YBTL 2004 Deaths To Date

Maxine Postal, 61, the Suffolk County, NY legislative leader who resigned her post in December 2003 because of failing health due to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rapidly spreading brain disorder, died 1 January in a hospice in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, where she also had a home.

One of the highest-ranking elected officials in the county, Ms. Postal was first voted into the county Legislature 15 years ago. A Democrat, she championed equal rights for women, environmental protection, and programs for children, the elderly and the poor.

Born Maxine Levy in Brooklyn on 24 November 1942, Postal was a 1962 fine-arts graduate of Brooklyn College, where she also received an M.A. in fine arts in 1965. She taught at public junior high and high schools in Brooklyn for six years before opening the Busy Bee Nursery School and Kindergarten there in 1968. After moving to Long Island, she owned and directed the Busy Bee nursery in Amityville from 1976 to 1990, when the press of her community work and public service prompted her to sell the business.

Postal served as president of the Hauppauge Library Board in the 1970's and was a vice president of the Amityville Board of Education from 1984 to 1988. In 1987 she was elected to the County Legislature. She served as minority leader and headed the Health Services Committee, the Human Services Committee and the Senior Citizens Committee. In 2002 she was the vice chairwoman of the Finance and Fiscal Services Committee.

She was chosen as presiding officer for a one-year term last year by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans. As such she was in a position to shape the legislative agenda, name committee chairmen and preside at meetings of the 18-member body. As her illness progressed in recent months, her duties often fell upon the deputy presiding officer elected alongside her.

Michael Straight, 87, the patrician magazine publisher who wrote a political memoir about his involvement with Soviet spies whom he had first met when they were all students at Cambridge University, died 4 January at his home in Chicago from pancreatic cancer.

In a life of rubbing shoulders with the privileged, Straight went through a series of identities, from Communist during his student days at Trinity College, Cambridge, to reluctant Soviet agent in New Deal Washington to liberal anti-Communist during the cold war. He also went through a series of jobs, including economist at the State Department, editor and publisher of The New Republic magazine and deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Nixon and Ford administrations.

He confessed his career as a spy in his 1983 memoir, After Long Silence. He cited his hesitancy to spy when ordered to do so in 1937 by Anthony Blunt, then a young Cambridge don, and insisted that upon taking a job with the State Department under Roosevelt, the only papers he passed to the Soviets were political and economic analyses written by himself.He repudiated Communism and espionage in 1939 when Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler.

In 1951, Straight ran into Guy Burgess, once his fellow student at Cambridge, on a Washington street corner and assumed he must be running a spy ring out of the nearby British Embassy. He said he warned Burgess to stop and go home or he would expose him. Shortly after, Burgess defected to the Soviet Union with his colleague and lover, Donald Maclean.

Straight's own exposure came in 1963 when he was offered an arts post in the Kennedy Administration. Fearing a background check, he confessed to the FBI, a confession that led to the unmasking of Blunt, by then knighted and the curator of Queen Elizabeth's art collection. Straight turned down the Kennedy Administration post, although some years later he took the position of deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Michael Whitney Straight was born 1 Sept 1916, in New York City, the third and youngest child of Willard D. Straight, an investment banker with J. P. Morgan, and Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, an heiress. Together in 1914 the couple had started The New Republic. Straight's father died in 1918 of septic pneumonia while serving with the American Expeditionary Forces in France. Their elder two children were Whitney, who became a racing-car driver and head of British Overseas Airway Corporation (later British Airways), and Beatrice, an actress.

Straight spent a year at the London School of Economics before going on to Cambridge in 1934. He became a member of the circle around John Maynard Keynes, socialized with young radical patricians like himself and joined the Communist Party, he said in his memoir, mostly in sympathy with its Popular Front objectives of supporting democrat governments against the rising tide of Nazism.

Former Major League Baseball relief pitcher Tug McGraw, 59, who won two World Series in a 19-year career, died 5 January in Nashville, Tennessee after a long battle with brain cancer.

McGraw made his major league debut in 1965 with the New York Mets. Four years later, he was part of the "Miracle Mets'" World Series-winning club. In 1973, he coined the now-famous phrase "you gotta believe" during the Mets' improbable run to the National League championship.

Traded to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1974 season, McGraw helped lead the Phillies to six playoff appearances between 1976 and 1983. In 1980, he recorded the final out to give the Phillies their first and only World Series championship.

McGraw retired in 1984 with 180 career saves and a 3.14 earned run average.

British political activist and photo-journalist Tom Hurndall, 22, died 13 January after lying in a coma for nine months in a London hospital. Hurndall was shot by an Israeli soldier while helping Palestinian civilians take cover during a clash in the Gaza Strip. Hurndall, who was in a persistant vegetative state, had contracted pneumonia in recent weeks that led to his death.

The Israeli army arrested a soldier late last year over the shooting of activist Tom Hurndall and charged him on 12 January with grievous bodily harm. The charges against the soldier are now likely to be upgraded to manslaughter. Hurndall's supporters say he was wearing a bright orange jacket and helping Palestinian children cross a street under fire in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah when he was shot. The soldier initially maintained he had opened fire on a man armed with a pistol, but later "admitted to firing in proximity to an unarmed civilian as a deterrent."

Uta Hagen, 84, award-winning stage actress and acting teacher, who originated the role of Martha in the Broadway production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, died 14 January after a long illness.

Hagen was known for her work in classical and modern plays ranging from Shakespeare and Chekhov to Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams and Clifford Odets. She made her Broadway debut in 1938 in The Seagull, by Anton Chekhov. She earned her first Tony Award in 1951 for best actress in the lead role of Clifford Odet's The Country Girl. She won another best actress Tony twelve years later for her portrayal of Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.Her acting school's alumni roster includes Jack Lemmon, Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook, Candice Bergen, Lily Tomlin, Geraldine Page, Stockard Channing, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Matthew Broderick.

Hagen gave her last performance, at age 82, on 21 August 2001, at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, playing opposite David Hyde Pierce in Richard Alfieri's Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.

Ann Miller, 81, a childhood dance prodigy who tap danced her way to movie stardom that peaked in 1940s musicals like On the Town, Easter Parade and Kiss Me Kate, died 22 January of lung cancer.

Miller's film career peaked at MGM in the late 1940s and early '50s, but she continued to dance on Broadway into her 60s, earning millions for Sugar Babies, a razzmatazz tribute to the era of burlesque featuring Mickey Rooney.

Miller's legs, pretty face and fast tapping (she claimed a record of 500 taps a minute) earned her jobs in vaudeville and night clubs when she first came to Hollywood. Her early film career included working as a child extra in films and as a chorus girl in a minor musical, The Devil on Horseback.

An appearance at the popular Bal Tabarin in San Francisco won a contract at RKO studio. Her first film at RKO, New Faces of 1937, featured her dancing. She next played an acting hopeful in Stage Door, with Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball and Eve Arden. When Cyd Charisse broke a leg before starting Easter Parade at MGM with Fred Astaire, Miller replaced her. That led to an MGM contract and her most enduring work.

Bob Keeshan, 76, who entertained and educated generations of children as television's walrus-mustachioed Captain Kangaroo, died 23 January after a long illness.

Keeshan's Captain Kangaroo debuted on CBS television in 1955 and ran for 30 years before moving to public television for six more. The program was wildly popular among children and won six Emmy Awards, three Gabriels and three Peabody Awards. The format was simple: Each day, Captain Kangaroo, with his sugar-bowl haircut and uniform coat, would wander through his Treasure House, chatting with his good friend Mr. Green Jeans, played by Hugh "Lumpy" Brannum. He would visit with puppet animals, like Bunny Rabbit, who was scolded for eating too many carrots, and Mr. Moose, who loved to tell knock-knock jokes.

But the show revolved about the grandfatherly Captain Kangaroo, whose name was inspired by the kangaroo pouch-like pockets of the coat Keeshan wore.

"I was impressed with the potential positive relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, so I chose an elderly character," Keeshan said.

Jack Paar, 85, the prickly, often emotional and always unpredictable humorist who turned late-night television into a national institution and invented the "talk show" along the way, died 26 January at his home in Greenwich, Conn.

Paar hosted The Tonight Show on NBC from 1987 to 1962, simplifying the format from a variety show into the familiar talk format that it remains today. He introduced the sofa-and-desk set that remains a fixture of talk shows to this day. But Paar's show truly focused on interesting talk, rather than the stream of celebrity product plugs that talk shows have become today. Paar combined interesting guests with his own ability to listen carefully and actually engage in clever and often witty conversation.

Paar's couch became a sounding board for social gossips like Elsa Maxwell and national political figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. It was also a hangout for witty regular guests like the irascibly neurotic Oscar Levant and the equally fine raconteurs Alexander King, Peter Ustinov and Clement Freud. Paar liked to pair guests unusually, such as Liberace and Muhammad Ali or Jayne Mansfield and Zsa Zsa Gabor and long before David Letterman and Conan O'Brian, Paar brought an anarchistic streak to late-night television.

Paar was unpredictable. He once walked off the set in the middle of a live broadcast because NBC censors cut one of his jokes. Three weeks later, he was back, proclaiming, "As I was saying before I was interrupted . . . "

In time he was joined by a kind of repertory company that included Hugh Downs, his announcer; José Melis, his pianist; Cliff Arquette, who portrayed a down-home character named Charley Weaver; Genevieve, a French chanteuse who mangled the English language; and the comedians Jonathan Winters, Dody Goodman and Peggy Cass.

Paar's studio at Rockefeller Center in New York also became a launching pad for dozens of unknowns who would get national exposure on his show, among them Bill Cosby, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Carol Burnett, Woody Allen, the Smothers Brothers and Godfrey Cambridge. Paar's Tonight Show featured Elvis Presley before the famous appearance on Ed Sullivan.

Paar abruptly left The Tonight Show in 1962 with an average audience of seven million people every night. He never gave an answer for why he decided to leave while at the top of his game.

Janet Frame, 79, who overcame mental illness to become one of New Zealand's most acclaimed authors, died 29 January of leukemia in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Frame was diagnosed while young as suffering from schizophrenia and came close to having a lobotomy. She published her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, in 1951, and her first novel, Owls Do Cry, in 1957. Frame's three-part autobiography was turned into the film Angel at my Table by Jane Campion. In her autobiography, Frame revealed she suffered several years of electric shock treatment for schizophrenia before doctors decided on a lobotomy. The operation was canceled after a collection of Frame's short stories won a literary prize.

Widely acclaimed as the most accomplished and talented New Zealand writer since Katherine Mansfield, Frame won accolades from New Zealand, Britain and the United States.

When Frame later went to England, it was found her schizophrenia had been misdiagnosed. A British psychiatrist said she was just someone who preferred to be alone, and who was different from most other people.

Frame wrote 11 novels, five short story collections, a poetry collection and her three-volume autobiography.

Julius Schwartz, 88, died on 8 February. Schwartz was a promoter of science fiction in the 1930s and, as editor of National Publications (later DC Comics), revived comic book superheroes after the Second World War by reviving the moribund character the Flash and then others.

Rather than simply pick up the adventures of the original Flash where they had left off seven years earlier, Schwartz reimagined the concept, created a new Flash, brought in a new writer and artist with fresh ideas, and turned the rather static Flash into a dynamic hero. Such was the success of the character that Schwartz went on to recreate a string of other faded stars, including Green Lantern, Hawkman, the Atom and the Justice League of America. To fans, this was the dawn of the "Silver Age" of comic books; the revived fortunes of National's superheroes prompted their rivals, Marvel Comics, to create their own line-up of new heroes, thus giving birth to Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk and others.

In 1964 Schwartz became the editor of National's foremost hero, Batman, whose fortunes had been flagging for some years thanks to stories filled with hackneyed science fiction elements, with Batman battling mad scientists, robots and aliens. Schwartz returned Batman to his roots as a crime fighter and detective, and had the artists revise the look of the character. The new Batman was a great success and caught the imagination of television producers. Although Schwartz detested the campness of the television series, it helped catapult sales of the comic into the stratosphere.

For 40 years Schwartz handled the most famous of superheroes, including the Superman family of titles, from 1970, and the revival of Captain Marvel in 1973. Even after his retirement in 1985, he continued to act as a consultant for DC Comics. His talks on the history of comics were the highlight of many conventions. His awards and honors included the Comics Fandom's Alley award for Best Editor in 1962; the Academy of Comic Book Arts award for Superior Achievement in 1972; three Eagle awards; the Jules Verne award for Life-time Achievement in 1984; and the Diamond Lifetime Fandom Award in 1991.

Julius Schwartz was born in the Bronx, New York, on 19 June 1915, and educated at Hebrew school. He graduated from the College of the City of New York with a bachelor of science degree in 1936. By then he had already established himself firmly as a leading light of science fiction fandom. Schwartz had followed the early growth of scienct fiction through pulp magazines and was introduced to a small circle of Bronx fans known as the Scienceers in 1930.

Inspired by an early attempt by the Scienceers to publish a science fiction fan magazine, Schwartz and Allen Glasser launched The Time Traveller, the first science fiction fanzine to achieve a wide circulation. In 1932 Schwartz was part of the group which published Science Fiction Digest, a fully printed semi-professional magazine which ran until 1934. Schwartz took over as editor, and under the title Fantasy Magazine it continued to appear until 1937. He also established the Solar Sales Service, to place science fiction stories. The agency began handling the work of many leading sf writers of the time, including Edmond Hamilton, Stanley G Weinbaum, John Taine, Otto and Earl Binder, Ralph Milne Farley, David H Keller, Henry Kuttner and H P Lovecraft. The stories were often rejects which Weisinger and Schwartz would sell by retyping the first few pages and resubmitting them.

In 1941, Schwartz rented an apartment in New York, where an enthusiastic young Ray Bradbury often called in after an afternoon spent selling newspapers on a nearby corner. Schwartz helped Bradbury with some of his earliest professional sales and acted as his agent until 1948.

Schwartz had been turned down by the US Army because of his poor vision and, at the suggestion of one of his former Solar clients, he went for an interview at National Publications who were looking for a comic book editor. Schwartz, who had never read a comic in his life, picked up three comics on his way to the interview with Sheldon Mayer and read them on the subway. He was hired in February 1944.

Claude Ryan, 79, a former leader of the Quebec Liberal Party who led the successful opposition in a referendum in 1980 on the French-speaking province's secession from Canada, died 9 February in Montreal of stomach cancer.

Ryan was at the center of Quebec politics when a new generation of assertive French-speaking politicians and entrepreneurs had grown in prominence, campaigning for a greater measure of autonomy for the province to preserve its cultural and linguistic heritage. Ryan, who did not favor outright independence, pushed for recognition of Quebec as a "distinct society" with greater autonomy than Canada's nine other provinces have. Like many other federalists in Quebec, Mr. Ryan sought a balance between convincing his fellow Quebecers that it was in their interests to remain part of Canada, while making the case to the rest of the country that Quebec deserved a special status.

Ryan's attempts to achieve this balance were especially evident in his approach to the sensitive issue of language policy. He switched from journalism to politics in 1978 primarily to campaign against proposals by the separatist Parti Québécois, which controlled the provincial government, to make French the province's only official language. But in the late 80s and early 90s, when Mr. Ryan was the cabinet minister in charge of the province's French language charter, he led the adoption of new rules forbidding the use of English on outdoor commercial signs. His move prompted the resignation of three English-speaking cabinet ministers. The French-only language law, known as Bill 101, remains on the books, though separatist sentiment has waned.

In the May 1980 referendum, 59.5 percent of voters defeated the Parti Québécois proposal for "sovereignty association," a combination of political independence and economic "association." Though Mr. Ryan's position as Liberal Party leader put him nominally in charge of the federalist forces in Quebec, he was overshadowed during the campaign by the more forceful federal prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

In spite of losing the referendum, Parti Québécois won a general election a year later, and Ryan stepped down as Liberal leader. The Liberals returned to office in 1985 under Ryan's successor, Robert Bourassa. Mr. Ryan remained a member of the Quebec legislative assembly and an influential member of the government until he retired in 1994. At the time of his death, Ryan taught Catholic studies at McGill University.

John Randolph, 88, a Tony Award-winning stage, television and film actor and longtime activist who was blacklisted in the McCarthy era, died on 24 February at his home in Hollywood. He died of natural causes.

Randolph's career stretched from the 1930's through the 1990s. Frequently cast as an authoritarian figure, his favorite roles included the police chief in the 1973 film Serpico and Jack Nicholson's father in 1985's Prizzi's Honor. He appeared in several Broadway productions and won the Tony Award in 1987 for his role as the cantankerous grandfather in Neil Simon's comedy Broadway Bound.

Randolph, who was born Emanuel Cohen in the Bronx, legally changed his name in the 1940s. He came from a family of middle-class immigrants from Romania. His father was a milliner who died at age 29 during a flu epidemic when his son was only 4 years old.

He began his stage training in the Federal Theater Project in the 1930s, later studying with Stella Adler and becoming one of the original members of the Actors Studio.

He also was a longtime civil activist, supporting striking Kentucky miners, opposing the execution of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, protesting apartheid and the Vietnam War and working with the group Amnesty International.

In 1955, he and his wife, actress Sarah Cunningham, were called before Sen. Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating alleged communist influence in the entertainment industry. They refused to answer questions. As a result, the couple became part of the infamous Hollywood blacklist that denied them film and television work for more than a decade. Both turned to stage work (Randolph had made his Broadway debut in 1938) and had active careers. In 1966, Randolph's film career revived after director John Frankenheimer cast him in the science fiction drama, Seconds.

Cecily Adams, 39, an actress, casting director and the daughter of Get Smart television star Don Adams, died 3 March of lung cancer in Los Angeles.

Adams appeared in the 1990s syndicated series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as the character Ishka and has guest roles in a variety of TV shows including Just Shoot Me, Murphy Brown and Party of Five. More recently, Adams worked as a Hollywood casting director.

Adams was born in Queens, N.Y. Her mother, Adelaide Adams, was a singer. Don Adams gained fame as bumbling agent Maxwell Smart in the 1960s spy spoof Get Smart.

Pedro Pietri, 59, a co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe who composed poems and plays that illustrated the lives of Puerto Rican New Yorkers, died of renal failure on 3 March.He had been in a holistic clinic in Mexico since January for treatment of advanced stomach cancer. He was flying back to New York for specialized treatment when he died.

He was best known for Puerto Rican Obituary, a 1973 poem that chronicled the lives of five people who left Puerto Rico for mainland America with plans that never bore fruit. The piece was embraced by young Puerto Ricans in New York -- called Nuyoricans for short.

John Henry Williams, 35, the son of Hall of Famer Ted Williams, died 6 March of leukemia in a hospital in Los Angeles. Williams, at the center of a controversy surrounding his father's remains, had been battling the disease since October, when he was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. In December, he had a bone marrow transplant, using a donation from Claudia, his youngest sister.

Ted Williams' brother, Danny, also died of leukemia at the age of 39.

After his father died July 5, 2002, John Henry Williams had his father's body taken to an Arizona cryonics lab for freezing, setting off a battle with his half-sister, who said her father had wanted to be cremated. The matter was settled in December 2002, when Bobby Jo Ferrell, Ted Williams' oldest daughter, dropped her objections.

The note that Ted Williams signed setting in motion his being frozen included a provision that John Henry and Claudia Williams would join him: "JHW, Claudia and Dad all agree to be put into biostasis after we die," it read.

John Henry Williams made an attempt in the past two seasons to follow in his father's footsteps, playing for some low-level minor league and independent baseball teams.

Frances Dee, 94 (or possibly 96), the actress who co-starred in the 1930s and 1940s with Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Ronald Colman and her husband, Joel McCrea, died 6 March at Norwalk Hospital in Norwalk, Conn. The actress had been at the hospital since having a stroke three weeks ago.

Dee achieved stardom in 1930 opposite Chevalier in one of the first talkie musicals, The Playboy of Paris. Her beauty earned her leading roles in comedies and dramas, notably in the 1931 An American Tragedy as Sondra Finchley, the role played by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1951 remake A Place in the Sun.

Other memorable films include Souls at Sea with Cooper and George Raft, Little Women, starring Katharine Hepburn, If I Were King with Colman, and Of Human Bondage, in which she played Leslie Howard's sweetheart.

In 1933, Dee appeared with McCrea in The Silver Cord. They married that year in Rye, N.Y., and they co-starred again in Wells Fargo (1937) and Four Faces West (1948). She appeared in occasional movies in the 1940s and 1950s and retired after Gypsy Colt in 1954.

Two teams, Bunch of Old Bags and Death March, earn a big 18 points for Dee, the first points of the year for both teams.

Princess Juliana of the Netherlands, 94, who as queen presided over the dismantling of the centuries-old Dutch empire and saw the birth of a social revolution during her 31-year reign of the Netherlands, died 20 March.

Princess Juliana, who gave up the title of queen when she abdicated in favour of her daughter Beatrix in 1980, spent the last decade of her life in seclusion, too ill and mentally feeble to appreciate the adoration of her people. The palace was protective of her privacy, but she was known to suffer heart rhythm problems and to have been under 24 hour surveillance by two nurses. Her husband, Prince Bernhard, admitted in a televised interview in June 2001 that Juliana could no longer recognise members of her family.

Juliana Louise Emma Marie Wilhelmina, Princess of Orange-Nassau, was 39 when she took the throne on September 4, 1948. Through her more modern, down-to-earth ways, she brought the monarchy closer to the people than under her mother, Queen Wilhelmina, who had stepped down after a reign of 50 years. Juliana was known to unregally pour the tea herself for her visitors.

Even after she abdicated, the Dutch continued to celebrate their national holiday on her birthday rather than the birthday of the reigning Queen Beatrix, partly from respect for the queen mother and partly because her spring birthday was more suitable for outdoor celebrations.

As queen, she was active in social issues, frequently visiting hospitals, old age homes and nurseries. She spent days in the southern provinces of Zeeland and South Holland when they were inundated by devastating floods in early 1953.

During the turbulent 1960s, she watched the youthful social unrest that decades later evolved into such landmark legislation as legalised homosexual marriages, prostitution and euthanasia.

Jan Berry, 62, member of the duo Jan & Dean that had the 1960s surf-music hits Deadman's Curve and The Little Old Lady from Pasadena, died on 26 March. Berry had a seizure and stopped breathing at his home. He had been in poor health recently from the lingering effects of brain damage from a 1966 car crash.

Jan & Dean had a string of hits and 10 gold records in the 1960s with their tales of Southern California. Among them were 1964's The Little Old Lady from Pasadena, about a hotrod racing grandma, and Surf City, with its lines about taking the station wagon to a place where there are "two girls for every boy."

With Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, William Jan Berry co-wrote the lyrics for Surf City and Deadman's Curve, which featured the driving guitar licks and falsetto crooning of the wildly popular surf music.

Berry's hit-making career with high school friend Dean Torrence was cut short in 1966 when Berry's speeding Corvette hit a parked truck and he suffered severe brain damage that left him partially paralyzed and unable to talk. His recovery was slow, but eventually he was able to resume singing and writing songs.

Sir Peter Ustinov, 82, an Oscar-winning actor who later earned a reputation for his humanitarian work, died 28 March.

Born in London on April 16, 1921, the only son of a Russian artist mother and a journalist father, Ustinov claimed also to have Swiss, Ethiopian, Italian and French blood -- everything except English. Ustinov was educated at the prestigious Westminster School, but hated it and left at 16. He appeared in his first revue and had his first stage play presented in London in 1940, when he was 19.

In a career lasting some 60 years, Ustinov appeared in roles ranging from Emperor Nero to Agatha Christie's Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. He won Academy Awards for supporting actor in the films Spartacus and Topkapi in the 1960s.

More recently he was the voice of Babar the Elephant, played the role of a doctor in the film Lorenzo's Oil, and in 1999 appeared as the Walrus to Pete Postlethwaite's Carpenter in a multimillion-dollar TV movie version of Alice in Wonderland.

Ustinov faced criticism in the early 1990s for his controversial views on the emergence of Russia from Communist rule, and for his unstinting support for Mikhail Gorbachev, but his long service as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF led U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to joke that Ustinov was the man to take over from him.

Veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke, 95, died 29 March, less than a month after recording his last Letter from America.

Cooke retired earlier in March following advice from doctors after 58 years. He was famous throughout the world for his weekly broadcast on BBC World Service and in Britain on Radio 4. Cooke, who lived in New York, had missed only three broadcasts in around 3,000 programs over 58 years.

Millions of listeners across the world tuned in for Cooke's weekly observations of life in America since his show began in 1946. In the United States, Cooke was perhaps best known for Alistair Cooke's America, a BBC series aired around the world, and as host of the PBS series Masterpiece Theatre in the United States for 22 years.

Born Alfred Cooke in 1908 and raised in a boarding house in Blackpool, England, he changed his name to Alistair after graduating from Cambridge University with an honors degree in English and joined the BBC in 1934 as a film critic.

Letter From America -- said to be the world's longest-running radio speech program -- was originally intended to last only 13 weeks.

Singer Timi Yuro, 64, one of the most powerful and emotional singers of the 1960s, died in Las Vegas on 30 March.

She was born Rosemarie Timotea Aurro into an Italian-American family in Chicago in 1940. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1952 where Frankie Laine's vocal coach was so impressed that she gave Timi free training. By the time she was 14, she was singing as Timi Yuro in night-clubs. Yuro's parents had a restaurant in Hollywood and she became their resident singer.

Yuro was signed to Liberty Records in late 1959, but she was not happy at being asked to record lightweight pop songs. She gatecrashed an executive meeting and threatened to tear up her contract unless she could record as she wanted. She then broke into an impassioned rendition of Hurt, which had been a rhythm and blues hit for Roy Hamilton in 1954.

Hurt became Yuro's debut recording, going to No. 4 on the US charts in 1961, with the B-side, I Apologize, also making the charts.

In 1962, when Yuro's record producer Clyde Otis left Liberty and Phil Spector was asked to take over her recording of Otis's song What's a Matter Baby. Spector gave her big voice an even bigger backing and the song returned her to the US Top Twenty. That same year, Burt Bacharach arranged one of his best songs, The Love of a Boy, for Yuro. She also befriended Willie Nelson, a struggling songwriter who was trying to place his songs. Her parents would feed him for free at their restaurant.

In 1969 Yuro married Robert Selnick and left the music business to raise a family. Both the Manhattans and Elvis Presley had success with Hurt in 1976, which encouraged her to start performing again. Yuro lost her voice in 1980 and underwent surgery for throat cancer. Around the same time, a re-recording of Hurt was a hit in Holland and, when she was able to sing again, she recorded two albums for the Dutch market. In 1982 Willie Nelson repaid her earlier kindness by lending her both his band and his recording studio for an album, Timi Yuro - Today, which also featured his guest vocals. She lost her voice again in 1984 and had been fighting cancer ever since.

Retired Army Colonel Aaron Bank, 101, a military icon called "the father of the Green Berets" for his role as the first commander of the US Army's elite Special Forces, died on 1 April of natural causes.

In 1952, the Army approved 2,300 spaces for men in a Special Forces unit, the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), at Ft. Bragg, N.C. Bank was a key figure in pushing for its creation. He also is credited with writing a memorandum suggesting that Special Forces soldiers be allowed to wear berets as a mark of distinction. The Army initially turned the idea down. But in 1962, four years after Bank retired from the military, President John F. Kennedy authorized Army Special Forces to wear berets.

Bank, a native of New York City, worked as a lifeguard and swimming instructor in the Bahamas and southern France as a young man. He traveled widely in Europe during the 1930s and had become fluent in French and German when he entered the Army in 1939. Four years later, while an officer with an Army transportation unit in Louisiana, he saw a notice seeking volunteers with foreign-language ability for special assignments. He signed up and became a part of the Office of Strategic Services' Jedburgh missions, small-unit operations that joined with resistance fighters for hit-and-run attacks in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Bank remained in the Army after the war and became an advocate for special-warfare units that would do the type of work carried out by the O.S.S. While serving with a combat unit in the Korean War in 1951, he was called to Washington to work on creation of guerrilla-style units with Brig. Gen. Robert McClure, the head of the Army's psychological warfare staff, and Col. Russell Volckmann, who led Filipino guerrillas fighting the Japanese in World War II.

Bank retired from the military in 1958 and settled in Southern California, where he worked as chief of security for a residential development. His decorations included the Distinguished Service Medal, which he was awarded at age 97 in a ceremony attended by top commanders of the Special Forces.

He wrote From O.S.S. to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces and, with E. M. Nathanson, the novel Knight's Cross, which was based in part on an O.S.S. mission Colonel Bank was to lead that envisioned capturing Hitler if he were to hide in the Austrian Alps when Nazi Germany collapsed.

Bank is winner of the Jeanne Calment award for oldest stiff of the year.

Bruce Edwards, 49, the caddie whose year-long struggle with Lou Gehrig's disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) inspired longtime boss Tom Watson at last year's U.S. Open, died 8 April.

Edwards was on the bag for many of Watson's most memorable triumphs, including the opening round at last year's U.S. Open outside Chicago where Watson shot a 5-under 65, matching his best score ever at the Open and giving him a share of the lead.

Edwards died just hours after being honored in Augusta, Ga., with the Ben Hogan award, given annually by the Golf Writers Association of America to someone who remained active in the game despite a physical handicap or serious illness. Edwards' father, Jay, accepted the award.

At last year's season-ending Champions event in Sonoma, Calif., Watson earned enough points to easily win the Charles Schwab Cup as the over-50 tour's most consistent performer. After receiving the Cup on the 18th green, Watson announced his intention to donate the $1 million annuity to organizations fighting ALS. Edwards was on hand for the presentation, smiling broadly.

Edwards was told early last year that he had one to three years to live.

Frank Morrison, 98, who served three terms as governor of Nebraska and gave the state the idea for the Great Platte River Archway, died 19 April. He had cancer of the esophagus.

Morrison, a Democrat, served three consecutive two-year terms as governor of Nebraska from 1960-66. He had five unsuccessful tries for statewide elected office before winning the governor's office the first time. While governor, Morrison worked to improve the University of Nebraska, with particular emphasis on agricultural and scientific research. He said the most important legislation he signed involved the Education Television Act, which led to the establishment of a statewide public television network.

In the 1990s Morrison touted his idea for the Great Platte River Road Archway, which crosses Interstate 80 near Kearney. Morrison envisioned a monument to the westward movement and on July 16, 2000, dedicated a 50,000-square-foot building that arches over the highway.

Estee Lauder, 97, who built a multi-billion-dollar cosmetics business died of heart failure on 24 April. Famous for her hands-on approach to marketing, her lavish entertaining and grand friends, Lauder created the empire that bears her name almost single handedly and was for decades the acknowledged queen of the cosmetics industry.

From humble beginnings in the New York borough of Queens, Lauder turned her firm into a global giant, worth over $2 billion when it went public in 1995. Last year its sales in 130 countries topped $5 billion.

The transformation of Josephine Esther Mentzer into the legendary Estee Lauder took decades but was soon hailed as a classic example of the all-American success story. Estee was short for Esther. Lauder derived from her husband's name, Lauter. The couple divorced in 1939 but were reconciled in 1942, remarried and were together until his death in 1982.

The creams that were the backbone of her business were originally developed by her uncle, John Schotz, on a gas stove at home. The business took off after the Second World War when Lauder persuaded Saks of Fifth Avenue to allow her to set up shop in the prestigious New York store. Her skill at sales and the launch of a bath oil called Youth Dew in the 1950s secured the firm as a world leader, well placed to exploit the new post-war prosperity. Lauder pioneered the idea of giving away free samples of products with the sale of Estee Lauder merchandise.

In 1962, she began selecting one supermodel who would be the company's face in advertisements. Those chosen have included Karen Graham, Willow Bay, Pauline Porizkova, Elizabeth Hurley and Carolyn Murphy.

Barney Kessel, 80, a celebrated jazz guitar soloist and a ubiquitous but anonymous studio musician, died on 6 May at his home in San Diego. The cause was brain cancer. Mr. Kessel had been inactive since a stroke in 1992 and he learned in 2001 that he had inoperable cancer.

By the mid-1950's Kessel was one of the most popular guitarists in jazz, a perennial winner of music magazine polls and a sideman whose résumé included work with Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum and countless others. But he still found it hard to pay his bills, so he began a second career in the studios, which came to dominate his professional life until he decided to return to jazz full time in the 1970's.

He was born in Muskogee, Okla., on Oct. 17, 1923, and began his professional career there at 14 as the only white musician in an otherwise all-black dance band. Kessel initially modeled his style closely on that of the pioneering electric guitarist Charlie Christian, a fellow Oklahoman, and he continued to regard Christian as his main influence. With Christian's encouragement, Mr. Kessel moved to Los Angeles in 1942 and was soon on the road with a band fronted by the comedian Chico Marx.

Over the next few years he worked with the big bands of Artie Shaw, Charlie Barnet and Benny Goodman, establishing a reputation as one of the most versatile and reliable guitarists on the West Coast. He soon began working regularly as a sideman for the record producer Norman Granz, and in 1944 he was one of the many musicians featured in "Jammin' the Blues," the acclaimed short jazz film produced by Granz and directed by the photographer Gjon Mili. (In a strange echo of his first job, Kessel was the only white musician in that film; all that was clearly visible of him were his hands, which were dyed black.)

Kessel's profile in the jazz world continued to grow in the 1950's. In 1952 he joined the pianist Oscar Peterson's trio and toured with Granz's all-star Jazz at the Philharmonic aggregation. The next year he began his recording career as a leader with the first of a series of small-group albums for the Los Angeles-based Contemporary label.

Within a few years he had also become a fixture in Hollywood's recording studios. In this parallel career he could be heard on movie and television soundtracks and in television and radio commercials as well as on records by everyone from the Beach Boys to Liberace to Frank Sinatra.

In 1973 he joined forces with his fellow jazz guitarists Herb Ellis and Charlie Byrd to form the group Great Guitars. In 1983 at 59 he made his New York nightclub debut as a leader.

Olive Osmond, 79, the mother of Marie and Donny Osmond and other members of the performing family, died on Mother's Day, 9 May, of complications from a massive stroke she suffered more than two years ago. Her condition began to deteriorate last week and family members were by her bedside.

Osmond was born in 1925 to Thomas and Vera Ann Davis in Samaria, Idaho, where her father was a school principal. She later moved to Ogden, Utah, where she was a secretary at the Adjutant General Depot. There she met George V. Osmond, the soldier she married in 1944.

Both enjoyed music. George sang and Olive played the saxophone, and they passed along their love of music to their children.

Their first two sons, Virl and Tom, developed degenerative hearing losses that affected their speech. The next four sons, Alan, Wayne, Merrill and Jay, had no signs of hearing loss and began singing harmonies as children. They performed as the Osmond Brothers, producing 34 gold and platinum records in the 1960s and 1970s.

They were later joined by younger siblings Donny, Marie, and Jimmy Osmond. The family toured internationally and made numerous recordings and TV appearances. From 1976-79, Donny and Marie Osmond hosted the TV program "The Donny and Marie Show," which their older brothers helped produce.

Alan King, 76, whose tirades against everyday suburban life grew into a long comedy career in nightclubs and television that he later expanded to Broadway and character roles in movies, died 9 May.

King, who also was host of the New York Friars Club's celebrity roasts, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show 93 times beginning in the 1950s. Comedian Jerry Stiller, who knew King for more than 50 years, said King was "in touch with what was happening with the world, which is what made him so funny. He always talked about the annoyances of life. He was like a Jewish Will Rogers."

King played supporting roles in more than 20 films including Bye Bye Braverman, I, the Jury, The Anderson Tapes, Lovesick, Bonfire of the Vanities, Casino, and Rush Hour 2.

Anna Lee, 91, whose nearly 70-year acting career in movies and television spanned from her breakthrough role in How Green Was My Valley to an extended run on General Hospital, died 14 May of pneumonia. Lee had been ailing for the past several months and died at her home near Beverly Hills with son by her side.

Paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident just a year after she began playing Lila Quartermaine in ABC's General Hospital, Lee acted in a wheelchair for more than two decades until she left the soap last year, Byron said.

Born in Kent, England, Lee studied acting in London and was known as "the British bombshell" when touring with the London Repertory Theatre. In the early 1930s she moved to California to work in Hollywood, and appeared in more than 60 films including The Sound of Music (1965), Fort Apache (1948) and King Solomon's Mines (1937).

Nearing retirement age, Lee's stint on ABC's General Hospital rejuvenated her. In 1982, Lee received an MBE, or Member of the Order of the British Empire award. She is to be honored with a lifetime achievement award at Friday's Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony.

Lee was married three times, first to Robert Stevenson, the director of films including The Love Bug and Mary Poppins. She was married to George Stafford for two decades and wed writer Robert Nathan in 1970. Nathan died in 1985.

Three teams bag 16 points each for Lee: Life's A Bitch, Monty Python's Dying Circus, and No Longer Eligible For The Census.

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, 97, a self-trained South African naturalist who in 1938 discovered the coelacanth, a species of bony, four-finned fish often described as a living fossil, died on 17 May in East London, South Africa. A cause of death was not determined, although she had suffered a series of falls.

The story of Courtenay-Latimer's discovery remains among the most famous in the annals of modern biology. She was a young curator at the East London Museum when, on 22 December 1938, she spotted the coelacanth in a pile of fish on a vessel at the town's dock. After taking steps to preserve the 127-pound fish, she sent a quick sketch to South Africa's leading fish expert, Dr. J. L. B. Smith of Rhodes University. Her discovery compared to finding a lost dinosaur on a South American plateau or a pterodactyl in the Everglades. Before Ms. Courtenay-Latimer's discovery, the coelacanth was thought to have been extinct for at least 70 million years.

As a living species, it is believed to hold a unique place in the evolutionary chain from fish to land vertebrates. Early theories that held that the fish might be a direct ancestor of humankind were disproved by studies in the 1980s of the coelacanth's anatomy and DNA.

The second coelacanth was caught 14 years later, in 1952, in the Indian Ocean off the Comoro Islands after an international effort by Dr. Smith to find more specimens of the fish. Some 200 coelacanths have been captured since, leading to a call to study the fish in its environment and to preserve the species. Several were found off the South African coast last month.

The significance of the coelacanth continues to unfold. Dr. William E. Bemis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said studies of the fish's eye muscles, used to close its jaws, had provided important links to how similar muscles in frogs and vertebrates worked. Other studies have shown that the fish possesses within its snout an electrosensory organ, the rostral organ, which scientists have determined is probably used to find prey.

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was born 24 February 1907, the daughter of a railroad accountant who moved the family to stations throughout South Africa. While still a child, she began a collection of bird eggs and insects. She was educated at a convent school and intended to train as a nurse, but became curator at the East London Museum in 1931, a position she held until 1973. She never married.

Although best known for her discovery of the coelacanth, Courtenay-Latimer had a broader interest in natural history, and also wrote about wildflowers. In 1971, she received an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University. In 1998, she was a guest of honor when the South African government unveiled a gold coin minted to commemorate the coelacanth's discovery. Courtenay-Latimer's scientific collaborator, Dr. Smith, named the species after her, Latimeria chalumnae.

Tony Randall, 84, the star of a string of 1950s Doris Day films and the 1970s television sitcom The Odd Couple, who late in life realized a dream by founding the National Actors Theatre, died 18 May in his sleep at NYU Medical Center due to complications from pneumonia.

The indefatigable Randall worked unto the last. On Dec. 7, 2003, he opened and starred in Luigi Pirandello's Right You Are, in which he played a pivotal role. It was the most recent production for the NAT, which was founded by Randall in 1991.

To much of the world, Tony Randall was Felix Unger, the lovable, finicky neat freak who played opposite Jack Klugman's slovenly Oscar Madison in the television series The Odd Couple, which was based on Neil Simon's comedy. He won an Emmy Award for his portrayal.

Randall cultivated an equally indelible persona on talk shows and through innumerable personal appearances. This man was a cultivated, sophisticated raconteur, nattily decked out in snazzy sport coat and tie. He was jittery and hyperactive like Felix, but less neurotic, warmer, and armed with a devilish, self-deprecating self of humor. He often used his appearances to expouse on his various interests, which included a love of classical music and a hatred of smoking. (He once snatched a cigarette out of the hand of Johnny Carson.)

His worldliness belied his upbringing in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was born Leonard Rosenberg on 26 February 1920, the son of an art dealer. From there, he moved to the teeming Chicago area, attending Northwestern University, and on to further study at Columbia University and the Neighborhood Playhouse with the renowned acting teacher Sanford Meisner. He also studied movement with Martha Graham and voice with Henri Jacobi.

He made his New York debut was in 1941 in A Circle of Chalk, and soon after played with Ethel Barrymore in The Corn is Green and with Jane Cowl in Candida. A stint in the army interrupted his rise. In the 1950s, his parts got bigger. Perhaps the most significant role of his stage career was that of E.K. Hornbeck, the cynical reporter covering the Scopes Monkey Trial in the original 1955 production of Lawrence and Lee's Inherit the Wind.

Randall essayed another memorable role as a sea captain who leads a double life in the short-lived (182 performances) 1958 Livingston-Evans musical Oh, Captain!. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance.

By that point, he had a thriving film career, having appeared in Oh Men! Oh Women! and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter. He found his niche, however, in 1959, when he played a supporting role in Pillow Talk, the first of a string of soapy Doris Day-Rock Hudson romantic comedies. Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers followed. He typically played Hudson's chipper, but sad sack best friend who fails to win the girl.

The quality of his film roles declined by the end of the 60s. It was at this ebb in his career, however, that he became a television institution, starring in The Odd Couple from 1970 to 1975. His small-screen career began with the 1950's One Man's Family. He scored a distinct success with Mr. Peepers, a 1952-55 series that had him play brash, manly Harvey Weskitt opposite Wally Cox's shy science teacher Robinson Peepers.

The Odd Couple sitcom came after the play's resounding success on Broadway, where Art Carney and Walter Matthau played Felix and Oscar, and a film starring Jack Lemmon and Matthau in the parts. However, most of the world knows the Felix of Tony Randall. Randall and Jack Klugman played two middle-aged, divorced New Yorkers of diametrically opposed personalities who, as unlikely roommates, daily drive each other crazy. Felix was, in many ways, the ultimate Randall performance, bearing all the qualities as person and performer for which the public knew and loved him. He was perky, elitist, enthusiastic, opinionated, irritable, unflappable, friendly, fit, excitable and endearingly uptight; a sort of hummingbird as human being.

The less successful The Tony Randall Show (1976-78) and Love, Sidney (1981), in which Mr. Randall broke a TV taboo by playing an openly gay character followed.

Randall's professional activity late in life was matched by a new chapter in his personal life. Following a 50-year marriage to Florence Gibbs, which ended with her death in 1992, he married Heather Harlan, 50 years his junior, in 1995. To the surprise of many, he went on to become a father in his 70s, siring two children, Julia Laurette Randall and Jefferson Salvini Randall. Ever an aesthete, Mr. Randall named the second child after comic actor Joseph Jefferson and Italian tragic actor Tommasso Salvini.

Samuel Johnson, 76, who became a billionaire by expanding the wax company started by his great-grandfather into the consumer products giant SC Johnson, died of cancer 22 May. Johnson, who retired as chairman of the Racine-based company in 2000, was ranked as the richest man in Wisconsin, with a personal wealth estimated by Forbes magazine this year at $7.4 billion.

In 1967, Johnson became the fourth generation to lead the 118-year-old family business that once was called Johnson Wax. He turned the business into four global companies that now employ more than 28,000 people, making furniture polishes, waxes and other household cleaning products. SC Johnson's annual sales rose from about $171 million to about $6 billion under Johnson's leadership. The company now generates more than $8 billion in annual sales and operates in more than 70 countries, according to the company's Web site.

In 1975, Johnson removed chlorofluorocarbon propellants from his company's products, three years before the government required it. Fortune magazine inducted him into the U.S. National Business Hall of Fame, calling him "corporate America's leading environmentalist," the company said.

Johnson also was a philanthropist who showed a civic commitment to many projects. He was a founding member of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which advised world leaders at the historic 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Most recently, Johnson joined a coalition of environmental, business and religious groups in opposing a plan to build two coal-fired power plants in Oak Creek.

A Racine native, Johnson earned degrees from Cornell and Harvard Business School and served for two years as an U.S. Air Force intelligence officer. The Johnson Graduate School at Cornell is named for the family.

Award-winning TV writer Jack Rosenthal, 72, husband of actress Maureen Lipman, died of cancer in a London hospital on 29 May. Rosenthal, who won three British Academy of Film and Television awards, or "Baftas," wrote several early episodes of Coronation Street and the play that was turned into TV drama London's Burning.

London's Burning, which he created as a one-off play aired in 1986, became ITV's longest-running drama after Coronation Street and Emmerdale. During the 1970s Rosenthal was widely acclaimed as one of the UK's finest small-screen dramatists in what was seen as a golden age of TV plays. Three of his works--Bar Mitzvah Boy, The Evacuees and Spend, Spend, Spend--won back-to-back British Academy awards. Alongside plays such as Another Sunday & Sweet FA and The Evacuees, they epitomised a gritty new style of working-class drama. His other credits include comedy series Bootsie and Snudge, and The Lovers. He co-wrote the 1984 Hollywood film Yentl, starring Barbra Streisand.

Born in Manchester, Rosenthal worked in advertising before joining Granada where he became a regular writer on Coronation Street in the early 1960s. He married Lipman in 1974 after meeting her five years previously while working on the soap. The couple had a son, Adam, and a daughter, Amy.

Rosenthal was awarded a CBE in 1994.

Award-winning TV writer Jack Rosenthal, 72, husband of actress Maureen Lipman, died of cancer in a London hospital on 29 May. Rosenthal, who won three British Academy of Film and Television awards, or "Baftas," wrote several early episodes of Coronation Street and the play that was turned into TV drama London's Burning.

Archibald Cox, 92, died at his home in Brooksville, Maine on 29 May. Cox's refusal to curtail his Watergate investigation after being ordered to do so by the White House cost him his job and opened the way for President Nixon's impeachment. His principled stand against what he termed "exaggerated claims of executive privilege" guaranteed him a place in the history of Watergate.

Cox, a longtime Harvard law professor, had also been an adviser to President John F. Kennedy and served him as U.S. solicitor general.

In May 1973, he was asked to head the special prosecution force investigating charges Republican party operatives had broken into the Democratic campaign headquarters at the Watergate Hotel prior to the 1972 presidential election.

Nixon ordered Cox fired in October 1973 for his continued efforts to obtain tape recordings made at the White House, important evidence in the investigation of the Watergate break-in and coverup. The day before, Nixon had refused to comply with a federal appeals court order to surrender the tapes, declined to appeal to the Supreme Court, and ordered Cox to drop the case. But Cox vowed to continue, saying pulling back would violate his promise to the Senate.

Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, both refused to carry out Nixon's orders to fire Cox, resigning instead. Then-Solicitor General Robert Bork, who would 14 years later lose a Supreme Court bid after a strenuous debate over his legal theories, handled the job of firing Cox. The resignations and firing shook the nation and became known as "The Saturday Night Massacre."

At his firing, Cox issued a one-sentence statement: "Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people."

Nixon's move gave rise to an effort to impeach him, and he eventually had to give up the tapes. In August 1974, Nixon became the only president ever to resign office. The firing of Cox also gave rise to the law creating independent counsels--special prosecutors to investigate official misconduct.

Cox was born and raised in Plainfield, N.J. He graduated from Harvard in 1934 and from its law school in 1937. An expert on labor law, Cox in 1941 accepted a position on the staff of the National Defense Mediation Board, and after two years was appointed an associate solicitor in the Department of Labor. Cox began his many years of teaching at Harvard in 1945 and remained with the law school until he worked full time on Kennedy's presidential campaign staff. He then was named solicitor general in the new administration. He returned to Harvard in 1965 and, with the exception of his stint as Watergate special prosecutor, remained at the university until his retirement.

Historian William Manchester, 82, who brought a novelist's flair to his biographies of such 20th century giants as Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur and John F. Kennedy, died of cancer at his home on 1 June.

Manchester wrote 18 books, including two novels, but was best known in recent years for his magisterial, multivolume biography of Churchill, The Last Lion. Two strokes prevented Manchester from completing the much-awaited third volume, covering most of the World War II years.

Manchester emerged from a working-class childhood in industrial Massachusetts and battlefield experiences as a Marine Corps sergeant in World War II.

Manchester and JFK became friends in 1946 while both were recovering from war wounds. During the 1950s and the Camelot years, Manchester was a confidant and companion to Kennedy and a frequent visitor to the family's compound in Hyannisport, Mass. The friendship helped provide Manchester with material for his breakthrough book -- the 1962 Portrait of a President, the first of three books he wrote about Kennedy. The shattering experience of the Kennedy assassination the following year led to The Death of a President, published in 1967. In 1983, 20 years after the assassination, he wrote One Brief Shining Moment, an affectionate retrospective of the Kennedy years.

After his 1968 Arms of Krupp -- a history of the German arms-maker -- and his history of the United States from 1932 to 1972, The Glory and the Dream, Manchester took on other major historical figures. His 1978 biography of MacArthur, American Caesar, received a National Book Award nomination and became the basis for a movie.

The first volume of his expected three-book biography of Churchill, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1932, was published in 1983. The sequel, The Last Lion: Alone 1932-1940, came out in 1988.

The most personal of his works was an attempt to exorcise demons and recurring wartime nightmares -- Goodbye, Darkness, published in 1980. Manchester describes growing up in Attleboro, Mass., as the son of a wounded World War I Marine. The book relates Manchester's World War II experiences on Okinawa, where he was wounded twice, and his visits to other Pacific battlegrounds during the late 1970s.

After the war, Manchester earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Massachusetts and a master's from the University of Missouri.

He was a reporter for the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City and for The (Baltimore) Sun, where he was a war correspondent. His first book, Disturber of the Peace, came out in 1951.

Ronald Reagan, 93, died at his home in Bel Air, California on 5 June. His condition had rapidly deteriorated over the last few days of his life. He had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease, diaganosed ten years ago. Reagan rose from Depression-era poverty to Hollywood fame as an actor. He governed California during its most tumultuous era since World War II. He transformed modern presidential politics and oversaw the fall of communism. And he survived an assassin's bullet to become one of the most popular presidents in history.

Reagan was the nation's 40th chief executive and the oldest ever elected to the White House, a two-term California governor who parlayed an acting career into political success, a fierce Cold Warrior who could face down the Soviet Union and inspire a conservative revolution. He resuscitated the Republican Party in the post-Watergate era.

Critics say his fabulously expensive defense buildup that forced the Soviet Union -- trying to keep up -- into bankruptcy and collapse, was a reckless strategy that nearly bankrupted the U.S., too. They charged that his ``trickle-down'' economics -- the idea that everyone benefits when those at the top of the salary ladder pay less taxes and keep more money -- was a sham and a cynical slap in the face to America's poor. They howled that his romantic notion of returning America to an earlier, simpler time hinted at a desire to erase decades of social progress.

But for most Americans, he was ``Dutch,'' the ``Gipper'' and the guy who stood in Berlin and demanded: ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'' -- then watched a few years later when the wall actually was torn down. And, perhaps most important, he was ``the Great Communicator,'' a president who was so affable and connected to the public that even his political opponents found it hard not to like him.

Reagan became such an icon of modern conservatives that few remember he was once a Democrat who supported President Harry Truman. He survived the Iran-Contra affair, one of the most serious political scandals after Watergate, with few political scratches. While being blamed by his critics for aggravating the nation's divide between rich and poor, he left office with the highest public approval rating of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Born in 1911 and raised in several small Illinois towns, Reagan turned a Depression-era radio sports-announcing job into a springboard to Hollywood fame and fortune. A sports scholarship helped Reagan enter Eureka College, where he majored in economics and sociology. He washed dishes to pay bills.

Graduating in June 1932, Reagan found a part-time radio job announcing sports in nearby Davenport, Iowa. Soon he was working full time, and before long was winning regional attention at a station out of Des Moines. In 1937 he went to Hollywood to cover the Chicago Cubs in spring training. Upon his arrival, a friend introduced him to an actors' agent, who got him a screen test, which won him a $200-a-week movie contract. He was on his way.

His athletic good looks and Midwestern sincerity helped make him a leading man. Among his most notable films were Kings Row (his favorite), Brother Rat, Dark Victory, Knute Rockne, All-American, and Bedtime for Bonzo, the latter movie making him the butt of more than a few jokes when he reached political prominence.

Weak eyesight kept him out of combat in World War II. He made Army training films while living at home with his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, whom he married in 1940. After giving birth to daughter Maureen in 1941 and adopting son Michael in 1945, Wyman slowly grew distant from Reagan, divorcing him, to his great regret, in 1948. One reason for their estrangement was Reagan's growing immersion in union politics. In 1947, he was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, a post he held for six terms. It put him in the center of union rivalries involving both mobsters and communists, and fueled his interest in public affairs beyond movies. A Democrat then, he campaigned for Truman in 1948.

He found the great love of his life, actress Nancy Davis, in 1951 and married her the following year. Daughter Patricia was born in 1952, son Ronald in 1958.

Reagan combined his interests in theater and public affairs in a new role with General Electric from 1954 to 1962, which spurred his transformation into a conservative. Every Sunday night, he hosted GE Theater on television. As a GE spokesman, he toured company plants and communities around the country. Always staunchly anti-communist, in his speeches, he increasingly championed core conservative values based on rescuing people from big government.

By the late 1950s, he was the second most sought-after speaker in the country behind Dwight Eisenhower. Biographers have written that Nancy's conservatism also influenced Reagan. With her, he met conservative Barry Goldwater in 1960 at a party and began to warm to his ideas. It came as no surprise, then, that he switched to the Republican Party in 1962, about the time California Republicans were casting about for challenger to Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown.

Reagan's steep trajectory from novice to president relied on the serendipity of timing and a cache of California millionaires who broke new ground in the packaging and selling of their candidate. The Los Angeles group behind him became his "kitchen cabinet," and many of its members followed Reagan to Washington, taking ideas tested in California to a national level.

From his first step into political prominence -- a televised 1964 fundraising speech for Republican presidential nominee Goldwater -- Reagan was crystal clear about his agenda: emasculating big government. It was a radical notion in a time when many Americans remembered New Deal largess as their lifeline out of the Depression and were confident that the Great Society could end poverty in their lifetimes.

Reagan won his first try at public office, beating Brown to become California's governor in a 1966 landslide. Efforts to portray him as a dangerous conservative, a Vietnam hawk, failed, as they later did on the national stage. He was as much centrist as conservative as governor -- restraining spending, reforming welfare, expanding parkland and liberalizing California's abortion law.

After two terms as California's governor from 1967 to 1975, Reagan rolled over George Bush, John Connally and Howard Baker to win the Republican nomination for president in 1980. That autumn, President Jimmy Carter portrayed him as a reckless would-be warrior, but Reagan's genial warmth blunted the attack when they met in face-to-face debate a week before the election.

His one-liners cemented his place in political lore. After one hyperbolic Carter attack on his character, Reagan replied mildly and memorably, more in sorrow than in anger: "There you go again." The Californian clinched the debate, and probably the election, with his summary question to voters: ``Are you better off now than you were four years ago?''

Reagan's presidency was almost cut short on March 30, 1981, when would-be assassin John W. Hinckley Jr., a 25-year-old drifter, shot him in the chest. The bullet came to rest an inch from his heart and caused massive internal bleeding.

Early highlights of his presidency included his ambitious 1981 tax-and-spending cuts; his appointment of the first woman, Sandra Day O'Connor, to the Supreme Court; and his breaking of an air traffic controllers' strike by outlawing their union.

Four years later he swept to a landslide re-election, winning 49 of 50 states over Walter Mondale. He left office in 1989 with the highest public approval rating -- 63 percent in the Gallup poll -- of any departing president since Roosevelt in 1945.

Reagan's popularity may have been uncontested during his presidency, but his record is likely to get mixed reviews in the history books. He cut taxes and spending sharply upon taking power, but by the time he left office the government was bigger and spent more than ever -- and the national debt had tripled. He calmly counseled patience through the nation's worst recession since the 1930s, then presided over one of the richest periods of prosperity in history, but did little to shrink the growing gap between rich and poor.

He greatly strengthened the military, then helped end the Cold War by boldly striking agreements with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear arsenals for the first time.

Reagan's greatest achievements, however, arguably were symbolic, perhaps even spiritual. He renewed the American spirit of can-do optimism after almost 20 years of doldrums from Vietnam, Watergate, economic stagnation and weak leadership.

He reinvigorated the Republican Party and led it to an era of dominance, as his conservative values reshaped American politics. Democrats could not win the presidency again until Bill Clinton amended liberal ideology in 1992 to echo such Reaganesque themes as cutting taxes, fighting crime, reforming welfare and shrinking government.

But his masterful public leadership was not matched by managerial prowess.

Reagan's gravest error as president was the Iran-Contra affair. It involved repeated sales of weapons to Iran from mid-1985 to late 1986, directly violating his prominent stand against arming nations that sponsor terrorism, especially Iran. He hoped the arms sales would help free U.S. hostages held in Lebanon by pro-Iranian terrorists, and also might ease relations with Iran, a hostile power. Instead they led to more hostages being kidnapped than released. The other half of this double-barreled scandal involved diverting profits from the weapons sales to help finance anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua -- the Contras -- despite a law ruling out U.S. aid to them.

After months of public denial, on March 4, 1987, Reagan admitted in a TV address that he had tried to swap arms for hostages. He termed it "a mistake." He always denied knowledge of the Contra connection, however, and investigations never proved he knew of it. Nevertheless, the Iran-Contra affair wounded his credibility and undermined his second term.

Critics said the Iran-Contra scandal revealed a Reagan flaw. Both as governor and as president, Reagan was highly dependent upon his staff, to whom he delegated an unusual degree of responsibility for running the government. He set the broad thematic agenda and made the big decisions, but he knew little detail of the government he headed, and often didn't bother to find out much about it.

Reagan left the presidency to George Bush, his vice president, in January 1989 and avoided public life thereafter.

Ray Charles, 73, the blind singer and piano player who erased musical boundaries with classic hits such as What'd I Say, Hit the Road Jack and the melancholy ballad Georgia on My Mind, died 10 June. Charles died of acute liver disease at his Beverly Hills home.

Blind by age 7 and an orphan at 15, Charles spent his life defying definition. A gifted pianist and saxophonist, he dabbled in country, jazz, big band and blues, and put his stamp on it all with a deep, warm voice roughened by heartbreak from a hardscrabble childhood in the segregated South.

Charles won nine of his 12 Grammy Awards between 1960 and 1966, including the best R&B recording three consecutive years (Hit the Road Jack, I Can't Stop Loving You, and Busted). His versions of other songs are also well known, including Makin' Whoopee and a stirring America the Beautiful. Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell wrote Georgia on My Mind in 1931 but it didn't become Georgia's official state song until 1979, long after Charles turned it into an American standard.

He teamed with such disparate musicians as Willie Nelson, Chaka Khan, and Eric Clapton, and appeared in movies including The Blues Brothers. Pepsi tapped him for TV spots around a simple "uh huh" theme, perhaps playing off the grunts and moans that pepper his songs.

Charles was no angel. He could be mercurial and his womanizing was legendary. He also struggled with a heroin addiction for nearly 20 years before quitting cold turkey in 1965 after an arrest at the Boston airport. Yet there was a sense of humor about even that  he released both I Don't Need No Doctor and Let's Go Get Stoned in 1966. He later became reluctant to talk about the drug use, fearing it would taint how people thought of his work.

Ray Charles Robinson was born 23 September 1930, in Albany, Ga. His father, Bailey Robinson, was a mechanic and a handyman, and his mother, Aretha, stacked boards in a sawmill. His family moved to Gainesville, Fla., when Charles was an infant. Charles saw his brother drown in the tub his mother used to do laundry when he was about 5 as the family struggled through poverty at the height of the Depression. His sight was gone two years later. Glaucoma is often mentioned as a cause, though Charles said nothing was ever diagnosed.

Charles began dabbling in music at 3, encouraged by a cafe owner who played the piano. The knowledge was basic, but he was that much more prepared for music classes when he was sent away, heartbroken, to the state-supported St. Augustine School for the Deaf and the Blind. There Charles learned to read and write music in Braille, score for big bands and play instruments--lots of them, including trumpet, clarinet, organ, alto sax and the piano.

His early influences were myriad: Chopin and Sibelius, country and western stars he heard on the Grand Ole Opry, the powerhouse big bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, jazz greats Art Tatum and Artie Shaw.

By the time he was 15 his parents were dead and Charles had graduated from St. Augustine. He wound up playing gigs in black dance halls--the so-called chitlin' circuit--and exposed himself to a variety of music, including hillbilly (he learned to yodel) before moving to Seattle.

He dropped his last name in deference to boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, patterned himself for a time after Nat "King" Cole and formed a group that backed rhythm 'n' blues singer Ruth Brown. It was in Seattle's red light district were he met a young Quincy Jones, showing the future producer and composer how to write music. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

Charles developed quickly in those early days. Atlantic Records purchased his contract from Swingtime Records in 1952, and two years later he recorded I Got a Woman, a raw mixture of gospel and rhythm 'n' blues, inventing what was later called soul. Soon, he was being called "The Genius" and was playing at Carnegie Hall and the Newport Jazz Festival.

His first big hit was 1959's What'd I Say, a song built off a simple piano riff with suggestive moaning from the Raeletts. Some U.S. radio stations banned the song, but Charles was on his way to stardom.

Charles released Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Volumes 1 and 2 in the early 60s, a big switch from his gospel work. It included Born to Lose, Take These Chains From My Heart (And Set Me Free), and I Can't Stop Loving You, some of the biggest hits of his career.

Charles's last Grammy came in 1993 for A Song for You, but he never dropped out of the music scene. He continued to tour and long treasured time for chess.

Ernest Avants, 72, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman convicted last year in a 1966 murder that prosecutors say was part of a failed plot to assassinate the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., died in prison on 14 June. He died of complications from heart problems while serving a life sentence in Fort Worth, Texas.

Avants was convicted for his role in the 1966 slaying of Ben Chester White, a black sharecropper. Prosecutors said the killing was intended to lure King to Natchez, Miss., where he was to be assassinated. The civil rights leader did not visit Natchez after White's slaying. He was assassinated two years later in Memphis Tenn.

Avants was acquitted of murder in a 1967 state trial. Years later, authorities filed a federal charge of aiding and abetting murder after realizing that White was killed on federal property. Avants and two white companions offered the 67-year-old White $2 and a soda to help them find a dog lost in the woods. White then was driven to the Homochitto National Forest and shot.

Marlon Brando, 80, who revolutionized American acting with his method performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront and went on to create the iconic character of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, died Thursday of lung failure.

Brando, whose unpredictable behavior made him equally fascinating off the screen, was acclaimed the greatest actor of his generation, a two-time winner of the Academy Award who influenced some of the best actors of the generation that followed.

He was the unforgettable embodiment of the brutish Stanley Kowalski of A Streetcar Named Desire, the mixed up Terry Malloy of On the Waterfront (which won him his first Oscar) and the wily Corleone of The Godfather. Brando's private life may best be defined by a line from The Wild One, in which Brando, playing a motorcycle gang leader, is asked what he's rebelling against. "Whattaya got?" was his famous reply.

Brando was not the first actor to bring to the screen the style known as the Method - an internalized acting technique promulgated in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavski in the 1920s and then popularized in New York in the 1940s by Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler, Brando's beloved teacher. But Brando was the first to make clear how truly powerful and culture-shaking the Method could be, in the right hands. Often, Brando was accused of mumbling his lines, but audiences watching those early performances today would notice none of that, so complete has the Brando school of anti-glamour taken root in American acting.

Marlon Brando Jr. was born in Omaha, Neb., on April 3, 1924. Young Brando first became exposed to the theater through his mother, who became a leader and occasional actress in the Omaha Community Playhouse. For his first film he declined several big studio offers and joined independent Stanley Kramer for The Men in 1950.

His impact on screen acting was demonstrated by Academy nominations as best actor in four successive years: as Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); as the Mexican revolutionary in Viva Zapata! (1952); as Marc Anthony in Julius Caesar (1953); and as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954).

His films after Waterfront failed to challenge his unique talent. Most were commercial enterprises: Desiree, Guys and Dolls, The Teahouse of the August Moon, Sayonara, The Young Lions. The 1962 star vehicle Mutiny on the Bounty was a financial disaster, blamed largely and undeservedly on Brando. He tried directing himself in a Western, One-eyed Jacks, going wildly over budget.

During the making of Bounty, Brando fell in love with both Tahiti and his co-star, Tarita Teriipia. In 1966 he bought his own island - actually a small atoll - Tetiaroa, a sickle of palm and sand surrounding a green lagoon about 30 miles north of the island of Tahiti. He married Teriipia, his third wife, and split his time between the South Pacific and Los Angeles.

He had disappeared from Hollywood radar screens when he was picked by Francis Ford Coppola to play the title role in the 1972 film The Godfather. That same year, he also stunned audiences and critics with his performance in Last Tango in Paris. These two performances were a stunning return for Brando, winning him his second Oscar for The Godfather.

His personal life was as turbulent as his professional life. He married three times, fathering eleven children. In 1988, his son Christian was convicted of manslaughter in the shooting death of daughter Cheyenne's lover. Cheyenne committed suicide several years later. Brando was said to have been £10.9 million in debt and living on social security payments, his pension from the Screen Actors Guild and small residuals from his acting work.

Mattie Stepanek, 13, the child poet whose inspirational verse made him a best-selling writer and a prominent voice for muscular dystrophy sufferers, died 22 June of a rare form of the disease. Stepanek had dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy, a genetic disease that impaired his heart rate, breathing, blood pressure and digestion, and caused muscle weakness. He had been hospitalized since early March for complications related to the disease.

In his short life, the tireless Stepanek wrote five volumes of poetry that sold millions of copies. Three of the volumes reached the New York Times' best-seller list. He began writing poetry at age 3 to cope with the death of a brother. In 2001, a small publisher issued a slim volume of his poems, called Heartsongs. Within weeks, the book reached the top of the Times' best-seller list. He wrote four other books: Journey Through Heartsongs, Hope Through Heartsongs, Celebrate Through Heartsongs, and Loving Through Heartsongs. His poems brought him admirers including Oprah Winfrey and former president Jimmy Carter and made him one of the best-selling poets in recent years.

In the summer of 2001, Mattie nearly died from uncontrollable bleeding in his throat and spent five months at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, DC. When it seemed he would not survive, the hospital got in touch with a Virginia publisher on his behalf. Mattie and his mother had sent the book to dozens of New York publishers, all of whom rejected it. VSP Books printed 200 copies of Heartsongs to be handed out to friends. But after a news conference publicizing the book, interest exploded. Heartsongs went on to sell more than 500,000 copies.

His mother, Jeni, 44, has the adult-onset form of the disease, and his three older siblings died of it in early childhood.

Stepanek is the winner of the Charles Lindbergh III Award for youngest stiff of the year.

Isabel Sanford, 86, best known as Louise "Weezie" Jefferson on the television sitcom The Jeffersons, died of natural causes on 9 July. She had been hospitalized since 4 July. Her health had waned after undergoing preventive surgery on a neck artery 10 months ago.

Sanford co-starred with Sherman Hemsley from 1975 to 1985 on CBS's The Jeffersons, a spin-off of the popular series All in the Family, in which she also appeared. In 1981, Sanford became the first black woman to receive an Emmy for Best Actress in a Comedy Series for her work on The Jeffersons.

A native New Yorker, Sanford was joined by "Jeffersons" creator Norman Lear and others in January when she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Sanford made her feature film debut in the 1967 classic, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

Recently, Sanford lent her voice to The Simpsons and appeared in commercial campaigns for Denny's restaurants and retailer Old Navy.

Laurance Rockefeller, 94, a conservationist, philanthropist and leading figure in the field of venture capital, died 11 July. The cause of death was pulmonary fibrosis.

Rockefeller was No. 377 on this year's Forbes magazine list of 587 billionaires, with $1.5 billion. But he was perhaps best known for his environmental work: He served under five presidents in several capacities related to conservation and the outdoors.

He founded the American Conservation Association in 1958, helped develop national parks in Wyoming, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Vermont, and chaired the White House Conference on Natural Beauty.

Rockefeller also was a pivotal developer of the economics field that became known as venture capital. In 1938 he helped finance World War I pilot Eddie Rickenbacker's Eastern Airlines, and he later invested in McDonnell Aircraft Corp., Intel Corp. and Apple Computer Inc.

Rockefeller was the fourth of six children of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.

Former pro golfer Jeff Julian, 42, died 15 July. Julian died of complications from ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. He had been diagnosed with the disease nearly 3 years ago.

He played on the PGA Tour in 1996 and 2002. His best finish in 58 starts was a tie for 16th at the 1996 Buick Classic.

Julian was diagnosed with ALS in October 2001. He played seven events on the PGA Tour the following year.

Right before the Masters in April 2003, Julian accepted the Ben Hogan Award from the Golf Writers Association of America. It goes to a player who remains active in golf despite a physical handicap or serious illness. Julian had lost his ability to speak five months earlier. After losing strength in his arms and legs, he had been forced to stop playing golf shortly before he went to Augusta National for the award.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, 95, died 2 August. He was the prime mover in the revolution that in the 20th century transformed photography from a scientific curiosity into a modern art form. He largely created the natural, observational style that came to govern photojournalism, a profession whose independence of spirit was nurtured in the agency he co-founded, Magnum.

Of equal importance was his elevation of photography to the status of art; he himself brought to the medium the eye of a painter and the temperament of a philosopher. Cartier-Bresson gave his discipline purpose, and the resulting images persuaded the world that photography was not simply the mechanical reproduction of life but a valid form of self-expression.

Few of the century's most recognisable photographs do not bear his imprint, so great was his influence and so much did his pictures shape public perception of a memorable image.

Half a dozen of his photographs will remain benchmarks. Among them are those of a Parisian boy swaggering home with two bottles of red wine; of a man slumbering at the foot of Nelson's Column on Coronation Day, insensible to the crowd perched above him; of a couple, seen from behind, gazing down from the Eiffel Tower; and of the astonished fury of a prisoner recognising the informer who sent her to the concentration camp.

Cartier-Bresson rigidly applied three rules to his work. He never contrived a photograph, used no artificial light and never retouched the results. Some found this a counsel of perfection that left much to chance, but Cartier-Bresson's skill was to thrive on accident, or at least to recognise a situation that held the promise of accident. Most of his pictures were taken on 35 mm rangefinder cameras with an ordinary 50 mm lens - the kind of equipment owned by many amateur photographers.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on 22 August 1908 at Chanteloup, near Paris. He was the oldest of the five children of a rich, well-connected textile manufacturer and a mother descended from Marat's assassin, Charlotte Corday. He was educated in Paris at the Ecole Fenelon and the Lycee Condorcet. As a teenager he mixed with the capital's avant-garde and surrealists such as Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali.

After completing his military service, Cartier-Bresson went to the Ivory Coast in 1931 in search of adventure.He earned his living as a hunter until he fell seriously ill with blackwater fever. Convalescing in Marseilles, Cartier-Bresson began to experiment with a small, lightweight Leica camera . Cartier-Bresson would become renowned for his skill at remaining undetected when photographing; except for portraits, his subjects are rarely seen looking into the lens. He would keep the Leica hidden under his coat but tied to his wrist for instant production, with tape masking the camera's shiny surfaces.

In 1946 he founded the Magnum agency with photographers Robert Capa, Chim, and George Rodger. The co-operative, the first of its kind, was set up to give freelance photographers greater editorial and financial control of their work. Its ensuing fame made photo-journalism glamorous and respectable, mainly due to Capa and Chim's determination to get close to the action. When both were killed covering conflicts, Cartier-Bresson resigned from Magnum in 1966.

After 1945, he worked extensively for major newspapers and magazines. He travelled wherever the world was changing, capturing its impact at human level. He took memorable photographs of the partition of India and, having been the last person to interview Gandhi, of the Indian leader's cremation.

As Mao's forces seized Peking he was on the last flight out; later he spent five weeks as a prisoner of the Communists. He became a forceful advocate of the interests of Third World countries, particularly Indonesia.

Fay Wray, 96, an actress who appeared in about 100 movies but whose fame is inextricably linked with the classic King Kong, died on 8 August at her apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

The huge success of the 1933 film King Kong, led to roles for Wray in other 1930s films in which her life or her virtue, or both, were imperiled: Dr. X, The Mystery of the Wax Museum, The Vampire Bat, and The Most Dangerous Game. But she was always aware that she would be remembered for the culmination of King Kong, in which the giant ape carries her to the top of the Empire State Building, gently places her on a ledge, lunges furiously at fighter planes peppering him with bullets and falls to his death from the 102-story skyscraper, his strength and power neutralized by love. "When I'm in New York," the actress wrote in 1969, "I look at the building and feel as though it belongs to me, or is it vice versa?"

Fay Wray was born on 15 September 1907, on a farm in Alberta, Canada, the daughter of Jerry Wray, an inventor, and his wife, Vina. The couple separated when Fay was 12, and her mother moved to Los Angeles with her five children. As a teen-ager, Miss Wray began acting in bit parts in movies, then won supporting roles. After graduating from Hollywood High School, she was the ingénue in a half-dozen silent westerns and played the bride in Erich von Stroheim's 1928 silent classic The Wedding March. Among her prominent sound films were The Four Feathers (1929), Dirigible (1931), One Sunday Afternoon (1933), Viva Villa! (1934) and The Affairs of Cellini (1934).

Wray was always drawn to writers. She was just 19 when she married John Monk Saunders, a Rhodes scholar and screenwriter known for films like Wings and The Dawn Patrol. Saunders was a womanizer, an alcoholic and a drug addict. She divorced him, claiming he had injected her with drugs while she slept, sold their house and their furniture and kept the money, and disappeared for a time with their baby daughter, Susan. During the 11 years they were married, Wray and her husband each earned half a million dollars, but nothing was left when Saunders hanged himself in 1940, at 43.

She was pursued by Sinclair Lewis and had a long romance with Clifford Odets. In 1942, she was married to Robert Riskin, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Lost Horizon. They had two children, Vicki and Robert Jr., who survive her, as does her daughter Susan. Riskin had a stroke in 1950 and died five years later. In 1971, she married Dr. Sanford Rothenberg, a neurosurgeon who had been one of Riskin's doctors. Rothenberg died in 1991.

Wray retired in 1942, but made occasional movies in the 1950's and starred in Gideon's Trumpet, a 1979 film with Henry Fonda. On television, she starred in a situation comedy, The Pride of the Family, from 1953 to 1955. In later years, she also wrote plays that were produced in regional theaters.

Julia Child, 91, the masterful cooking instructor, author and television personality whose knowledge, exuberance and daft antics lured legions of inexperienced cooks into the kitchen, demystified French cuisine and launched an enduring epicurean craze in America, died 13 August at her apartment in Montecito, California. Child, a longtime Cambridge, Mass., resident who moved back to her native California in 2001, had been in generally good health, visiting farmers markets and eating out several times a week, until a month ago, when she began suffering from kidney failure. She passed away in her sleep after a last meal of French onion soup prepared by her longtime assistant, Stephanie Hersh.

Literally a towering figure in the culinary world, the 6-foot, 2-inch Child planted the seeds of a revolution in 1961 when she published, with co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She was an irreverent American completely at ease in the formal French kitchen, who translated that higher culinary sensibility to a generation of cooks who were intimidated by anything beyond meatloaf and casseroles. With more than 1 million copies sold and a 40th-anniversary edition published in 2001, Mastering is still considered the definitive classical French cookbook in the English language. Child went on from there to blaze trails on public television, where her cooking shows charmed and educated millions.

A self-described ham, Child promoted Mastering on a Boston educational television station and wound up with her own show, The French Chef, in 1963. Captivating audiences with her merry patter, often klutzy maneuvers and down-to-earth attitude about a cuisine that had been too haute for the masses, she became public television's first bona fide star.

In the last few years, Child was accorded both the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor. Her 90th birthday in August 2002 was marked by the unveiling of a replica of Child's Cambridge kitchen at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The exhibit includes nearly all the original contents, from potato peelers to the kitchen sink.

Pro-butter, pro-salt, pro-fat and pro-red meat in moderation, Child prided herself as the loyal opposition of "food terrorists," believing their alarms about cholesterol, calories and contaminants would deprive the palate of joyful tastes. She crusaded against the minimalist tendencies of nouvelle cuisine for years. In Child's world, cooking and eating were, above all, about having a good time.

Her love of gastronomy was not bred at home. Born 15 August 1912, Julia McWilliams was the oldest of three children of a patrician Pasadena family who remembered the kitchen of her youth as "a dismal place." Her parents employed a series of cooks who turned out the standard meat-and-potatoes fare of the day. On the cook's night off, Julia's mother took over, but her efforts were not inspiring: Baking-powder biscuits, codfish balls and Welsh rarebit were mainstays.

She attended private schools: Polytechnic in Pasadena, Katharine Branson School for Girls in Mill Valley and Smith College, her mother's alma mater. Less a scholar than the life of the party, she graduated from college with a C average, then returned to Pasadena where she tried to immerse herself in the rituals of her social class: joining the Junior League and finding a husband. Her height was a disadvantage in the dating game. So, with thoughts of being a novelist, she went east, where she wrote advertising copy for W.J. Sloane in New York and published a few pieces in the New Yorker.

In 1942 she moved to Washington and became a typist in the War Information Office. She later was hired as a researcher in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA, where she developed a shark repellent to protect airmen downed at sea. When the OSS wanted to open a branch in India, Julia volunteered. The branch headquarters was a tea plantation in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). On May 1, 1944, out on the veranda, she met Paul Child, an artist turned mapmaker for the OSS who was 10 years her senior. They married in 1946. Paul Child died in 1994. They had no children.

Her husband's love of good food inspired her to attend Le Cordon Bleu, the renowned school of French cooking. She was the only woman in Chef Max Bugnard's class for ex-GIs who wanted to become professional cooks.

In 1951 Child met Beck, her future co-author, who introduced her to an exclusive gastronomic society for women known as Le Cercle des Gourmettes. With her friend Bertholle, Beck had written a slim French cookbook for Americans. Stymied in their attempts to get it published, they were advised by their editor to find "an American who is crazy about French cooking" to collaborate with them. Child embraced the role.

Work on the cookbook began in earnest in 1952. Beck developed the recipes and Child translated them into readable English. But Child wound up doing far more. When Beck sent her a recipe, Child tested it until it was foolproof. Bertholle would add some flourishes, then Child would write the final version. It was Child's idea to provide do-ahead steps, an innovation that kept the busy American housewife in mind. She also adjusted the recipes to accommodate American-size portions and supplies available in U.S. supermarkets.

She hated the skimpy directions offered in most American cookbooks. Her recipes were deliberately voluminous. Beating and folding egg whites alone took up four pages that detailed the exact number of strokes per second, the hand motion, even which part of the arm and wrist to employ. There were 50 pages on sauces, another 50 on poultry, and 100 on vegetables. If a book could hold a nervous cook's hand, describing what a dish should look and feel like at every step, Mastering did.

The book's success led in fairly short order to television. Invited to appear on a book review program on WGBH-TV, Boston's educational television station, Child brought along a copper bowl and a giant wire whisk and proceeded to show viewers how to whip egg whites. "Who is this mad woman cooking an omelet on a book review program?" producer Russell Morash, Child's future producer and director, thought the first time he saw her. The station received 28 letters asking for more cooking demonstrations, a level of response that, for public television, suggested a hit in the making. Child filmed three pilot episodes. Dubbed The French Chef, the first show, on making a French omelet, aired Feb. 11, 1963.

The timing was fortuitous. The Kennedys had installed a French chef in the White House, and more Americans were traveling to Europe, where they acquired new tastes. A generation of nascent foodies tuned in for instruction, while others began to watch because its star, this droll mistress of cuisine bourgeoise, was so entertaining. She appeared in a pith helmet and fired a popgun to snare a squab for a show on Small Roast Birds. She wore a raincoat and an umbrella to dry lettuce with a salad spinner.

The PBS show was broadcast from 1963 to 1966, went on hiatus while Child worked on the second volume of Mastering, then returned for another run from 1970 to 1973. In 1965, it won a Peabody. In 1966, it earned public television's first Emmy. It remained a hot property for PBS and cable through the 1990s.

Although her later recipes, in a nod to the calorie police, reduced fat here and there, she disdained diet foods, which she called fake food. "I, for one, would much rather swoon over a few thin slices of prime beefsteak, or one small serving of chocolate mousse, or a sliver of foie gras, than indulge to the full on such nonentities as fat-free gelatin puddings," she wrote in the introduction to her 1989 book The Way to Cook. "In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal."

Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, 93, known for his intellectual and emotional works about some of the worst cruelties of the 20th century, died 14 August at Milosz died at his home in Krakow.

Milosz had lived in Krakow since the fall of the Iron Curtain allowed him to return home after almost 30 years in exile in France and the United States, a time in which he became a prominent symbol for anti-communist dissidents.

He was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1980, an honor that coincided with the emergence of the Solidarity worker protest movement that shook communist rule in Poland.

Milosz's best-known works include The Captive Mind, a study of the plight of intellectuals under communist dictatorship. It brought him international fame in the early 1950s. Milosz's poetry was praised for its enormous range of subject matter and technique, and its mix of sensuousness and references to culture, religion and philosophy. Milosz also carried the burden of being an intellectual in exile, one whose poems were only published in his native country after he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Exile and the feelings of being a foreigner intensified the theme of memory in his work. He often explored the problem of roots in his writing.

Milosz was born on 30 June 1911, in Szetejnie, now Lithuania, and studied law at the University in Vilnius. There, he published his first book of poems, Three Winters, in 1936. The themes of his early poetry were a portent of his later works, a historical perspective combined with individual experience of the world, expressed in simple images of the idyllic and the apocalyptic.

After World War II, Milosz served in communist Poland's diplomatic service as a cultural attache in New York and Paris. In 1951, he severed ties with the government and sought political asylum in France, entering into cooperation with a Paris-based institute that specialized in Polish emigre literature.

In 1960, Milosz left France for California, where he spent more than 20 years as Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley. English-speaking audiences got access to his poetry only in 1973, when some of his work was translated in Selected Poems.

At 90, Milosz said he was still up at night writing poems. "It's not possible to be sated with the world. I'm still insatiable," he said. "At my age, I'm still looking for a form, for a language to express the world."

Carl Mydans, 97, who died of a heart ailment on 16 August at his home in Larchmont, N.Y., was one of the most celebrated war photographers and roaming journalists of the past century. He often worked in tandem with his wife, the writer Shelley Smith Mydans. Mydans was the fifth photographer hired by the fledgling Life magazine in 1936, after Tom McAvoy, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Peter Stackpole. The weekly publication became known as a bastion of pictorial journalism, its photo team chronicling Depression misery, wartime tragedy and home front sacrifice and gaiety.

Mr. Mydans remained at the vanguard of photojournalism for the next four decades. His assignments took him from the barren Texas brush country to palmy Hollywood -- and later to jungle war zones.

With his wife -- and a jackknife, a poncho, a canteen, a cup, a spoon and a helmet -- Mydans hopscotched throughout the South Pacific during World War II for Life, taking pictures and filling notebooks with his observations. Staying behind after Allied forces retreated in the Philippines, the Mydanses were imprisoned by the Japanese for 22 months. In December 1943 they, and other American civilian prisoners, were released to American authorities in a prisoner exchange.Mydans later felt triumphant as he accompanied Gen. Douglas MacArthur on his famous promise to liberate the islands from Axis control. On Jan. 9, 1945, he photographed MacArthur as he waded ashore on his return to Luzon in the Philippines, a stirring moment as the war in the Pacific neared its end. Mydans captured the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. He attained a clear position atop a 40mm gun turret that gave him a perfect view of the Japanese foreign minister, Shigemitsu Mamoru. He said he felt an unexpected surge of compassion as the defeated official signed the surrender.

His shot of a hulking Winston Churchill in 1955 was one of the many definitive moments he captured of world leaders. He also took a memorable shot of Sen. John F. Kennedy and his wife campaigning in 1958 and later showed suburban commuters reacting in horror to a 22 Nov. 1963, newspaper headline about then-President Kennedy's assassination.

Carl Mayer Mydans, the son of a classical oboist, was born in Boston on 20 May 1907, and raised in nearby Medford. His early ambitions were to be a boat builder or a surgeon. Working for the student paper at Boston University swayed him toward journalism, and after graduation in 1930 he was a reporter and editor for various publications, including American Banker in New York.

Taking his miniature camera on assignments, he soon became far more intrigued by photojournalism. In 1935, he, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn and Dorothea Lange were hired by what became the Farm Security Administration to take pictures that would arouse a public upwelling of support for New Deal policies.

Mydans wrote several books, including More Than Meets the Eye (1959), in which Mr. Mydans explained an insight from his work.

Robert David Lion Gardiner, 93, the 16th lord of the manor of the private Gardiners Island off the tip of Long Island, died at his home in East Hampton on Monday, a family spokeswoman said.

Gardiner's title came from a hereditary royal land grant dating back more than 360 years to England's King Charles I, who gave the island to Lion Gardiner, Gardiner's ancestor, in 1639 as a reward for defeating the Pequots.

The island was a pirate stopover in the 17th and 18th centuries and provided a home to the buried treasure of pirates like Capt. William Kidd.

Gardiners Island is 7 miles long and 3 miles across, and includes more than 1,000 acres of forest and 1,000 more of meadow and wetlands. It's the largest privately owned island in the country.

Gardiner had no children and spent more than 20 years battling with a niece, Alexandra Gardiner Creel, and her husband, who shared access to the island with him and stand to inherit it.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, 78, a psychiatrist who revolutionized the way the world looks at terminally ill patients with her book On Death and Dying and later as a pioneer for hospice care, has died. She died 24 August of natural causes at her Scottsdale home, family members said.

Published in 1969, On Death and Dying focused on the needs of the dying and offered her theory that they go through five stages of grief--denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Kubler-Ross wrote 12 books after On Death and Dying, including how to deal with the death of a child and an early study on the AIDS epidemic.

In 1979, she received the Ladies' Home Journal Woman of the Decade Award. In 1999, Time magazine named Kubler-Ross as one of the "100 Most Important Thinkers" of the past century.

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Kubler-Ross graduated from medical school at the University of Zurich in 1957. She came to New York the following year and was appalled by hospital treatment of dying patients. She began her work with the terminally ill at the University of Colorado Medical Center in Denver, and was a clinical professor of behavioral medicine and psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Kubler-Ross began giving lectures featuring terminally ill patients, who talked about what they were going through. That led to her 1969 book.

Richard G. Butler, 86, the notorious white supremacist who founded the Aryan Nations and was once dubbed the "elder statesman of American hate," died in his sleep. It was not known when he died; his body was found in his bed on the morning of 8 September.

The Aryan Nations lost its church and 20-acre compound in northern Idaho in 2000 after a $6.3 million civil judgment led to a bankruptcy filing. Butler moved into a house bought by a supporter in Hayden, and made few public appearances in recent years because of failing health.

Butler had moved to Idaho in the early 1970s, claiming later that he was impressed by its high percentage of white residents. To the dismay of many locals, the region became known as a place hospitable to white supremacist groups.

Butler's church held that whites are the true children of God, that Jews are the offspring of Satan and that blacks and other minorities are inferior. The compound drew skinheads, ex-convicts and others from the fringes of society. A "whites only" sign was placed at the gate, and Nazi symbols decorated the grounds.

Butler, born in Colorado and trained as an aeronautical engineer, claimed he became admirer of Hitler while serving the United States Army Air Corps during World War II. He said Hitler "led a nation, a division of our race, to fight for the life of our race."

Skeeter Davis, 72, who hit the top of the pop charts with The End of the World in 1963 and sang on the Grand Ole Opry radio show for more than 40 years, died 19 September in a Nashville hospice of breast cancer.

Davis, nicknamed Skeeter by her grandfather who said she was so active she buzzed around like a mosquito, had toured with Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones. She became a regular on the Opry, a live radio show, in 1959, and continued to perform as late as this year.

Besides The End of the World, her hits included I'm Saving My Love and I Can't Stay Mad at You.

A native of Dry Ridge, Kentucky., Davis was born Mary Frances Penick. She took the name Skeeter Davis in the 1950s when she became half of the Davis Sisters duet. She began a solo career after her duet partner, Betty Jack Davis, was killed in a 1953 car wreck. Skeeter Davis was critically injured in the same accident.

French writer Francoise Sagan, 69, who shot to literary fame at 18 with her first novel Bonjour Tristresse and stayed in the limelight for the next half century, died 24 September. Sagan, who had been ill for several years, died of heart and lung failure in a hospital in the port town of Honfleur in Normandy, northern France, near where she had a home.

Sagan produced more than 40 novels and plays but will go down in literary history as the author of Bonjour Tristesse--the anthem to disillusioned youth that became one of the best-known books of the 20th century. Written over the course of seven weeks in 1953, Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) told the story of a bored, bourgeois teenager who filled the emptiness of her existence by conspiring to destroy her father's new girlfriend. With its cool, laconic language, the novel caught the spirit of the 1950s--a decade in which the psychological groundwork was being laid in the West for the social rebellion that followed. It was a huge international seller and catapulted its young creator into a life of wealth, fame and excess.

Sagan was born June 21, 1935, into a well-to-do family in the Lot department of southwest France that moved to Paris after World War II. Her real surname was Quoirez and she chose her nom-de-plume from a character in Marcel Prousts's Remembrance of Things Past. A teenage rebel, she was expelled from her convent school and failed her secondary school leaving exam because of a growing affinity for the jazz clubs of Paris' Latin Quarter. Bored, she shut herself in her bedroom during the summer of 1953 and tapped out the 200 pages of Bonjour Tristesse.

The novel was an instant "succes de scandale" in a post-war France that affected to be shocked by its emotional intimacy and subversive subtext. Within five years it had been translated into 22 languages and sold five million copies around the world, including one million in the Unites States alone. In 1957 Hollywood director Otto Preminger made it into a film starring Deborah Kerr, David Niven and Jean Seberg.

To show that "Bonjour Tristesse" was no one-off, she followed it with A Certain Smile in 1956. Later Sagan took to writing plays - including A Castle in Sweden and Valentine's Purple Dress, which were modest successes - screen-plays and memoirs. She wrote her last book, a self-critical retrospective called "Over the Shoulder," in 1996.

Sagan made no secret of her hedonistic leanings. In 1957 she suffered a near fatal high-speed car crash and in later life was twice convicted on drugs charges.

In 2002 she was once again in trouble with the law, convicted of tax fraud over the hundreds of thousands of dollars she was paid by a businessman in the early 1990s in order to intercede with her friend, President Francois Mitterrand, over oil exploration rights in Uzbekistan. But Sagan was unable to attend the court proceedings because of her declining health. In her last years she was hospitalised on several occasions and friends described her as an increasingly lonely, sad and impoverished old woman.

Janet Leigh, 77, the actress who co-starred with James Stewart, John Wayne and Frank Sinatra in films of the 1940s to 1960s and achieved her most lasting fame as the victim of a shower slashing in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, died 3 October at her Beverly Hills, California home. The actress' daughters, Kelly Curtis and actress Jamie Lee Curtis were at their mother's side when she died.

A stunning blonde beauty, Leigh enjoyed a long and distinguished career, appearing in such films as The Manchurian Candidate in 1962 and in Orson Welles' 1958 film noir classic Touch of Evil. But she gained her most lasting fame in Psycho as the embezzling office worker who is stabbed to death in the shower by cross-dressing madman Anthony Perkins. The role earned her an Academy Award nomination as best supporting actress. Leigh wrote in her 1995 book Psycho: Behind the Scenes in the Classic Thriller that the filming was easy until the last 20 seconds when she had to express total horror as her character was being slashed to death.

Her other films included Act of Violence, Little Women, Holiday Affair, Strictly Dishonorable, The Naked Spur, Living It Up, Jet Pilot, Bye Bye Birdie, and Safari.

Leigh appeared with daughter Jamie Lee in the 1980 thriller The Fog and made occasional television appearances in her later years. She had married Curtis' father, Tony Curtis, in 1951 when both stars were at the height of their fame. They divorced in 1962.

Five teams snag 12 points each for Leigh.

Rodney Dangerfield, 82, who died 5 October after heart surgery at a Los Angeles Hospital, will certainly receive in death what he built a career on denying he got in life: respect. Presenting himself as a beaten-down everyman, he brought the art of a fine whine to new highs, or perhaps lows.

He had sustained success over four decades in standup comedy, appearing on Johnny Carson's Tonight show 70 times. He appeared on dozens of television shows and his own comedy specials, some of which he produced himself. He wrote screenplays and appeared in a score of movies, most notably Caddyshack and Back to School.

Yet when it came to Hollywood, Dangerfield truly couldn't get any respect: In 1995, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rejected his application for membership. The letter, signed by Roddy McDowell (an actor who found one of his most affecting roles while wearing a rubber ape mask) stated that Dangerfield had failed to perform "enough of the kinds of roles that allow a performer to demonstrate the mastery of his craft." It was as hard a slap as he ever endured in public, and Dangerfield played it to the hilt in his act. (Fan outcry prompted the academy to reverse itself.)

Most comedians who make it in show business climb the ladder of standup as youngsters, then stick around to perform in sitcoms or films or to make guest appearances on the talk circuit. Dangerfield's career track was a bit different: After a few frustrating years in small comedy clubs, he gave up, got a job, and raised a family. Only whe