April-May farewells

Ronny James Dio, Lynn Redgrave, Dede Allen, Anna Walentynowicz, Edward Gorey, Sister Smile and Wilma Mankiller.

‘The nicest, classiest person you would ever want to meet.’
Ronny James Dio

Ronnie James Dio, whose soaring vocals, poetic lyrics and mythic tales of a never-ending struggle between good and evil broke new ground in heavy metal, died this month. He was 67.

Farewell Ronny James Dio

Dio revealed last summer that he was suffering from stomach cancer shortly after wrapping up a tour in Atlantic City, with the latest incarnation of Black Sabbath, under the name Heaven And Hell.

“Today my heart is broken,” Wendy Dio wrote on the singer’s site, adding he died at 7.45am.
“Many, many friends and family were able to say their private goodbyes before he peacefully passed away.

“Ronnie knew how much he was loved by all. We so appreciate the love and support that you have all given us … Please know he loved you all and his music will live on forever.”

The statement was confirmed by Los Angeles publicist Maureen O’Connor.

Though he had recently undergone his seventh chemotherapy treatment, he was hopeful to perform again. Earlier this month, the band Heaven And Hell cancelled its summer tour, but Dio did not view being sidelined as a permanent thing.

“Wendy, my doctors and I have worked so hard to make it happen for all of you, the ones we care so much about, that this setback could be devastating, but we will not let it be,” he said in a statement.

“With your continued love and support, we … will carry on and thrive. There will be other tours, more music, more life and much more magic.”

Dio rose to fame in 1975 as the first lead singer of Rainbow, the heavy metal band put together by guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, who had just quit Deep Purple.

Dio then replaced legendary vocalist Ozzy Osbourne in Black Sabbath in 1980 with the critically acclaimed album “Heaven And Hell,” considered by many critics to be one of the finest heavy metal albums of all time. His on-again, off-again tenure with Black Sabbath touched off an intense debate among fans as to which singer was the true essence of the band — a discussion that lasted until his death.

He also enjoyed a successful solo career with his self-titled band, Dio, in between his three stints with Black Sabbath (1980-82; 1992; and 2007-2009, when the band toured as Heaven And Hell, to differentiate it from Osbourne-led versions of Sabbath).

Many of his most memorable songs revolved around the struggle between good and evil, including his signature tune Heaven And Hell. He also drew heavily on medieval imagery in songs like Neon Knights, Killing The Dragon and Stargazer.

“He possessed one of the greatest voices in all of heavy metal, and had a heart to match it,” said Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French, whose band toured with Dio since 1983, and was to do so again this summer at European rock festivals.

“He was the nicest, classiest person you would ever want to meet.”

Dio organized an all-star charity collaboration in 1986 called “Hear N’ Aid” to raise money for famine relief in Africa, styled on the successful “We Are The World” campaign of a few years earlier.

His solo hits included Rainbow In The Dark, The Last In Line and Holy Diver.

Lynn Redgrave, an introspective and independent player in her family’s acting dynasty who became a 1960s sensation as the unconventional title character of Georgy Girl and later dramatised her troubled past in such one-woman stage performances as Shakespeare for My Father and Nightingale, has died. She was 67.

Her publicist Rick Miramontez, speaking on behalf of her children, said Redgrave died peacefully Sunday night at her home in Connecticut. Children Ben, Pema and Annabel were with her, as were close friends.

“Our beloved mother Lynn Rachel passed away peacefully after a seven year journey with breast cancer,” Redgrave’s children said in a statement on Monday.

“She lived, loved and worked harder than ever before. The endless memories she created as a mother, grandmother, writer, actor and friend will sustain us for the rest of our lives. Our entire family asks for privacy through this difficult time.”

Redgrave was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2002, had a mastectomy in January 2003 and underwent chemotherapy.

Her death comes a year after her niece Natasha Richardson died from head injuries sustained in a skiing accident and just a month after the death of her older brother, Corin Redgrave.

The youngest child of Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, Lynn Redgrave never quite managed the acclaim – or notoriety – of elder sibling Vanessa Redgrave, but received Oscar nominations for Georgy Girl and Gods and Monsters, and Tony nominations for Mrs Warren’s Profession, Shakespeare for My Father and The Constant Wife. In recent years, she also made appearances on television in Ugly Betty, Law & Order and Desperate Housewives.

“Vanessa was the one expected to be the great actress,” Lynn Redgrave told The Associated Press in 1999. “It was always, ‘Corin’s the brain, Vanessa the shining star, oh, and then there’s Lynn.’”

In theater, the ruby-haired Redgrave often displayed a sunny, sweet and open personality, much like her ebullient offstage personality. It worked well in such shows as Black Comedy – her Broadway debut in 1972 – and again two years later in My Fat Friend, a comedy about an overweight young woman who sheds pounds to find romance.

Tall and blue-eyed like her sister, she was as open about her personal life as Vanessa has been about politics. In plays and in interviews, Lynn Redgrave confided about her family, her marriage and her health. She acknowledged that she suffered from bulimia and served as a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers. With daughter Annabel Clark, she released a 2004 book about her fight with cancer, Journal: A Mother and Daughter’s Recovery From Breast Cancer.

Redgrave was born in London in 1943 and despite self-doubts pursued the family trade. She studied at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, and was not yet 20 when she debuted professionally on stage in a London production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Like her siblings, she appeared in plays and in films, working under Noel Coward and Laurence Olivier as a member of the National Theater and under director/brother-in-law Tony Richardson in the 1963 screen hit Tom Jones.

“Before I was born, my father was a movie star and a stage star,” the actress told the AP in 1993. “I was raised in a household where we didn’t see our parents in the morning. We lived in the nursery. Our nanny made our breakfast, and I was dressed up to go downstairs to have tea with my parents, if they were there.”

Farewell Lynn Redgrave

At fifty, Redgrave was ready to tell her story in full. As she wrote in the foreword to Shakespeare for My Father, she was out of work and set off on a “journey that began almost as an act of desperation,” writing a play out of her “passionately emotional desire” to better understand her father, who had died in 1985.

In the 1993 AP interview, Redgrave remembered her father as a fearless stage performer yet a shy, tormented man who had great difficulty talking to his youngest daughter.

“I didn’t really know him,” Redgrave said. “I lived in his house. I was in awe of him and I adored him, and I was terrified of him and I hated him and I loved him, all in one go.”

Lynn Redgrave is survived by six grandchildren, her sister Vanessa, and four nieces and nephews.

A private funeral with be held later this week.

April 2010

The Shock Cut

Dede Allen, the film editor whose pioneering work on movies like The Hustler and Bonnie and Clyde brought a new approach to shaping the look and sound of American movies, has died. She was 86.

Allen died on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles days after suffering a stroke, her son Tom Fleischman told The Los Angeles Times.

Waren Beattie and Faye Dunaway in the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde

With Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, Allen became the first film editor to receive sole credit on a movie. She was nominated for Academy Awards for that movie, 1975′s Dog Day Afternoon, Reds in 1981 and Wonder Boys in 2000.

Warren Beatty in Reds, after single-handedly inspiring the Russian workers to revolution

Allen was the first American to embrace European methods of editing by beginning sequences with close-ups or jump cuts and using the sound from the next shot while the previous scene was still playing.

Greg S Faller, professor of film studies at Towson University in Maryland, said ‘The Hustler and Bonnie and Clyde must be considered benchmark films in the history of editing”.

Many of her techniques are now standard in modern filmmaking.

Paul Newman in The Hustler

‘It’s hard to see the changes she made because most of what she did has been so fully embraced by the industry,’ Faller said.

In Dog Day Afternoon, she used a staccato tempo, sometimes called shock cutting.

‘She creates this menacing quality by not cutting where you’d expect it — she typically would cut sooner than you might expect,’ Faller said.

“You weren’t ready for it.”

Allen edited or co-edited 20 major films over four decades. She was most closely identified with directors Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet and George Roy Hill and actor-directors Paul Newman, Warren Beatty and Robert Redford.

Dorothea Corothers Allen was born in Cincinnati on 3 December 1923. She attended Scripps College in Claremont but left school to take a job as a messenger at Columbia Pictures. She started out working on television commercials before getting her first big break in the late 1950s editing Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow.

In 1994, Allen received a career achievement award given by American Cinema Editors. In November 2007 she received the Motion Picture Editors Guild’s Fellowship and Service Award.

Farewell Dede Allen

As well as her son, Tom, she is survived by her husband of 63 years, Stephen E Fleischman, daughter Ramey Ward, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

Anna Walentynowicz

Anna Walentynowicz, a union activist whose 1980 dismissal from a Gdansk shipyard touched off strikes that led to the founding of the Solidarity movement and the eventual toppling of Polish communism, died in the plane crash that devastated the country’s elite. She was 80.

Walentynowicz was an anti-communist dissident who worked with Solidarity founder Lech Walesa in the early 1980s to agitate against repressive communist rule. She worked with future president President Lech Kaczynski, also killed in the Saturday crash. Many others aboard the plane were also their ideological brethren.

Walentynowicz was the most famous Solidarity activist aboard, an iconic figure more closely associated with the 1980 strikes than anyone save Walesa. She had sometimes been referred to as the Rosa Parks of Poland – a nod to the American woman who was the public face of the American civil rights movement.

A 51-year-old widow and crane operator in 1980, Walentynowicz was only five months away from retirement when her shipyard bosses fired her for producing and distributing a newspaper critical of the regime. She handed some copies directly to her bosses. ??Her fellow workers were outraged at the injustice of her firing and agitated to have her reinstated, resistance that led to strikes and sit-ins at the Gdansk shipyard and in factories across the country.

Walesa, who had also been fired for his opposition activism, jumped the walls of the shipyard and returned to his workplace to lead massive strikes. That protest, which lasted eighteen days, resulted in a historic agreement with the communist authorities which gave birth to Eastern Europe’s first independent workers’ movement. Both Walesa and Walentynowicz were allowed to return to work.

“Anna had been at the center of the events that birthed Solidarity, and along with Lech Walesa she virtually personified the 1980 strikes in the public eye,” writes author Shana Penn in Solidarity’s Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland.

But it didn’t take long for Walentynowicz and the other female activists to be sidelined by Walesa and the other male organisers. Walentynowicz and Walesa later turned against each other for personal and ideological reasons. She was part of a group that included Andrzej Gwiazda, another prominent opposition leader, who criticised Walesa for making too many compromises with the communists. Walesa also suffered a falling out with Kaczynski in past years and after Saturday’s tragedy expressed remorse that he had not reconciled with his one-time allies before their deaths.

Farewell Anna Walentynowicz

“I have to ask God for forgiveness because I made some mistakes and I don’t have a clear conscience,” Walesa said in televised remarks Sunday.

Walentynowicz was born August 13, 1929, and was 10 years old when Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union invaded and occupied the country. Her father was killed in the war and she herself fell victim to a Nazi decree that prevented Poles from continuing their education after the fourth grade, part of an effort by the Nazis to enslave Poles.

When she began her activism at the shipyard she was already widowed and had survived a near-fatal bout of cancer. Her unlikely survival from the illness left her with a sense that she had survived to carry out something worthwhile.

“It took someone like her unafraid of authority to tackle the Communist authorities of the day,” said Victor Ashe, a former US ambassador to Poland who said he was honored to have the silver-haired Walentynowicz as a guest as his residence on a number of occasions.

“She was an amazing person who continued to express her views actively and directly.”

OUT THERE PLAYING KICK THE CAN

10 years ago this month: farewell Edward Gorey

“Somebody once said that it doesn’t much matter whether you’re conquering an empire or playing dominoes,” Edward Gorey told an interviewer shortly before his death 10 years ago this month.

“It’s just another way of passing time.”

If you’re thinking of using the quote to justify your own indolence, consider: Edward Gorey passed his time by writing and illustrating more than 100 books. He illustrated at least another 50 works by other authors, including Samuel Beckett, HG Wells, Charles Dickens, Raymond Chandler and John Updike. His output was so prolific he often used pseudonyms like Ogred Weary and EG Deadworry. He even found time to write film reviews for the Soho Weekly under the name Wardore Edgy, win a Tony award for costume design for a Broadway production of Dracula, and pen the libretto for an opera to be performed by hand puppets. He did not, it would seem, spend much time playing dominoes.

Edward Gorey was born in Chicago in 1925, son of a sometimes Hearst newspaperman who divorced Gorey’s mother when Edward was eleven only to remarry her 16 years later. He had taught himself to read before he was three and a half years-old and began drawing at early age. His maternal grandmother had been a popular 19th century greeting card artist, but Gorey claimed he showed no early artistic talent.

He characterised his childhood as more or less normal.

“I think of myself as being sensitive and pale and wan. But I wasn’t at all,” he once told a journalist.

“I was out there playing kick-the-can.”

Chicago Art Institute

His only formal artistic training consisted of a few classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. After a stint in the Army he attended Harvard University on the G.I. Bill, where he roomed with Frank O’Hara, who would go on to become one of the best-known poets in America. Modelling themselves on Oscar Wilde, they delighted in playing eccentric dandies, listening to old Marlene Dietrich records, painting all the furniture in their room white and using a tombstone stolen from a local cemetery as a dining table.

After getting a degree in French, Gorey moved to New York and landed a job illustrating book jackets for Doubleday Anchor, a new imprint with the then experimental idea of marketing “serious” literature in paperback editions. His cover work incorporating a simple, muted palette, hand-drawn lettering, and often his austere, cross-hatched pen and ink drawings, would do much to give Anchor an identity in the marketplace.

In 1953, he published his first book, The Unstrung Harp, the story of a novelist named CF Earbrass struggling with his latest work. He would continue publishing an average of one to two new books a year for the next forty-five years.

One of the best-loved remains 1963’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an abcedarian book using rhyming dactylic couplets to chronicle the horrible deaths of twenty-six children (‘A’ is for Amy, who fell down the stairs/ ‘B’ is for Basil, assaulted by bears). Featuring his stylistic hallmark of bleak, ominous landscapes and characters in Edwardian and Victorian dress, it embodies his lifelong preoccupation with macabre and the whimsical, emerging as a work at once morbid, nostalgic, and inventive.

Sister Smile

When you think of pop music in 1963, maybe you think The Beatles. Maybe The Ronettes, Jan and Dean, or The Four Seasons – all had big hits that year. But in December 1963, while the world was still thinking about the assassination of President Kennedy, for three weeks the number one slot on the pop charts was occupied by the unlikeliest of one-hit wonders, a singing nun from Belgium named Soeur Sourire, “Sister Smile”.

Her life came to a tragic end twenty-five years ago this month. Born Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers, she was encouraged by her parents to take over the family bakery in Brussels, but instead briefly enrolled in a Paris art school. She then shocked her family by dropping out and joining the Dominican Fichermont Convent in Waterloo, Belgium, and becoming Sister Luc-Gabrielle. While there, she entertained her fellow sisters by playing songs on her guitar (like BB King’s ‘Lucille’ or Eric Clapton’s ‘Blackie,’ her instrument also had its own name – Sister Adele). She chaffed against the discipline of cloistered life, but her superiors encouraged her to record some of her songs, as they believed the simple, airy tunes would be useful in missionary work.

Deckers entered the Philips Recording Studio in Brussels in October 1961 and, pleased with the results, the higher-ups at Fichermont agreed to cut 1,000 copies of her record. A Philips executive happened to hear the recording, and convinced the order to allow them to commercially market the recording. None could have foreseen what would happen next.

The single Dominique became an instant hit in Europe. The record didn’t make its American debut until late 1963, but in many ways, given the tumult the country was experiencing, an innocuous ditty dedicated to a 13th century saint proved a perfectly timed release.

Farewell Jeanne-Paule Marie Deckers, twenty-five years ago this month

In the wake of President Kennedy’s death, many were seeking softer fare on the radio dial, eschewing songs like The Surfaris’ “Wipe Out” for more soothing sounds. The song topped the U.S. Billboard charts for four weeks in row. With more versions recorded in Dutch, German, Hebrew and Japanese, the song charted in eleven countries between 1963 and 1964.

Wilma Mankiller – Dancing on the edge of the roof

She wanted to be remembered not just for being the tribe’s first female chief but for emphasising that Cherokee values can help solve contemporary problems.

Former Cherokee Nation Chief Wilma Mankiller, one of the few women ever to lead a major American Indian tribe, has died. She was 64.

Tribal spokesman Mike Miller said Mankiller, who became one of the nation’s most visible American Indian leaders during her 10 years as chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, died on Tuesday.

Wilma Mankiller died on Tuesday

Mankiller had battled lymphoma, breast cancer and several other health problems. On 2 March, Mankiller’s husband, Charlie Soap, announced that his wife had stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer.

As the first female chief of the Cherokees, serving from 1985 to 1995, Mankiller led the tribe in tripling its enrollment, doubling employment and building new health centres and children’s programs.

Her first taste of federal policy toward Indians came in the 1950s when her family participated in a government relocation program and ended up in a housing project. As chief, she took Indian issues to the White House and met with three presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Mankiller earned a reputation for facing conflict head-on.

She met snide remarks about her surname – a Cherokee military title – with humor, often delivering a straight-faced, “Mankiller is actually a well-earned nickname.”

Continual struggles with her health appeared not to deter her. A 1979 car accident nearly claimed her life and resulted in 17 operations. She developed a muscular disorder called myasthenia gravis and underwent a kidney transplant in 1990.

Mankiller used some hospital stays to work on her autobiography with Michael Wallis called “Mankiller: A Chief and Her People,” published in 1993.

Seal of the Cherokee nation

After the announcement that she had pancreatic cancer, Mankiller said she was “mentally and spiritually prepared for this journey.”

“I learned a long time ago that I can’t control the challenges the creator sends my way, but I can control the way I think about them and deal with them,” she said in a March 2010 statement released by the tribe.

“On balance, I have been blessed with an extraordinarily rich and wonderful life, filled with incredible experiences.”

Mankiller succeeded former Chief Ross Swimmer, who left at midterm in 1985 for a job in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She was re-elected in a landslide four years later, with 83 percent of the vote. She decided not to seek re-election in 1995 and accepted a teaching position at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where she held an honorary degree.

Among her other honors was a Presidential Medal of Freedom – the nation’s highest civilian award – presented by Clinton in 1998.

A Cherokee man

Born at WW Hastings Indian Hospital in Tahlequah, Mankiller moved with her family to San Francisco in the 1950s when their farm in Adair County failed. The pledge of opportunity turned out to be a life of poverty in a housing project.

She married Ecuadoran accountant Hector Olaya in 1963, and they had two daughters, Felicia, born in 1964, and Gina, born in 1966.

Mankiller moved back to her family’s land in Oklahoma after divorcing Olaya in 1975, and she married Soap in 1986.

In 1969, she got what she called “an enormous wake-up call” and took her first step into Indian activism by participating in the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island.

The 1969 occupation of Alcatraz

Seventy-nine Native Americans took over the site of the former federal prison to protest a policy that terminated the federal government’s recognition of tribal sovereignty and the exclusion of Indians from state laws. The policy was based on the belief that Native Americans would be better off if they assimilated as individuals into mainstream American society. Federal officers removed the remaining protesters in June 1971.

As chief, Mankiller was less of an activist and more of a pragmatist. She was criticised for focusing almost exclusively on social programs instead of pushing for smoke shops and high-stakes casinos, which many Indian tribes have profited from.

In her autobiography, Mankiller said she wanted to be remembered not just for being the tribe’s first female chief but for emphasising that Cherokee values can help solve contemporary problems.

“Friends describe me as someone who likes to dance along the edge of the roof,” she wrote.

“I try to encourage young women to be willing to take risks, to stand up for the things they believe in, and to step up and accept the challenge of serving in leadership roles.”

Farewell Wilma Mankiller

A memorial service has been scheduled for the Cherokee Nation Cultural Grounds in Tahlequah.

For earlier farewells, click here