Category: people

“The Juilliard-trained actor and uncontainably exhibitionist comic who became one of the most dazzling all-around talents in show business … was found dead Aug. 11 at his home in Tiburon, Calif. He was 63 … The cause of death was [apparently] suicide due to asphyxia … His media agent said he had been battling depression.” (includes slide show and video clips)

David Edelstein: “He never found a form that would capture the genius of his stand-up act or his early appearances on The Tonight Show, when his mind worked faster than anyone alive and very possibly dead, when he seemed to be channeling a fleet of circling UFOs containing the galaxy’s best comedy writers.”

Sure, there are clips from Mork & Mindy, Dead Poets’ Society, Good Will Hunting and Mrs. Doubtfire – but there are also treasures like an old Richard Pryor roast, a 1977 pop-up on Laugh-In, and a phone company commercial.

Dahlia Lithwick: “I was aware that I was in the presence of a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime talent who could not even for a moment settle down enough to breathe himself in. For the few minutes that he was himself, talking to me, he was this sweet gentle, big-hearted guy. But he was happiest doing the voices. And you see this quality in everything he ever did, including an interview about his history of addiction where he only really seems happy when he is doing the British, the French, and the Italians.”

“[He] was a proud product of New Orleans, whose strutting parade rhythms always lurked just beneath the surface of his style.” He played for everyone from Curtis Mayfield to Roberta Flack to the original Broadway company of Hair, but “the heart of his work was at the intersection of jazz, R&B and funk, especially as they converged in the 1970s.”

Though he and his partner Yoram Globus were best known for action and exploitation films such as The Delta Force, Enter the Ninja, the Death Wish series, and The Happy Hooker, Golan also produced such prestige projects as Cassavetes’s Love Streams, Godard’s King Lear, the Meryl Streep vehicle A Cry in the Dark, and Altman’s Fool for Love. (Not to mention his extensive career in Israel that included several foreign-language Oscar nominations.)

Zero Freitas, 62, is a São Paulo transportation magnate “who, since he was a child, has been unable to stop buying records. ‘I’ve gone to therapy for 40 years to try to explain this to myself,’ he said.”

Unlike his near-contemporary and fellow suicide Walter Benjamin, Zweig had safe haven (first in London, then the U.S. and Brazil) from the Nazis and the ravages of World War II. Even so, he had his reasons for not being able to go on …

“Plans for the still massive and transformative project he and architect Frank Gehry are orchestrating for King St. W. could take a decade to execute. But there’s no sign that the man who runs the empire created by his father, a.k.a. Honest Ed, has any plans to scale back his own role as presiding czar.”

“For many, Sculthorpe defined what it meant to be an Australian composer and defined a uniquely Australian sound. … He would become our most acclaimed contemporary composer, admired for pieces like his 1960s series Irkanda – ‘scrub country’ – … and later work such as Kakadu (1988), Memento Mori (1993) and the Rites of Passage, originally commissioned for the opening of the Sydney Opera House.”