Art and LiteratureEd Benguiat (92) graphic designer known for his expertise in typefaces. Benguiat became one of the go-to designers of the second half of the 20th century, especially of typography. His hand was behind more than 600 typefaces, several of which bear his name. He helped to establish the International Typeface Corp., the first independent licensing company for type designers, and became its vice president. He also taught for almost 50 years at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. But it was his painstaking work designing new typefaces and modifying existing ones that made him a revered figure in the business, and that reached the public eye, although the public rarely knew his role. He designed logotypes for companies including Ford and AT&T and for
Esquire, Look, McCall’s, and other publications. His typefaces were seen in movies including
Super Fly (1972) and
Planet of the Apes (1968). Benguiat died in Cliffside Park, New Jersey on October 15, 2020.
Marguerite Littman (90) literary muse from Louisiana who taught Hollywood to speak Southern but left her most enduring legacy as an early force in the fight against AIDS. Littman, who landed in Los Angeles at mid-20th century, counted among her closest friends writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy; Gore Vidal; and, famously, Truman Capote, said to have based his most famous character, Holly Golightly of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on her. In 1986 at the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Littman, then living in London, wrote to 100 friends asking them each to contribute £100 as a founding member of what became the AIDS Charitable Trust, a powerhouse of fundraising in Britain for more than 10 years. She died in London, England on October 16, 2020.
Tom Maschler (87) British publisher who fostered the literary careers of more than a dozen Nobel laureates and conceived the Booker Prize to promote fiction. Maschler was 26 in 1960 when he was named literary director of Jonathan Cape, the London publishing firm, a month after the death of its founder. He catapulted to early fame by buying the British rights to Joseph Heller’s debut novel,
Catch-22, for a bargain £250 in 1961 (the equivalent of about $700 then and about $6,500 today), and in ‘62 by transplanting himself to Idaho shortly after the suicide of Ernest Hemingway to help Hemingway’s widow prepare the novelist’s memoir
A Moveable Feast for publication. Among the authors Maschler discovered, incubated, or published who won the Nobel in Literature were Gabriel García Márquez, Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa, and V. S. Naipaul. He also published or nurtured Martin Amis, Jeffrey Archer, Julian Barnes, Bruce Chatwin, Roald Dahl, John Fowles, Clive James, Ian McEwan, Edna O’Brien, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut. Maschler died near his home in Luberon, in southeastern France, on October 15, 2020.
News and EntertainmentBob Biggs (74) entrepreneur who harnessed the energy of the Los Angeles punk scene to create the essential independent label Slash Records. Founded in 1978 as an extension of a successful punk magazine, Slash delivered to the national stage bands including X, Los Lobos, Germs, Blasters, Misfits, Violent Femmes, Faith No More, L7, and dozens more. Biggs sensed that what was happening at Hollywood clubs such as the Masque and the Whisky a Go Go marked the beginning of something special that might resonate beyond southern California. He died of Lewy body dementia, a debilitating neurological disease that causes problems with movement, cognition, mood, and behavior, on October 17, 2020.
Anthony Chisholm (77) award-winning actor, a familiar face to Center Theatre Group patrons and a performer celebrated for his work in several August Wilson productions. Chisholm, who played Burr Redding on the HBO series
Oz and had a role in the Spike Lee film
Chi-Raq, recently appeared in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s Tony-winning revival of Wilson’s
Jitney, which ran in 2019 at the Mark Taper Forum. Over the years he appeared in several other CTG productions of Wilson’s works, including
Gem of the Ocean, Radio Golf, and
Two Trains Running. He was nominated for a featured actor Tony for his role as Joseph Barlow in
Radio Golf. Chisholm died on October 16, 2020.
Conchata Ferrell (77) veteran character actress who played Berta on
Two and a Half Men and appeared on dozens of other TV series and in films including
Erin Brokovich, Edward Scissorhands, and
Mystic Pizza. Although Ferrell’s credits were many, she was perhaps best known for her 12-season run on the CBS sitcom
Two and a Half Men, playing the brusque, insult-slinging, tough-loving housekeeper Berta. The role earned her two Emmy nominations for supporting actress in 2005 and ’07. She scored another nomination in 1992 for her role as entertainment lawyer Susan Bloom on Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher’s legal drama
LA Law. Ferrell died of cardiac arrest in Sherman Oaks, California on October 12, 2020.
Rhonda Fleming (97) actress, the fiery redhead who appeared with Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Ronald Reagan, and other film stars of the ‘40s and ‘50s. From her first film in color,
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949) with Bing Crosby, Fleming became immensely popular with producers because of her vivid coloring: red hair and green eyes. More emphasis was placed on her looks than on her acting ability. Before Reagan entered politics, the actress costarred with him in
Hong Kong, Tropic Zone, The Last Outpost, and
Tennessee’s Partner. Fleming possessed a fine singing voice and later in her career sang onstage in Las Vegas and in a touring act. Married six times, she died in Santa Monica, California on October 14, 2020.
Jon Gibson (80) saxophonist and composer who played a foundational role in Minimalist music. Gibson, who also played flute and keyboards, was best known as a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble from its founding in 1968 through 2019. He participated in the first performances of watershed Glass works like “Music in Twelve Parts” and “Einstein on the Beach” and performed with Glass around the world until health problems prompted his departure. His mastery of circular breathing and other techniques made him a crucial asset to the development of Glass’s sound. Gibson died of a brain tumor in Springfield, Massachusetts on October 11, 2020.
Susan Hendl (73) dancer and longtime teacher at New York City Ballet who staged works by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins and inspired generations of dancers. Hendl joined City Ballet in 1963 and was promoted to soloist in ’72. Her first principal role with the company was in 1970, as the Strip Tease girl in Balanchine’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” Before retiring from the stage in 1983, Hendl danced in numerous Balanchine and Robbins ballets. Balanchine created roles for her in “Who Cares?” (1970), “Coppélia” (1974), “Le Tombeau de Couperin” (1975), and “Chaconne.” Robbins created roles for her in “The Goldberg Variations” (1971) and “Requiem Canticles” (1972). By the late ‘70s Hendl had taken on rehearsal duties, working on the first ballets by Peter Martins, who became ballet master-in-chief after Balanchine’s death at 79 in 1983. Hendl was an assistant to both Balanchine and Robbins in 1979 in their “Les Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” created as a
piece d’occasion, starring Rudolf Nureyev, for the New York City Opera. Hendl died of renal failure in New York City on October 12, 2020.
Herbert Kretzmer (95) London theater critic who wrote the English lyrics to an all-but-forgotten French musical called
Les Misérables and gave new life to what has become one of the world’s most successful theater productions. A South African journalist, Kretzmer wrote features and columns for London newspapers and became a theater critic for the
Daily Express for 16 years, then a TV critic for the
Daily Mail for eight more. Starting in 1960, he began developing a second career as a lyricist and songwriter. British producer Cameron Mackintosh asked Kretzmer to reimagine an obscure musical that had opened and closed after a few months in Paris five years earlier.
Les Misérables was based on Victor Hugo’s tale of 19th-century student uprisings, with teeming streets, brothels, sewers, and characters who love, fight, and die at the barricades. And it was all sung, in French. Kretzmer’s task was not to literally translate the original libretto. What he tried to do instead was to capture, in English, the spirit of Hugo’s tale of revolution—the songs of angry men and women yearning for freedom. With the Kretzmer libretto, additional lyrics by James Fenton, and music by Claude-Michel Schonberg,
Les Misérables opened in London on October 8, 1985. That production ran continuously until March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic shuttered London’s theaters, making it the West End’s longest-running musical and the world’s second-longest, after
The Fantasticks, which ran Off-Broadway for 42 years. Kretzmer died in London, England on October 14, 2020.
Edith O'Hara (103) started the 13th Street Repertory Co. in Greenwich Village in 1972 and made it a mainstay of New York's Off-Off-Broadway scene, keeping it going through the decades while countless other companies fell by the wayside. O’Hara had come to the city from Warren County in northwestern Pennsylvania, bringing a show she had developed at a small theater she founded there: a musical called
Touch, about young people trying the communal life. In the age of
Hair, it found an audience, enjoying a two-year run. O’Hara was smitten with the bohemian theater scene. When a building at 50 West 13th Street was advertised as being for rent and containing a small theater, she took a lease, and the 13th Street Rep was born. O’Hara died in her apartment above the theater on October 16, 2020.
James Redford (58) filmmaker, activist, and son of actor Robert Redford. James battled liver disease for more than 30 years. In an HBO documentary,
The Kindness of Strangers (1999), he expressed gratitude for a liver transplant that saved his life. He produced the film and raised its $600,000 budget from foundations, corporations, and individuals. James and his father cofounded the Redford Center, a nonprofit focused on environmental filmmaking. They also established the James Redford Institute in 1995 for Transplant Awareness to raise money and increase awareness of the shortage of organ donors. James's liver disease returned in 2018, and he was waiting for another liver transplant when bile-duct cancer was discovered in '19. The younger Redford died in Los Angeles, California on October 16, 2020.
Bob Shanks (88) TV producer and executive who helped to define the talk show and news-magazine formats, working with Jack Paar and Merv Griffin and bringing
Good Morning America, 20/20, and other programs to the air. Shanks began his TV career in the ‘50s, working as a talent booker and producer for
The Tonight Show with Jack Paar, then as the longtime producer of
The Merv Griffin Show. Shanks was more prominent in the ‘70s, when he was a vice president at ABC. In 1975 he and another ABC VP, Ed Vane, were given a tall assignment by Fred Silverman, newly named president of the network’s entertainment division: Come up with something to challenge the decades-long dominance of NBC’s
Today. The result was
Good Morning America. By the ‘80s the show was rivaling
Today in the ratings. Shanks died of a stroke in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, four days after his 88th birthday, on October 12, 2020.