Category: people

He didn’t begin his acting career until his 40s, but he worked steadily ever since – winning a Tony for John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves, earning several Emmy nominations for playing the Crane brothers’ father on Frasier, taking character roles in such films as Moonstruck and Say Anything. Above all, he was one of Chicago’s favorite stage actors; he took more than 30 roles with Steppenwolf alone, and he performed with many other companies there, large and small.

“Dr. Adams, a tweedy anthropologist and former provost of the University of Chicago, was secretary of the Smithsonian from 1984 to 1994 … [and he] sought to make ‘confrontation, experimentation and debate’ part of the Smithsonian’s mandate.”

The artist isn’t personally on Twitter or Instagram – or rather, she’s on them all of the time, but simply to observe. “As uncomfortable as she seems with contemporary standards of personal exposure, she is at ease in the realm of the abstract. As in her work, she quickly distills dissertation-worthy topics into stuff you want to put on a sweatshirt. ‘History is a circle jerk of hurt and damage,’ she told me at one point.”

She spent most of her career playing bit parts – something she said she was glad of. Yet that career stretched from opening for vaudeville and radio legend Sophie Tucker, through notable spots in the films A Hole in the Head, True Grit, Dumb and Dumber, and Pineapple Express, to her final TV appearances at age 102.

“Throughout her career, De Larios’ work took singular forms – as small, sprightly sculptures of animals and towering goddesses – inspired by her interest in pre-Columbian craft and ancient Japanese design.”

“Over more than a half-century, Mr. Castle helped establish a creative genre, the studio crafts, that blended furniture-making and sculpture. He was a designer whose chairs, tables and coat racks were works of art, and an artist whose oeuvre could be used as well as admired.”

“[She] did her work behind the scenes, eschewing labels like ‘producer’ and ‘presenter’ while performing a wide array of functions – go-between, convincer, fund-raiser and more – that might in fact have fallen under those job descriptions. When pressed, she would use a humble term to characterize her role: ‘secrétaire d’artistes‘ – secretary of artists.” Among those artists were Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson (she engineered the commissioning of Einstein on the Beach).

“In contrast with the work-shirking soldier he immortalized, Mr. Walker was a man of considerable drive and ambition. He drew his daily comic strip for 68 years, longer than any other U.S. artist in the history of the medium.”

“[He] performed alongside Ella Fitzgerald and Marlene Dietrich during a decades-long musical career, but who gave his most consequential performances as an inmate of the Nazi concentration camps where, he said, music saved his life.”

Mulcahy established Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre as a major hub. He doubled the subscriptions and the theatre was packed every night. Mr. Mulcahy was fired in 1972 for criticizing the theatre’s leadership. At the time, he said it was because of “several irritating dissatisfactions I am undergoing with the theatre’s administration.” Mr. Mulcahy was the artistic director at five other Canadian theatres, most of them in smaller cities, from Fredericton, where he was director of the Playhouse, to the Press Theatre in St. Catharines, Ont. He was co-artistic director of the Shaw Festival’s first professional season. He also continued acting.