Tony Lo Bianco, ‘French Connection’ Actor, Dies at 87 Once labeled a “natural-born heavy,” he shined onscreen and especially onstage, securing a Tony nomination and winning an Obie Award.

 

Tony Lo Bianco, ‘French Connection’ Actor, Dies at 87

Once labeled a “natural-born heavy,” he shined onscreen and especially onstage, securing a Tony nomination and winning an Obie Award.

By Anita Gates

Published June 12, 2024Updated June 14, 2024

Tony Lo Bianco, an actor whose film roles included villains in “The French Connection” and “The Honeymoon Killers” and whose stage career earned him stellar reviews for an Arthur Miller tragedy and an Obie Award for a baseball drama, died on Tuesday at his home in Poolesville, Md. He was 87.

The cause was prostate cancer, his wife, Alyse Lo Bianco, said.

Mr. Lo Bianco made a vivid impression in “The Honeymoon Killers” (1970), a low-budget black-and-white film, based on a true story, that came to be regarded as a cult classic. With a heavy Spanish accent and serious sideburns, he played Raymond Fernandez, a con man who courted, married and murdered lonely women for their bank accounts, passing off his real lover (Shirley Stoler) as his sister. The Guardian called the film the movies’ first “super-realist depiction of the banality of evil.”

Mr. Lo Bianco in “The Honeymoon Killers” with Mary Jane Higby, left, and Shirley Stoler. In that film, which was based on a true story, he played a serial killer.Credit...Roxanne Company, via Everett Collection

A United Press International writer once labeled Mr. Lo Bianco “a natural-born heavy” because of his dark hair, bushy eyebrows and sharp features. In “The French Connection” (1971), moviegoers saw him as the owner of a modest Brooklyn diner, Sal and Angie’s, dressed to the nines and driving a car with European plates, courtesy of international drug money. In “The Seven-Ups” (1973), he was a mortician at one of the Mafia’s favorite funeral homes.

Tony Lo Bianco in a scene from “The French Connection” (1971). His other films included the “The Honeymoon Killers” (1970), which has come to be regarded as a cult classic.Credit...20th Century Fox Film Corp., via Everett Collection

But Mr. Lo Bianco was a stage actor at heart. He won an Obie Award in 1975 for “Yanks 3, Detroit 0, Top of the Seventh,” in which he played Duke Bronkowski, a baseball player with age and time breathing down his neck who is trying to pitch a perfect game during his 14th season in the major leagues.

In 1983, Mr. Lo Bianco triumphed on Broadway in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” as a Brooklyn longshoreman destroyed by his obsession with his 17-year-old niece. The performance brought him a Tony Award nomination for best actor in a play.

Frank Rich, in his New York Times review, called it a “tumultuous star performance” and described Mr. Lo Bianco as “such a dynamic and enveloping force” that the audience never questions the play’s action. He “looms up,” Mr. Rich wrote, “to make the theater shake.”

Mr. Lo Bianco’s success stemmed in part from previous experience with the role, which he had played in summer stock in the 1960s. “I knew 20 years ago this would happen,” he said of the play’s reception. “It doesn’t surprise me at all. I knew the power of this play.”

Mr. Lo Bianco in 1978. A stage actor at heart, he won an Obie Award in 1975 for his performance in “Yanks 3, Detroit 0, Top of the Seventh.”Credit...John Mahler/Toronto Star, via Getty Images

Anthony Lo Bianco was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 19, 1936. His parents — Carmelo Lo Bianco, a taxi driver, and Sally (Blando) Lo Bianco — were first-generation Italian Americans. Anthony attended a vocational high school, where a speech and drama teacher suggested that he study acting.

 

 Read the rest of Mr. Lo Bianco's obituary here: 

 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/12/movies/tony-lo-bianco-dead.html

 

Terry Carter, Barrier-Breaking Actor and Documentarian, Dies at 95

 He was the only Black actor on “Combat!” and “The Phil Silvers Show,” then made well regarded documentaries on luminaries like Duke Ellington and Katherine Dunham.

 

Terry Carter as Colonel Tigh on the ABC science-fiction series “Battlestar Galactica.” He appeared on the show in 1978-79.Credit...via Everett Collection

By Robert D. McFadden

April 23, 2024

Terry Carter, who broke color barriers onstage and on television in the 1950s and ’60s and later produced multicultural documentaries on the jazz luminary Duke Ellington and the dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham, died on Tuesday at his home in Midtown Manhattan. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by his son, Miguel Carter DeCoste.

Mr. Carter was raised in a bilingual home next door to a synagogue in a predominantly Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. His best friend was the future jazz great Cecil Taylor. In his first stage role, at 9, Mr. Carter played the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama on a voyage of discovery.

And in a wayfaring six-decade career, he was a merchant seaman, a jazz pianist, a law student, a television news anchor, a familiar character on network sitcoms, an Emmy-winning documentarian, a good will ambassador to China, a longtime expatriate in Europe — and a reported dead man; in 2015, rumors that he had been killed were mistaken. It was not him but a much younger Terry Carter who had died in a hit-and-run accident in Los Angeles by a pickup truck driven by the rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight.

Slightly misquoting Mark Twain, Mr. Carter posted on social media: “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

While he acted in some 30 television series and movies, Mr. Carter was best known to viewers as Sgt. Joe Broadhurst, the sidekick to Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud (Dennis Weaver) on NBC’s “McCloud” series from 1970 to 1977, and in 21 episodes of “Battlestar Galactica,” as Colonel Tigh, second-in-command of the starship fleet in ABC’s original science-fiction series in 1978-79. (The series was revived for a second run from 2004 to 2009.)

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Mr. Carter, right, on “McCloud” as the sidekick to Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud, played by Dennis Weaver, left. Mr. Carter appeared on the series from 1970 to 1977.Credit...via Everett Collection

In the 1950s, when many American entertainments were racially segregated and hundreds of actors had been blacklisted during Communist witch-hunts by congressional investigators, Mr. Carter met the veteran actor Howard Da Silva, whose Hollywood and television career had stalled in 1951 after he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

“It was Howard who talked me into becoming an actor — he’s the one who changed my life,” Mr. Carter said in an interview for this obituary in 2018. “I quit law school and began studying at Howard’s acting school. I think he called it the Mobile Theater Workshop.”

Mr. Carter appeared in several Black-cast stage productions, both on Broadway and Off Broadway, before breaking into television as the only Black character on “The Phil Silvers Show” (1955-59), playing Pvt. Sugie Sugarman in 92 half-hour episodes of the CBS comedy about an Army con man, Sergeant Bilko, and his motor pool crew.

The show was filmed before studio audiences in New York City. Memorized lines were occasionally flubbed, there were awkward pauses, and the actors often improvised to cover the gaffes, all of which created a spirit of camaraderie in the cast.

“Well, I am the last living survivor of ‘The Phil Silvers Show,’” Mr. Carter said in 2018. “But I’m reluctant to take too much credit for being the only Black man on the show. I was only a cog in the wheel. I slew the foe, but I was just a ham like everybody else. It was a wonderful bunch.”

In 1958, Mr. Carter co-produced an Off Broadway version of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The predominantly Black cast featured the actress Hilda Simms as the faded Southern belle Blanche du Bois, and Black actors played Stanley and Stella Kowalski, while white actors filled smaller parts.

Mr. Carter starred with the British actress Sally Ann Howes in “Kwamina,” a 1961 avant-garde musical that explored the romance between a white female doctor and an African tribal chief’s son. After previews in Toronto and Boston, it ran for 32 performances on Broadway.

Also in 1961, Mr. Carter appeared in the Hollywood film “Parrish,” starring Claudette Colbert, Karl Malden and Troy Donahue in a Delmer Daves adaptation of a Mildred Savage novel about family conflicts on a tobacco plantation. And in 1965 he was the only Black actor to portray a G.I. in any of the 152 episodes of the World War II series “Combat!,” which appeared on ABC from 1962 to 1967.

After decades onstage and onscreen, Mr. Carter formed his own production company in 1975 and made educational documentaries. In the 1980s, he expanded into more sophisticated documentaries for PBS, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Read the rest of Terry Carter's obituary here: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/arts/television/terry-carter-dead.html

Steve Lawrence, Who Sang His Listeners Down Memory Lane, Dies at 88 With his wife, Eydie Gorme, and sometimes on his own, he kept pop standards in vogue long past their prime. He also acted on television and on Broadway.

 

Steve Lawrence, Who Sang His Listeners Down Memory Lane, Dies at 88

With his wife, Eydie Gorme, and sometimes on his own, he kept pop standards in vogue long past their prime. He also acted on television and on Broadway.

 

 

 

Steve Lawrence in a recording studio in the late 1950s. He had hit records both on his own and with his wife, Eydie Gorme.Credit...PoPsie Randolph, via Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

 

By Robert D. McFadden

March 7, 2024

Steve Lawrence, the mellow baritone nightclub, television and recording star who with his wife and partner, the soprano Eydie Gorme, kept pop standards in vogue long past their prime and took America on musical walks down memory lane for a half-century, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said Susan DuBow, a spokeswoman for the family. He had been diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s in 2019.

Billed as “Steve and Eydie” at Carnegie Hall concerts, on television and at glitzy hotels in Las Vegas, the remarkably durable couple remained steadfast to their pop style as rock ’n’ roll took America by storm in the 1950s and ’60s. Long after the millennium, they were still rendering songs like “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” “Just in Time” and “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” for audiences that seemed to grow old with them.

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Mr. Lawrence and Ms. Gorme recording in the 1960s. As Steve and Eydie, they performed at Carnegie Hall, on television and in Las Vegas.Credit...via Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Mr. Lawrence, a cantor’s son from Brooklyn, and Ms. Gorme, a Bronx-born daughter of Sephardic Jewish immigrants, met professionally in 1953 as regular singers on “The Steve Allen Show” a late-night show on NBC’s New York station that would go national the next year as “Tonight.” Their romance might have been the plot of an MGM musical of the ’40s, with spats, breakups, reconciliations and plenty of songs.

When they finally decided to get married, Mr. Lawrence and Ms. Gorme faced a roadblock, as they recalled in a dressing-room interview with The New York Times at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas in 1992.

“The major problem was his mother,” Ms. Gorme explained. “She said she’d put her head in the oven if Steve married me.”

He rolled his eyes and tried to get a word in edgewise, but she plunged on: “To the day his mother died, she said I wasn’t Jewish but Spanish.”

Later, the topic turned to the age of their audiences.

She: “Can I say something?”

He: “Could I ever stop you?”

 

Read the rest of this obituary here:

 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/arts/music/steve-lawrence-dead.html

 

 

 

 

Richard Lewis, Acerbic Comedian and Character Actor, Dies at 76

 

 

The comedian Richard Lewis in 2014.He was among the best-known names in a generation of comedians who came of age during the 1970s and ’80s.Credit...Michael Schwartz/WireImage

By Clay Risen

Feb. 28, 2024, 4:17 p.m. ET

Richard Lewis, a stand-up comedian who first achieved fame in the 1980s with his trademark acerbic, dark sense of humor, and who later parlayed that quality into an acting career that included movies like “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” and a recurring role as himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.

His publicist, Jeff Abraham, said the cause was a heart attack. Mr. Lewis announced last year that he had Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Lewis was among the best-known names in a generation of comedians who came of age during the 1970s and ’80s, marked by a world-weary, sarcastic wit that mapped well onto the urban malaise in which many of them plied their trade.

He became a regular on late-night talk shows, favored as much for his tight act as for his casual, open affability as an interviewee. And he was at the forefront of the boom in stand-up comedy that came with the expansion of cable television in the late 1980s.

 

Mr. Lewis later moved into acting. He starred on the sitcom “Anything but Love,” opposite Jamie Lee Curtis, from 1989 to 1992. Beginning in 1999, he had a regular, semi-fictionalized role on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” playing a good friend and golf buddy of Larry David, the show’s star and creator.

He did not appear in every episode, but he appeared regularly, including in the current season, the show’s last.

A full obituary will appear soon.

Orlando Mayorquin contributed reporting.

 

Robert M. Solow, Groundbreaking Economist and Nobelist, Dies at 99

  

Robert M. Solow in 1987, when he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. 

Photo Credit: Mark Lennihan/Associated Press

 

By Robert D. Hershey Jr. and Michael M. Weinstein

Dec. 21, 2023

Robert M. Solow, who won a Nobel in economic science in 1987 for his theory that advances in technology, rather than increases in capital and labor, have been the primary drivers of economic growth in the United States, died on Thursday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 99.

His son John confirmed the death.

Professor Solow (pronounced solo) taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he and a fellow Nobel laureate, Paul A. Samuelson, forged the M.I.T. style of economic analysis, which emerged as a leading approach in the second half of the 20th century and played an important role in economic policymaking.

His work demonstrated the power of bringing mathematics to bear on important economic debates and simplifying the analysis by focusing on a small number of variables at a time.

Beyond the impact of his own research, Professor Solow helped launch the careers of a stunning number of future superstar economists, including four Nobel laureates: Peter Diamond, Joseph E. Stiglitz, William D. Nordhaus and George A. Akerlof. “My pride and joy,” Professor Solow said.

 

The affection was reciprocated. In an interview for this obituary in 2013, Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton University economics professor, a former deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and a Solow pupil, said, “All his former students idolize him — all, with no exceptions.”

Professor Solow received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1961 as the finest American economist under 40 and the National Medal of Science in 1999; he was one of the few economists to receive that honor. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Professor Solow’s research on economic growth became the model by which economists, well beyond the confines of M.I.T., came to practice their craft. For a century or more they simply “knew” that growth of capital and labor determined economic growth. But Professor Solow could not find data to confirm that common-sense presumption.

Besides, academic theories of economic growth that predated his writings had the discomforting implication that capitalist economies were always teetering between boom and bust. He observed that “the history of capitalism didn’t look like that.”

So what did explain growth? Entrepreneurs? Geography? Legal institutions? Something else?

“I discovered to my great surprise that the main source of growth was not capital investment but technological change,” Professor Solow said in an interview in 2009, also for this obituary. Specifically, he estimated that technical progress accounted for a surprising 80 percent of 20th-century American growth. He later pointed to Silicon Valley as a validation of his theory.

 

Technology Was Key

Professor Solow’s strategy — his gimmick, he liked to say — was to pick out one thing of special interest and simplify the role of everything else. The goal was to understand completely the role of a “little piece of the puzzle.” This strategy of inquiry came to be known as building “toy models.”

In analyzing economic growth, he singled out technological progress (the ability of society to translate inputs of capital and labor into outputs of goods and services) as independent from the other key variables, including population growth and returns on capital.

He devised a graph with two curves. One captured his simplifying assumption that population growth and technological knowledge rise at a constant rate over time. The second one captured his all-important assumption that the economic impact of adding more and more capital gets weaker and weaker. Adding capital to an economy drives up total output, but each additional dollop of capital drives up output by less than the previous dollop did.

Put the two curves on the same graph and a powerful theory of growth emerged. Professor Solow showed that higher savings and investment would indeed make individuals richer on average — the level of income per person would rise. But the added savings and investment would not affect the economy’s long-term rate of growth. The impact of additional savings on permanent growth rates peters out in a way that, under Professor Solow’s assumption, the impacts of population and technical knowledge do not.

Out went 100 years of often fruitless, meandering debate. Professor Solow’s simple graph refocused the argument, providing a clear path to cause-and-effect statements about past and future growth. He published his growth model in 1956. At that point, he had provided an elegant theory. A year later, he presented evidence.

Read the rest of the obituary here:

 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/business/robert-solow-dead.html

 

Howard Golden, Who Led, and Defended, Brooklyn, Dies at 98

 

Howard Golden, the Brooklyn borough president, spoke at a hearing held by the New York City Council in 1992. During his tenure the power of the borough presidents was diminished, but he insisted on the importance of the job. 

 

Photo Credit: Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

By Joseph P. Fried

Jan. 24, 2024

Howard Golden, who as Brooklyn borough president for a quarter-century pressed to strengthen the borough economically and defended it against slights real or perceived in the years before it experienced a gentrifying revival, died on Wednesday at his home in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. He was 98.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Michele Golden.

A brash, blunt and savvy product of the Brooklyn Democratic machine, Mr. Golden, whose clipped and gravelly tones often conveyed caustic criticisms of those who crossed him, doubled as the Democratic Party leader in Brooklyn during seven of his 25 years as borough president.

The party post made him a kingpin in determining who would get party backing in legislative and judicial primaries in Brooklyn, a heavily Democratic borough where winning the Democratic nomination was usually tantamount to being elected.

A reduction of the borough presidents’ powers occurred midway through Mr. Golden’s tenure, a result of a municipal reorganization approved by voters in 1989. The change abolished the Board of Estimate, which had been one of the city’s two top policy-making bodies, along with the City Council, and which comprised the mayor, the Council president, the city comptroller and the five borough presidents.

 

The board had the power, along with the City Council, to approve the city’s budget and, without the Council, to determine the use of city-owned property and enter into contracts on behalf of the city. Having a vote in those key decisions had given borough presidents most of their governmental power.

Mr. Golden was vehement in opposing the abolition of the board, which had been proposed by a commission appointed to recommend revisions of the City Charter.

When the commission held a public hearing in Brooklyn to discuss its proposals, Mr. Golden did not mince words. “As an act of courtesy, I welcome you to Brooklyn,” he told the commissioners. “I must say that your visit here today is not a beneficial one.”

It was undisputed, however, that changes in how the city was run had to be made. The United States Supreme Court had ruled that the Board of Estimate’s voting structure was unconstitutional, because it violated the one-person, one-vote principle by allotting one vote to each borough president even though the populations of the boroughs varied widely in size.

Read the rest of the obituary here: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/nyregion/howard-golden-dead.html

 

Menachem Daum, 77, Filmmaker Who Explored the World of Hasidim

 His acclaimed documentary “A Life Apart” presented a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable.

 

Menachem Daum was not Hasidic himself. But in making the film “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” he was able to get people who scorn movies and television sets to sit on camera for revealing interviews.Credit...First Run Features/Oren Rudavsky Productions

By Joseph Berger

Published Jan. 19, 2024Updated Jan. 21, 2024, 1:25 a.m. ET

Menachem Daum, a filmmaker who co-produced a groundbreaking 1997 documentary that illuminated the cloistered world of America’s Hasidim, died on Jan. 7 in a hospital near his home in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was 77.

His death was confirmed by Eva Fogelman, a friend and the author of a book about Christian rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. She said Mr. Daum had been treated for congestive heart failure.

What made the documentary, “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” so striking was Mr. Daum’s ability to get people who scorn movies and television sets to sit on camera for revealing interviews, allowing him to chronicle their mores and rituals. The resulting film offered a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable; here it offered scenes of Hasidim joyfully dancing.

That achievement was not a given. Mr. Daum, though ultra-Orthodox, was not Hasidic himself. And although he had earlier made a film about caregivers for the aged, he was scarcely a seasoned filmmaker.

But he was well versed in the Torah, the Talmud and the intricacies of Orthodox Jewish observance. He spoke Yiddish — the Hasidic lingua franca — and lived in a Hasidic neighborhood. He teamed with an experienced filmmaker, Oren Rudavsky, the son of a Reform rabbi, to produce and direct the documentary.

The Hasidic movement was founded in the 18th century in Eastern Europe by a rabbi known as the Baal Shem Tov, who felt that Judaism had overemphasized intellectual qualities to the detriment of spiritual fervor and sincerity.

Mr. Rudavsky said in an interview that he believed “A Life Apart” was the first feature-length documentary released in American theaters that explored Hasidism.

The film, narrated by Leonard Nimoy and Sarah Jessica Parker, premiered at the Walter Reade Theater in Manhattan and in Los Angeles. It later ran for five months at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan and was shown on PBS television.

“‘A Life Apart’ enlivens its history and analysis with surprisingly tender family scenes, with evocations of the Hasidic world’s deep mysticism, and with some of the community’s most colorfully quaint features, like formal matchmaking,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The New York Times.

 Mr. Daum’s friendships and his familiarity with his neighborhood were the key to unlocking the reclusive Hasidic world, whose members deliberately wall themselves off socially from the secular world to avoid its temptations and to sustain their way of life, spurning even college educations and schooling in the professions.

“If I put on a hat, I look like I belong even more than I do,” Mr. Daum told The Times before the film’s premiere. “I could assure them that this film would not mock or exploit them.”

The film offered critical perspectives. A Hasidic woman laments what she sees as her second-class status, and a Black parks employee in Brooklyn condemns what he says is the aloofness and “spiritual arrogance” of the Hasidim he has encountered.

 

(The New York Times article continues here ).....https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/movies/menachem-daum-dead.html