Category: people

“Rumpole of the Bailey creator John Mortimer, 85, died this morning following a prolonged illness. … The novelist, playwright and former barrister, who was born in London in 1923, was known and loved for the comic lawyer Rumpole, whose dedication to cheap wine and motto ‘never plead guilty’, has been his most enduring creation.”

“James Thorpe, former director of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens who helped raise the public profile of the institution, turning it into one of Southern California’s leading educational and cultural centers, has died.”

“The 71-year-old designer behind the spacecraft-like media centre at Lord’s cricket ground in London and the curvaceous, sequin-clad Selfridges in Birmingham collapsed in Prague last night. The Czech-born architect’s octopus-shaped design for a new national library in Prague had won an international competition but failed to gain acceptance among Czech politicians… [and he] had been fighting hard to win support for what he hoped would be the ‘grand finale’ to his career.”

“One of the leading stars of British television of the 1950s and 1960s, he is best known for played The Prisoner‘s title character Number Six in the surreal 1960s show… He also won two Emmy Awards – 16 years apart – for his work on the Peter Falk detective drama Columbo.”

“Gage Bush Englund, ballet mistress of ABT II, and a former dancer with American Ballet Theater and the Joffrey Ballet, and former ballet mistress of the Joffrey II Dancers, died on Monday at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.”

“W. D. Snodgrass, who found the stuff of poetry in the raw material of his emotional life and from it helped forge a bold, self-analytical poetic style in postwar America, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his debut book, died on Tuesday at his home in Erieville, N.Y., in rural Madison County.”

“Hortense Calisher, the novelist and short-story writer whose unpredictable turns of phrase, intellectually challenging fictional situations and complex plots captivated and puzzled readers for a half-century, died on Tuesday in Manhattan.”

He was a “suave leading man who was one of the first Mexican-born actors to make it big in Hollywood.” But he’s best remembered by Boomers and Gen-Xers as a preternaturally smooth TV pitchman for Chrysler, Capt. Kirk’s most bitter enemy in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and as the presiding spirit on the series Fantasy Island.

The actor “played well-groomed, straight-arrow characters in myriad television shows and movies, most famously on the series Ironside, in which he was the sidekick of the wheelchair-bound detective played by Raymond Burr.” He was also a frequent guest star on more than 30 series over the years, “making him one of network television’s most familiar guest stars.”

In a new take on cultural diplomacy, the ebullient noisy filmmaker “kicked a soccer ball and chewed coca leaves” with the Andean head of state yesterday. “Stone’s meeting with President Evo Morales is likely fodder for the director’s documentary on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a close ally of Morales.”