, the New York Post’s gossip columnist, wrote at the time. “It’s larger than Utica.”

Invitations to Kramer’s annual Thanksgiving dinner at La Follia were prized, and even other celebrity hosts praised her — particularly for standing at the buffet, alongside her staff, serving the guests herself. Photographs taken there and around the world showed Kramer, instantly recognizable by her signature long blond hair, deep tan and (often) diamond earrings, with famous friends like Joan Collins, Jerry Hall, Denise Rich and Ivana Trump. La Follia is not far from the Trump family’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Friends joked that Kramer and actor George Hamilton had become close friends because they so admired each other’s suntans.

Terry Allen was born in Manhattan on June 20, 1933, the daughter of Charles Allen Jr., founder of his family Wall Street investment firm, and Rita (Friedman) Allen.

Terry’s brothers were raised to take over Allen &amp; Co. Marriage and children were the future her father wanted for her, Kramer told The New York Times in 1984. She attended Vassar, and she married young, but by the time her children were in high school, she said, her father agreed that a job might not be the worst idea. “He told my husband, ‘Find Terry something to do,’” she recalled.

Kramer was 41 when she produced her first Broadway show, “Good News,” a 1974 revival of a 1927 musical, with a cast including Alice Faye and Stubby Kaye. It was teasingly described by critic Clive Barnes in The Times as “entirely recycled, up-to-the-minute nostalgia.” The show opened two days before Christmas and closed on Jan. 4.

In 1977, things went considerably more smoothly with “I Love My Wife,” a relatively low-budget comedy that ran two years and won two Tonys and six Drama Desk Awards.

“You might say it’s another Allen deal,” she told The Times cheerfully that year, referring to the family company. “Invest a dollar to make 10. That’s what my father always did.” (When she signed up investors, a reporter noted, they tended to have surnames like Bronfman, Salomon and Lasker, not to mention Allen.)

Like most successful Broadway producers, she dealt with flops as well as hits. “Sugar Babies” (1979), an old-timey revue starring Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller, was reported to have doubled investors’ money, thanks to productions as far afield as London and Sydney. “I really didn’t know it would go,” Kramer said, looking back. “What do I know about burlesque?”

While “Sugar Babies” was still running, “Frankenstein” (1981), a nonmusical with a major budget for special effects, opened — and closed the same day. But then “Me and My Girl (1986),” based on a 1937 London musical romantic comedy, was hailed by The Times as “sheer happiness” and ran three years.

“Nick &amp; Nora,” a highly anticipated musical based on the sophisticated 1930s “Thin Man” characters, flopped in 1991 despite major buzz, big stars (Joanna Gleason and Barry Bostwick) and a book by Arthur Laurents. But “Movin’ Out (2002),” the Billy Joel and Twyla Tharp musical, ran three years.

Kramer apparently knew how to roll with the punches. At a 1976 opening-night party for another play, Jules Feiffer’s comedy “Knock Knock,” she talked to a reporter about the disasters surrounding her first show. “The scenery burned down on its way to New York,” she recalled philosophically. “Then the animals in the show died.”

Over the decades she showed a taste for revivals, producing Broadway returns of acclaimed hits like “Fiddler on the Roof” (2004), “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (2005), “Grease” (2007), “West Side Story” (2009) and “The Elephant Man” (2014). Fantasy was a favorite subject, too. Her projects also included the tempest-tossed “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” (2011), “The Addams Family” (2010), “Finding Neverland” (2015) and “Gorey Stories” (1978).

“Escape to Margaritaville” (2018), a musical based on the songs of Jimmy Buffett, was her last Broadway production.

At 18, Terry Allen married James Philips, a Wall Street trader. In 1958, after their divorce, she married Irwin Hamilton Kramer, who became a partner in Allen &amp; Co. He died in 1999.

Nick Simunek, the British-born producer who died in 2014, is often mentioned as her third husband, but family members said they were never legally married.

Kramer is survived by a daughter, Toni Goutal; a son, Nathaniel Kramer; a brother, Bruce Allen; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Angela Kramer, died in 2002.

Kramer said she never regretted the years spent raising a family before beginning her entertainment-industry career.

“All producers should be mothers,” she suggested, presumably with a smile, in a 1984 interview with The Times. “A lot of people in the theater are children.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/obituaries/terry-allen-kramer-dead.html" id="9ef55bf9-2308-3270-a249-7fc9da97c28e">The New York Times</a>.

Terry Allen Kramer, Tony-Winning Producer, Is Dead at 85

Terry Allen Kramer, the colorful Broadway producer who won five best-production Tony Awards in 16 years but was just as well known as the grande dame of Palm Beach, Florida, socialites, died Thursday at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital in Manhattan. She was 85.

The gallery name may be a surprise. These works didn’t come from an exhibition across the harbor in Kowloon or from Tokyo, Jakarta or Saigon. Pich and Chung (who now lives in Houston) are represented by Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York, a gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, half a block or so from the West Side Highway.

It’s no longer unheard-of for artists from one end of the Earth to be represented by dealers from the opposite end.

“Huge kudos to Tyler for doing this,” Adeline Ooi, Asia director of Art Basel, said in a telephone interview from Hong Kong. “His sole commitment to Southeast Asia and Asia Pacific is unparalleled.”

The Rollins gallery, which specializes in midcareer artists, will also be exhibiting the work of Pinaree Sanpitak and Agus Suwage at Art Basel Hong Kong.

Pinaree, born in Thailand, often uses images of the female body — especially breasts — and domesticity as themes in her paintings, drawings, sculpture and installations. She also likes candle wax as a medium. Jason Farago of The New York Times has compared her work to that of Louise Bourgeois.

Suwage, an Indonesian of Chinese and Javanese heritage who often uses watercolor, ink and tobacco juice in his work, has also been praised by The Times. Cotter called his work remarkable and summed him up as “a born satirist, which means a born moralist.”

Rollins, the gallery’s American namesake, said in an email that he had “noticed a huge change in the market” since the gallery opened in 2008. Collectors now seem to have a broader interest in Asia “beyond the most familiar countries,” he said.

Rollins is not the only New York gallery with a thriving and highly focused Asian art program. At Fergus McCaffrey, a few blocks north in Chelsea, one specialty is the Gutai group, the avant-garde Japanese artists who gleefully challenged artistic tradition after World War II.

At Art Basel Hong Kong, McCaffrey is showing the intense dark colors and bold strokes of several Gutai artists, including Kazuo Shiraga (who has a solo show at McCaffrey’s new Tokyo gallery at the same time), Sadamasa Motonaga and Toshio Yoshida.

Americans may have been slow, McCaffrey said, compared with their European counterparts, to appreciate Japanese postwar art, but that has changed since the gallery opened in 2006.

“Collectors quickly came to realize that something special happened in Japanese art and culture after the horror of the war,” said McCaffrey, who was born in Dublin and studied at Kyoto University in the early ‘90s. They also realized that its best artists were “equal to the leading innovators in the Western canon.”

One sign: When “Epic Abstraction” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art late last year, curators put a Shiraga (“an extraordinary untitled 1958 painting,” The Times said) right in the middle of the Jackson Pollocks. McCaffrey called that decision “an indication of how things have changed.”

When 47 Canal, the downtown New York gallery founded by Margaret Lee, a Korean-American artist born in the Bronx, notes that many of its Asian artists are immigrants or Asian-Americans, Ooi adds: The diaspora counts.

“There are so many ties that bind,” Ooi said. Many people today, she pointed out, have “hybrid identities,” defining that as “when you’re half-this, half-that and growing up somewhere else.”

She cheerfully describes herself as Malaysian-born, Malaysian-Chinese by heritage (with grandparents from mainland China), “living in Hong Kong, running an event for a Swiss company.”

At Art Basel Hong Kong, 47 Canal is showing works by Cici Wu, Anicka Yi and Trevor Shimizu — as well as by Josh Kline, Elle Pérez and others.

“I feel like the fluidity within the sense of the Hong Kong show is really beautiful, and it works,” Ooi said.

That fluidity is particularly apparent at Commonwealth and Council, a gallery in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood, with Korean-American owners and an artist roster that is about 25 percent Asian-American. The work they’re bringing to Art Basel Hong Kong this year is by Clarissa Tossin, an eco-conscious multimedia artist born in Brazil.

“We do give thought to regional tastes in deciding on which artists to bring,” said Kibum Kim, a partner, but “we feel that generally Asian collectors are eager to learn more and increasingly interested in expanding their collections to include more international emerging artists.”

The terribly British, practically parliamentary gallery name? It’s from the early days, when Kim’s partner Young Chung founded the business in his apartment living room — at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Council Street.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/arts/art-basel-hong-kong-asian-art.html" id="b668bc93-dacd-3725-a23d-08551f8ab13e">The New York Times</a>.

Art Basel's Asian Art Gets to Hong Kong via New York and Los Angeles

There you are in Hong Kong, making your way through the convention center and this newest iteration of Art Basel. Ah! There’s a group of bamboo and rattan sculptures by Sopheap Pich, the Cambodian artist, inspired by trees in his homeland. And there, at the same booth, a new map — she’d call it a cartographic work — by Tiffany Chung, the Vietnamese artist. Maybe it’s a new addition to “The Vietnam Exodus Project,” whose images Holland Cotter described in The New York Times as “personal, polit...

Just beyond those cases are lutes, lyres, gongs, drums, horns, harps, whistles, Italian violins, Indonesian gamelans, lamellaphones from sub-Saharan Africa, a golden harpsichord seemingly supported by mythical creatures and keyboard instruments small enough to fit in your carry-on luggage.

This is Gallery 681, “Mapping the Art of Music,” an intimate second-floor space at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which opened last month after a three-year makeover. (An exhibition of non-Western instruments was here before.)

“We still have a lot of questions about the origins of music,” said Bradley Strauchen-Scherer, an associate curator who oversaw the new gallery’s creation — and a French horn player since her middle school days in Connecticut. But the new gallery, she said, sheds considerable light on music’s travels.

“It sets up these really wonderful juxtapositions, how these different places have talked to each other, traded with each other,” said Strauchen-Scherer, who joined the Met seven years ago after almost two decades as a curator in London.

There are some 250 instruments in the new gallery, the oldest a terra cotta trumpet (circa 200 B.C.-A.D. 400) in the shape of a jaguar. It’s from the Moche civilization in what is now northern Peru. The jaguar sits next to a couple of 11th- to 15th-century Peruvian “whistling jars.” Anyone who ever created musical notes as a child by blowing across the top of a glass soda bottle will get the idea.

One of the newest objects here — although it looks far from contemporary — is an akonting (circa 2000), a traditional West African stringed instrument that served as a forerunner of the banjo. And while enslaved Africans may not have carried their instruments across the Atlantic Ocean, nothing could take away their musical influences.

“Instruments survive,” Strauchen-Scherer said. “That’s why we spend so much time studying them.” But the imports, she said, were just as much in the hearts, minds and memories of the people crossing borders over the centuries: tradesmen, immigrants, soldiers, explorers and prisoners.

“They’re thinking about rhythm; they’re thinking about harmony,” she suggested, referring to Africans on the Middle Passage. “It melds with American thinking, and it becomes ragtime — it becomes jazz.”

The research that went into the new gallery’s development did not reveal one single geographic origin of all music. What it demonstrated was to what extent people all over the planet were discovering a lot of the same things simultaneously.

One enormous influence was the Silk Road, the trade route that connected East and West for some 1,500 years and the later Triangular Trade, among North America, Europe and Africa.

Music galleries need music, of course, and the exhibition includes some 80 audio clips. Visitors can even enjoy free audio guides on Bose headphones, if they arrive from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. There’s also a small concert stage with state-of-the-art sound equipment.

A number of musical selections from the featured instruments are also on the museum’s website. There are demonstrations of the morin khuur of Mongolia, the tanbur panj simi and the shakuhachi. One of the more familiar selections is “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” played on a Brooklyn-made hand-crank-operated barrel piano like the ones that street musicians carried or wheeled down city walkways in the mid-19th century.

But the new gallery is an enthusiastically visual experience too. “We celebrate instruments as works of art,” Strauchen-Scherer said.

The Japanese odaiko (1873), for instance, is an ornate cloisonné and enamel drum with lacquerwork dragons on the skins. The Mexican seven-course guitar (guitarra séptima, 1880) has geometric patterns and floral designs in spruce, rosewood and inlaid mother-of-pearl.

On top of that, Gallery 681 has borrowed pieces of art from elsewhere in the museum and hung them above Michele Todini’s gilded mid-1600s Italian harpsichord. One standout is Fernando Botero’s “Dancing in Colombia” (1980), an almost 9-feet-wide oil showing sizable musicians in bowler hats.

The opening of “Mapping the Art of Music” completes the museum’s André Mertens Galleries for Musical Instruments. It sits just beyond the section’s other large gallery, “The Art of Music Through Time,” which reopened last year.

Gallery 681 isn’t necessarily easy to find. Visitors take the glass elevator in the first-floor American Wing to the second floor and look for the frosted glass doors on the east balcony. When they see the massive 1830 Thomas Appleton pipe organ, they’ve arrived.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/metropolitan-museum-reopens-music-gallery.html" id="0d802511-d4dd-3be2-a14a-e20dc01897ce">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — That’s Japan on your left. The first thing you may notice, inside a glass case filled with musical instruments, is the eighth-century koto, a long, low instrument with strings sometimes played while sitting on the floor. Southeast Asia is on your right. What looks like a small crocodile is a 19th-century mi-gyaung, or crocodile zither, from Myanmar (when it was Burma).

Met Gives Music Gallery a Makeover

His son, Ivan Iannoli, said the cause was complications from a rare form of cancer that was first diagnosed in 2009. Tork, who grew up in Connecticut, lived in Mansfield, east of Hartford, according to The Hartford Courant.

The Monkees were an unabashedly manufactured band, created by Hollywood producers in the 1960s to capitalize on the astounding popularity of The Beatles. The members — Tork (the oldest, at 24), Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz and Mike Nesmith — were cast as the stars of an NBC sitcom, “The Monkees” (1966-68), in which they performed and dealt with comic situations with a childlike irreverence, much as The Beatles had in their hit films “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!”

Tork was positioned as the goofy one, the court jester. Director Bob Rafelson, one of the show’s creators, compared him to Harpo Marx.

Because they were created for television, did not write their own songs (that was left to professionals like Gerry Goffin, Carole King and others) and did not play their own instruments (they mimed playing on camera), The Monkees were disdained by many; if The Beatles were the Fab Four, The Monkees quickly earned the derisive nickname the Prefab Four.

But they surprised many in the music industry, and perhaps themselves as well, when they became popular both on television and on the charts.

Their show won the Emmy Award for outstanding comedy series in 1967, and the band’s many hit records, including “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Daydream Believer,” “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and the infectious if simplistic “(Theme From) The Monkees” (“Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees/And people say we Monkee around … “), for a while earned them sales on the same stratospheric level as The Beatles’.

Both Tork and Nesmith were accomplished musicians — Tork played several instruments — and Dolenz and Jones were seasoned singers. (As a child, Jones had played the Artful Dodger in “Oliver!” on Broadway.) But because studio musicians did the playing on the first two Monkees albums, the notion that they were not a real band persisted.

That began to change in 1967, when the group released what came to be considered its signature album, “Headquarters,” on which they played most of the instruments themselves and wrote several of the songs. Tork co-wrote some of them and he shared lead vocals with Jones on the wistful ballad “Shades of Gray.”

(Peter Tork vocals were a rarity on Monkees albums — he was by far the group’s weakest singer — but he had some memorable ones, often laced with humor, beginning with “Your Auntie Grizelda” on the band’s second album, “More of the Monkees.”)

The Monkees recorded for only three years before disbanding; their popularity faded after their TV show was canceled, and Tork left the band in 1969.

But the group enjoyed a revival in the 1980s and reunited for numerous concerts and tours, although usually without Nesmith.

Tork recorded his first solo album, “Stranger Things Have Happened,” in 1994. He later formed a blues band, Shoe Suede Blues, with which he continued to perform and record until recently. The band’s latest album, “Relax Your Mind,” was released last year.

“The blues is about community,” Tork told The Courant, explaining his genre switch. “Not about how lonely I am, but everybody’s been lonely.”

Peter Halsten Thorkelson was born Feb. 13, 1942, in Washington, D.C., the son of Halsten John Thorkelson, an economics professor, and Virginia Hope (Straus) Thorkelson. The family moved to Connecticut, where Peter graduated from high school in Storrs. He attended Carleton College in Minnesota, but left before graduating and moved to New York, where he performed in folk clubs in Greenwich Village and met another up-and-coming musician, Stephen Stills.

In California, where both had relocated, Stills tried out for The Monkees. When that didn’t work out — some sources say Stills was rejected because he had bad teeth; Stills himself said that he rejected the job because he wanted to write songs for the show but that would have meant surrendering his music publishing — he recommended Tork, because people had always told the two that they looked alike.

Tork left show business shortly after leaving The Monkees and at one point taught high school in Santa Monica, California. There were financial problems, and personal ones as well; he dealt with alcoholism and drug abuse, and served a short prison sentence for hashish possession in 1972.

Later in his career he made guest appearances on a handful of television series, including “The King of Queens” and “7th Heaven.” His last movie role was in “I Filmed Your Death,” a horror drama yet to be released.

Tork reunited with his fellow Monkees for a world tour in 2011 and with Dolenz and Nesmith in 2012 for a tour that included a tribute to Jones, who died that year. In recent years the surviving Monkees released two albums.

Nesmith and Dolenz went back on the road last year, without Tork, for a tour billed as “The Monkees Present: The Mike &amp; Micky Show.” (That tour was interrupted when Nesmith underwent heart surgery but resumed this year.)

Tork’s marriages to Jody Babb, Reine Stewart and Barbara Iannoli ended in divorce.

In addition to his son, he is survived by his fourth wife, Pamela Grapes, whom he married in 2014; two daughters, Hallie Iannoli and Erica Thorkelson; a sister, Anne Thorkelson; a brother, Nick Thorkelson; and three grandchildren.

Like many artists, Tork concluded that happiness came simply from doing the work. “It’s about getting to play the music full time,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992. “It’s not about the following anymore, the fame game. A little bit of fame is fun, but I’ve had enough, thank you.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/obituaries/peter-tork-dead.html" id="5ee9ccca-ea51-373f-a1eb-d8d03992905f">The New York Times</a>.

Peter Tork, a struggling musician who became an overnight teenage idol in the 1960s with The Monkees, died Thursday at a family home in eastern Connecticut. He was 77.

Peter Tork, Court Jester of the Made-for-TV Band The Monkees, Dies at 77

His son, Ivan Iannoli, said the cause was complications of a rare form of cancer that was first diagnosed in 2009. Tork, who grew up in Connecticut, lived in Mansfield, east of Hartford, according to The Hartford Courant.

Peter Tork, Court Jester of The Monkees, Is Dead at 77

The Monkees were an unabashedly manufactured band, created by Hollywood producers in the 1960s to capitalize on the astounding popularity of the Beatles. The members — Tork (the oldest, at 24), Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz and Mike Nesmith — were cast as the stars of an NBC sitcom, “The Monkees” (1966-68), in which they performed and dealt with comic situations with a childlike irreverence, much as the Beatles had in their hit films “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!”

Because they were created for television, did not write their own songs (that was left to professionals like Gerry Goffin, Carole King and others) and did not play their own instruments (they mimed playing on camera), the Monkees were disdained by many; if the Beatles were the Fab Four, the Monkees quickly earned the derisive nickname the Prefab Four.

Their show won the Emmy Award for outstanding comedy series in 1967, and the band’s many hit records, including “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Daydream Believer,” “Pleasant Valley Sunday” and the infectious if simplistic “(Theme From) The Monkees” (“Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees/And people say we Monkee around … “), for a while earned them sales on the same stratospheric level as the Beatles’.

Both Tork and Nesmith were accomplished musicians — Tork played several instruments — and Dolenz and Jones were seasoned singers. (As a child, Jones had played the Artful Dodger in “Oliver!” on Broadway.) But because studio musicians did the playing on the first two Monkees records, the notion that they were not a real band persisted.

That began to change in 1967, when the group released what came to be considered its signature album, “Headquarters,” on which they played most of the instruments themselves and wrote several of the songs. Tork co-wrote some of them and shared lead vocals with Jones on the wistful ballad “Shades of Gray.”

But the group enjoyed a revival in the 1980s and reunited, usually without Nesmith, for numerous concerts and tours. In recent years, the Monkees released two albums.

In California, where both had relocated, Stills tried out for the Monkees. When that didn’t work out — some sources say Stills was rejected because he had bad teeth; Stills said that he rejected the job because he wanted to write songs for the show but that would have meant surrendering his music publishing — he recommended Tork, because people had always told the two that they looked alike.

Tork left show business shortly after leaving the Monkees and at one point taught high school in Santa Monica, California. There were financial problems, and personal ones as well; he dealt with alcoholism and drug abuse, and served a short prison sentence for hashish possession in 1972.

Tork reunited with his fellow Monkees for a world tour in 2011 and with Dolenz and Nesmith in 2012 for a tour that included a tribute to Jones, who died that year.

Peter Tork, a struggling musician who became an overnight teenage idol in the 1960s with the Monkees, died Thursday at a family home in eastern Connecticut. He was 77.

Peter Tork, Court Jester of the Monkees, Is Dead at 77

The death was confirmed by his agent, Patricia Baumbauer. Ganz received a diagnosis of colon cancer last summer while he was working at the Salzburg Festival in Austria.

Ganz won the Donatello Award, Italy’s Oscar equivalent, for his role as a quiet, poetic waiter who bonds with a runaway homemaker in “Bread and Tulips” (2000), an Italian-Swiss comic drama, but most of his work was in German-language films.

In the Wim Wenders drama “Wings of Desire” (1987), he played an angel whose job was to spend time on earth, make himself visible to the dying and to comfort them. But the character saw such beauty in human life that he wanted it for himself.

Perhaps his most talked-about role was as Hitler in “Downfall” (2004), the first major German work to present a portrayal of the Nazi leader.

“Nothing prepared me for what must be the most convincing screen Hitler yet,” Rob Mackie wrote in his review of “Downfall” in The Guardian. “An old, bent, sick dictator with the shaking hands of someone with Parkinson’s, alternating between rage and despair in his last days in the bunker.”

Most of Ganz’s more than 80 films and television movies were European productions, among them Wenders’ film noir homage “The American Friend” (1977), with Dennis Hopper, in which he played a German with a terminal-illness diagnosis who agrees to be a hit man; Volker Schlöndorff’s “Circle of Deceit” (1981), as a war correspondent in Beirut; Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu” (1979), as the innocent Jonathan Harker; and Barbet Schroeder’s “Amnesia” (2017).

But he did appear in American films, including “The Boys From Brazil” (1978), the drama about Nazi war criminals starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier; Jonathan Demme’s all-star 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate”; and “The Reader” (2008), with Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet.

There was strong reaction to his portrayal of Hitler (including a slew of angry-führer internet memes), but Ganz always insisted he was the mildest-mannered of introverts.

“I like to walk. I like to read. I like to watch people,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. “I’m very curious.”

Bruno Ganz was born in Zurich on March 22, 1941, the son of a Swiss mechanic and his Italian wife. He decided on an acting career early and never attended college. His first roles were in stage productions in the 1960s, and in 1970 he was a founder of a theater company, Schaubühne.

“It was definitely left-wing theater,” he told The Irish Times in 2005.

Stage roles over the years included Hamlet (in 1965 and again in 1982), Alceste in “The Misanthrope” (1987) and Max in a French translation of Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming” (2012, in Paris). When he played the title role of “Faust” in a Goethe marathon in Germany in 2001, John Rockwell of The Times proclaimed him “an undeniable presence.”

Ganz made his film debut as a hotel employee in “The Man in the Black Derby” (1961), a Swiss comedy, and was still busily making films in his late 70s. In 2018 alone, he starred in Sally Potter’s comic drama “The Party”; Terrence Malick’s “Radegund,” about a German conscientious objector; “The Tobacconist,” as Sigmund Freud; “I Witness,” an action drama; and “The House That Jack Built,” a serial-killer drama directed by Lars von Trier.

Ganz separated from Sabine Ganz, whom he married in 1965 but appeared never to have divorced. He is survived by his partner, film-industry photographer Ruth Walz, and a son, Daniel, born in 1972.

By many standards, the greatest honor Ganz received was possession of the Iffland-Ring, a diamond-studded piece of jewelry named for an 18th-century German actor and given to the “most significant and most worthy actor of the German-speaking theater.” When he received it in 1996, as a bequest from his predecessor, Josef Meinrad, he was only the fifth actor to have held it since the 1870s.

Ganz admitted that his convincing performances seemed to transcend reality for some fans. “People really seemed to think of me as a guardian angel” after “Wings of Desire,” he told The Irish Times in 2005. “People would bring their children before me for a blessing or something.”

But those fans appeared to have misinterpreted his character’s purpose and powers.

“When flying on aeroplanes,” he continued, “they would sometimes say, ‘Now you are with us, nothing can happen.’ It was very funny.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/obituaries/bruno-ganz-dead.html" id="8cf8c583-39f3-33dc-ab91-1794f6641ab8">The New York Times</a>.

Bruno Ganz, the melancholy Swiss film actor who played an angel longing for the visceral joys of mortality in “Wings of Desire” and a defeated Hitler with trembling hands facing his own mortality in “Downfall,” died Friday at his home in Zurich. He was 77.

Bruno Ganz, Who Played an Angel and Hitler, Is Dead at 77

Her death was confirmed by her agent, according to the BBC.

Mother — that was the official name of Whitfield’s character — looked the part of the kind, proper, white-haired London granny in sweater sets and pearls, but she had a gift for the cutting remark. In one classic scene, Edina (Jennifer Saunders) fretted about her weight, declaring, “Inside of me, there’s a thin person just screaming to get out.” Mother, sipping tea at the kitchen table, replied calmly, “Just the one, dear?”

In the series, which ran from 1992-96 and returned in various forms in the 21st century, Mother also turned out to be a practicing kleptomaniac who was not above climbing in and out of windows when necessary. “Oh, Mother is fabulous,” Whitfield told The Telegraph years later. “She appears more grounded, but she’s as mad as the rest of them.”

Whitfield may not have been a familiar face to American audiences when “Ab Fab,” as the show was nicknamed, had its U.S. premiere on Comedy Central in 1994. She was, however, a household name in her home country, thanks in part to “Happy Ever After” and “Terry and June,” the sitcoms in which she played Terry Scott’s suburban wife. Together the two series ran from 1974-87.

Modesty seemed to come naturally to Whitfield.

“I’ve always said one of the reasons I’ve worked for so long is that I’m no trouble,” she told The Guardian in 2011. The title of her autobiography was “And June Whitfield,” a comment on a lifetime of supporting roles. On an ITV talk show when she was 91, asked about her dream role for the future, she suggested something “sitting in a chair, not having to go very far.”

June Rosemary Whitfield was born in London on Nov. 11, 1925, the daughter of John Whitfield, managing director of a telephone and telegraph company, and Bertha (Flett) Whitfield, an amateur actress who enrolled her daughter in singing, dancing and music classes at 3. June received a diploma from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1944 and began her career on radio and the stage.

Her first big breaks included “Take It From Here,” a postwar radio series in which she was cast as Eth, a young woman who had been engaged forever, and Noël Coward’s 1950 musical “Ace of Clubs.”

The BBC estimated that Whitfield had made some 1,300 screen appearances. She played Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s fictional detective, on BBC Radio 4 from 1993-2001 and was a cast member of the satirical radio series “The News Huddlines” for decades. Although film was not her favorite medium (“TV is much cozier and warmer”), she did appear in more than a few, including the “Carry On” comedy series, beginning with “Carry On Nurse” (1959) and ending with “Carry On Columbus” (1992), in which she played Queen Isabella.

American television audiences had the occasional opportunity to see her other work. In the late 1990s, when Ross (David Schwimmer) was preparing to marry an Englishwoman on the NBC sitcom “Friends,” Whitfield made a cameo appearance as the bridal family’s housekeeper, taking a telephone call from the very American Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow). Whitfield also appeared in David Tennant’s last episode of “Doctor Who” (2009), as an enthusiastic admirer who in a brief scene managed to pinch Tennant’s cheeks and pat his bottom.

Whitfield moved into a retirement home in her 80s — happy, she told reporters, to have a weekly massage appointment and no further worries about plumbing or roofing — but she continued to work.

In 2015, she played God, appearing to a grieving woman in the ladies’ room of a pub, on the miniseries “You, Me and the Apocalypse” and a nun with a secret on the soap “EastEnders.” The 2016 film version of “Absolutely Fabulous,” in which her character partied in the South of France, was her last screen role.

Whitfield became Dame Rosemary Whitfield in 2017, tapped by Prince Charles almost two decades after she was named a Commander of the British Empire.

When she was 29, she married Timothy Aitchison, a surveyor (who, she once said, found show business more weird than glamorous). He died in 2001. Her survivors include a daughter, actress Suzy Aitchison.

Whitfield did some dramatic roles, including Aunt Drusilla in a 1996 film version of “Jude the Obscure,” but comedy was her choice from the beginning.

“It was entirely down to lack of confidence,” she recalled in a 2011 interview with The Telegraph. “Because I thought if I played anything straight, people would laugh at me, so I might as well do something where they were meant to laugh.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/obituaries/june-whitfield-dies-at-93.html" id="7512c955-dd69-30c8-a937-30cfdc107dd6">The New York Times</a>.

June Whitfield, the diminutive British actress whose seven-decade career reached its peak as Edina Monsoon’s dotty, acerbic mother in the hit comedy series “Absolutely Fabulous,” died Friday in London. She was 93.

June Whitfield, a Star of 'Absolutely Fabulous,' Dies at 93

Her publicist, Michelle Bega, said the cause was complications of diabetes.

Marshall became the first woman to direct a feature film that grossed more than $100 million when she made “Big” (1988). That movie, a comedy about a 12-year-old boy who magically turns into an adult (Tom Hanks), was as popular with critics as with audiences. Hanks received his first Oscar nomination for his performance.

Four years later she repeated her box-office success with “A League of Their Own,” a sentimentally spunky comedy about a wartime women’s baseball league with an ensemble cast that included Madonna, Geena Davis, Rosie O’Donnell and Hanks.

In between, she directed “Awakenings” (1990), a medical drama starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. “Awakenings,” based on a book by Oliver Sacks, was only moderately successful financially, but De Niro received an Academy Award nomination.

A writer for Cosmopolitan magazine once commented that Marshall “got into directing the ‘easy’ way — by becoming a television superstar first.” That was a reference to her seven seasons (1976-83) as Laverne DeFazio, the brasher (yet possibly more vulnerable) of two young roommates on the hit ABC comedy series “Laverne &amp; Shirley,” set in 1950s and ‘60s Milwaukee.

In Hollywood, Marshall had a reputation for instinctive directing, which could mean endless retakes. But she was also known for treating filmmaking as a team effort rather than a dictatorship.

“I have my own way of functioning,” she told The New York Times Magazine in 1992. “My personality is, I whine. It’s how I feel inside. I guess it’s how I use being female, too. I touch a lot to get my way and say, ‘Pleeease, do it over here.’ So it can be an advantage — the anti-director.”

Carole Penny Marshall was born on Oct. 15, 1943, in the Bronx, New York, and grew up there. Her father, Anthony, was an industrial filmmaker, and her mother, Marjorie (Ward) Marshall, taught dance. The family name had been changed from Masciarelli.

Marshall attended the University of New Mexico. There she met and married Michael Henry, a college football player. They had a daughter, but the marriage lasted only two years, and Marshall headed for California, where her older brother, Garry, had become a successful comedy writer.

She made her film debut in “The Savage Seven,” a 1968 biker-gang drama, and had a small part the same year in “How Sweet It Is!,” a romantic comedy starring Debbie Reynolds and James Garner.

Marshall got her big break in 1971, when she was cast in the recurring part of Jack Klugman’s gloomy secretary, Myrna Turner, on the ABC sitcom “The Odd Couple.” That same year she married Rob Reiner, who was then a star of the hit series “All in the Family.” He adopted her daughter, but they divorced in 1979.

Marshall’s two films after “A League of Their Own” — “Renaissance Man” (1994) and "The Preacher’s Wife” (1996) — were not as well received. “Riding in Cars With Boys” (2001), starring Drew Barrymore, was the last film Marshall directed. Her final screen appearance was on the new version of “The Odd Couple,” in a November 2016 episode.

Information on her survivors was not immediately available.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/obituaries/penny-marshall-dead.html" id="efc4b6b1-c110-35c4-ae9a-edcd3e92c449">The New York Times</a>.

Penny Marshall, the nasal-voiced co-star of the slapstick sitcom “Laverne &amp; Shirley” and later the chronically self-deprecating director of hit films like “Big” and “A League of Their Own,” died Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 75.

Penny Marshall, TV Sitcom Star and Hollywood Director, Dies at 75

Her publicist, Michelle Bega, said the cause was complications of diabetes. Marshall had in recent years been treated for lung cancer, discovered in 2009, and a brain tumor. She announced in 2013 that the cancer was in remission.

Marshall became the first woman to direct a feature film that grossed more than $100 million when she made “Big” (1988). That movie, a comedy about a 12-year-old boy who magically turns into an adult (Tom Hanks) and then has to navigate the grown-up world, was as popular with critics as with audiences.

The Washington Post said it had “the zip and exuberance of a classic romantic comedy.” The Los Angeles Times described it as “a refreshingly grown-up comedy” directed “with verve and impeccable judgment.” Hanks received his first Oscar nomination for his performance.

In between, she directed “Awakenings” (1990), a medical drama starring Robert De Niro as a patient coming out of an encephalitic trance and Robin Williams as the neurologist who helps him. “Awakenings,” based on a book by Oliver Sacks, was only moderately successful financially, but De Niro received an Academy Award nomination.

A writer for Cosmopolitan magazine once commented that Marshall “got into directing the ‘easy’ way — by becoming a television superstar first.” That was a reference to her seven seasons (1976-83) as Laverne DeFazio, the brasher (yet possibly more vulnerable) of two young roommates, brewery assembly-line workers, on the hit ABC comedy series “Laverne &amp; Shirley,” set in 1950s and ‘60s Milwaukee.

That may or may not have been a function of her self-effacing personality, which colleagues and interviewers often commented on. But in 1992 Marshall confessed to The New York Times Magazine that she wasn’t completely guileless.

“I have my own way of functioning,” she said. “My personality is, I whine. It’s how I feel inside. I guess it’s how I use being female, too. I touch a lot to get my way and say, ‘Pleeease, do it over here.’ So it can be an advantage — the anti-director.”

That attitude was also an essential aspect of her humor. When Vanity Fair asked her to identify her greatest regret, she said, “That when I was a size 0, there was no size 0.”

Carole Penny Marshall was born on Oct. 15, 1943, in the Bronx, New York, and grew up there, at the northern end of the Grand Concourse. Her father, Anthony, was an industrial filmmaker, and her mother, Marjorie (Ward) Marshall, taught dance. The family name had been changed from Masciarelli.

After she graduated from Walton High School, in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, Marshall attended the University of New Mexico. There she met and married Michael Henry, a college football player. They had a daughter, but the marriage lasted only two years, and Marshall headed for California, where her older brother, Garry, had become a successful comedy writer.

Marshall continued acting, mostly playing guest roles on television series, until she got her big break in 1971, when she was cast in the recurring part of Jack Klugman’s gloomy secretary, Myrna Turner, on the ABC sitcom “The Odd Couple.” Her brother, a producer of the show, got her the job, but nepotism had nothing to do with it when viewers fell in love with her poker-faced humor and Bronx-accented whine.

That same year she married Rob Reiner, who was then a star of the hit series “All in the Family.” He adopted her daughter, but they divorced in 1979, when “Laverne &amp; Shirley” and Marshall were at the height of their television popularity.

That series grew out of a 1975 episode of “Happy Days,” in which Laverne (Marshall) and Shirley Feeney (Cindy Williams), two fast blue-collar girls, turned up at the local hangout as blind dates for Richie Cunningham and Fonzie, the two lead characters.

When “Laverne &amp; Shirley” ended in 1983, after considerable on-set conflict between the co-stars and a final season without Williams, it was the first time in 12 years that Marshall had not had at least a relatively steady job on a television series.

She began making a handful of films and television appearances. Then Whoopi Goldberg, a friend, asked her to take over for a director she wasn’t getting along with on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986), a comic spy caper. (Marshall had directed a few episodes of “Laverne &amp; Shirley.”) The movie was far from an unqualified success, but it led to “Big.”

Marshall’s two films after “A League of Their Own” were not as well received. “Renaissance Man” (1994), starring Danny DeVito as an adman turned teacher of Army recruits, was savaged by critics and earned only about $24 million, considerably less than it cost to make, in the United States (in contrast, “Big” earned almost $115 million). “The Preacher’s Wife” (1996), a remake of the heartwarming 1947 fantasy romance “The Bishop’s Wife,” starred Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston. Critics found it likable but weak, and it brought in just under $50 million domestically.

Anita Gates

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