Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Virginia Mayo, who began her film career as a chorus girl and comic foil and then proved herself an accomplished actress, died yesterday at a nursing home in Thousand Oaks, Calif., the Los Angeles suburb where she had lived for many years. She was 84.

Her friend Mary Walsh told The Associated Press of her death.

Ms. Mayo, who played opposite Bob Hope in “The Princess and the Pirate” (1944), cavorted with Danny Kaye in four of his early comedies, was badly abused by James Cagney in “White Heat” (1949) and sailed the seas romantically with Gregory Peck in “Captain Horatio Hornblower” (1952), was never completely able to overcome type casting that relied more on her good looks than her acting ability. But she won high critical praise for her performance as the unfaithful wife of a returning veteran in “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946), widely regarded as one of the finest movies to come out of the World War II homecoming experience.

NY Times
Ruth Warrick, who made her movie debut with Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane” and ended her career with the long-running role of Phoebe Tyler Wallingford on the television soap opera “All My Children,” died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 88.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said her manager, Carolyn Anthony.

Ms. Warrick was not well known when she took the role of Emily Monroe Norton, the president’s niece who marries the newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, in Welles’s 1941 film classic. Three decades later, her role as Phoebe, the patrician matriarch of the Tyler family on ABC’s “All My Children,” fixed her most indelibly in the American consciousness. She created the role when the show was first broadcast in 1970, and this month she made a final visit to its fictional setting, Pine Valley, to commemorate the soap opera’s 35th anniversary.
Ruth Warrick memorabilia at eBay.com
All My Children: The Complete Family Scrapbook

Iron Major
Great Dan Patch,The (1949-USA)

NY Times
Alton Tobey, a muralist, portraitist and illustrator whose renderings of famous events and faces hang in museums, libraries, public buildings, corporate offices and private collections, died on Jan. 4 at a nursing home in Mamaroneck, N.Y., his family said. He was 90 and formerly lived in Larchmont.

Mr. Tobey was best known for portraits and his floor-to-ceiling murals, which he called “symphonies of painting.” Two of his most acclaimed works - “Inca Trephination” and “Contemporary Cultural Mutilations in Pursuit of Beauty” - are part of the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. He did a six-piece series on the life of Gen. Douglas MacArthur for the MacArthur Memorial Building in Norfolk, Va.
Alton Tobey memorabilia at eBay.com

LA Times
Ernie Pepion, 61, a Blackfeet Indian who overcame quadriplegia to paint American Indians and people with disabilities, died Thursday of natural causes in a Great Falls, Mont., hospital.

Pepion grew up in a ranching family and became a rodeo rider. Four years after serving in Vietnam, he lost the use of his arms and legs in a 1971 auto accident. He learned to paint while recovering at a veterans hospital, using a motorized easel and a brace for his hand and forearm.

The artist received the 2005 Montana Governor’s Award for the Arts. In the early 1990s, he was profiled in a Native Voices Public Television Workshop documentary, “Ernie Pepion: The Art of Healing.”
Paintings by Ernie Pepion

LA Times
Zhao Ziyang, the natty, liberal-minded Communist Party chief who was purged for sympathizing with students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, died today. He was 85.

Zhao died in a Beijing hospital after suffering a series of strokes and a lung ailment. He had been in fluctuating health for some time, which occasionally sparked rumors of his death in recent years.

A youthful idealist-turned-apparatchik who climbed the party ladder, Zhao held a variety of posts throughout a career spanning nearly 50 years, from member of the Communist Youth League to governor of populous Sichuan province.
The Fourth Session of the Sixth National People’s Congress (Chinese Documents)
The making of a premier: Zhao Ziyang’s provincial career (A Westview replica edition)
Speeches made by Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang during his visit to the United States of America
The biography of Zhao Ziyang
China for Peace

NY Times
Dennis Flanagan, who as editor of Scientific American magazine helped foster science writing for the general reader, died at his home in Manhattan on Friday. He was 85.

The cause of death was prostate cancer, according to his wife, Barbara Williams Flanagan.

Mr. Flanagan, who worked at Scientific American for more than three decades beginning in 1947, teamed editors directly with working scientists, publishing pieces by leading figures like Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Mr. Flanagan described his formula for deciding what to include in the magazine simply: “Science is what scientists do, not what nonscientists think they do or ought to be doing.” After seeing his slogan translated into Dutch, he decided he liked the ring of it better in that language and hung a banner in his office emblazoned with the translation: “Wetenschap is wat wetenschappers doen.”
FLANAGAN’S VERSION

NY Times
Charles H. Bell, the former president and chief executive of McDonald’s, died of colorectal cancer in Sydney, Australia, today, the company announced. Mr. Bell was 44 and had been ill since May. He resigned his posts in November.

“Charlie Bell gave his all to McDonald’s. Even during his hospitalization and chemotherapy, Charlie led this company with pride and determination,” Andrew J. McKenna, chairman of McDonald’s board, said in a statement.

Mr. Bell is the second McDonald’s chief executive to die in the last year. In April, Mr. Bell’s predecessor, James R. Cantalupo, died after suffering a heart attack while at a McDonald’s convention for franchisees in Orlando, Fla.

NY Times
Suzie Frankfurt, an interior decorator who popularized 18th- and 19th-century Russian furniture among corporate raiders of the 1970’s and 1980’s and was an early collaborator of Andy Warhol, died on Jan. 7 at the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale, in the Bronx. She was 73.

She had lived in Norfolk, Conn., until she became incapacitated several years ago after treatment of a brain tumor, her family said.

A bohemian hostess, the flame-haired Ms. Frankfurt was known as a creative catalyst as well as a celebrity decorator. The designer Gianni Versace, for example, credited her with introducing him to America when he was largely unknown, not to mention also introducing him to Studio 54.
Get Andy Warhol memorabilia at eBay.com
More Andy Warhol books at Amazon.com

NY Times
Marjorie Williams, a Washington Post columnist and contributing editor for Vanity Fair who was known for sharp observations on the political elite, died yesterday at her home in Washington. She was 47.

The cause was liver cancer, said her husband, Timothy Noah.

Ms. Williams became a columnist in 2000, after more than a decade of writing lengthy profiles on Washington power brokers, including Vice President Al Gore and the Democratic diplomat Clark Clifford.

Her column was syndicated in July 2001, the same week her fourth-stage cancer was diagnosed, Mr. Noah said.

Ms. Williams attended Harvard for two years, but dropped out and went to work in publishing, where she worked for several years before getting a job as an editor at The Post. Later, she asked to move to a writing position in The Post’s Style section and frequently wrote for Vanity Fair.

LA Times
Edmund S. Valtman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Hartford Times, died Wednes- day at a retirement home in Bloomfield, Conn. He was 90.

Valtman won the Pulitzer in 1962 for his work the year before.

That work was exemplified by a cartoon published Aug. 31, 1961, showing Fidel Castro leading a beleaguered, shackled and barefoot man labeled “Cuba.” He tells another man, in a broken-down cart labeled “Brazil”: “What you need, man, is a revolution like mine!”
“Valtman”: The Editorial Cartoons of Edmund S. Vahman 1961-1991

NY Times
The Spanish soprano Victoria de los Angeles, whose sweet-toned lyric voice and beguiling expressivity earned her a devoted following during a career of more than four decades, died overnight Friday in a hospital in Barcelona, a spokesman for the Liceu Opera there said. Ms. de los Angeles, who was 81, had been admitted to the city’s Teknon clinic with cardiorespiratory problems on New Year’s Eve.

For sheer loveliness of timbre, affecting sensitivity, elegance of line and utter ease in florid passagework, she was hard to top. By the 1950’s she was a mainstay of opera houses around the world and widely admired for her portrayals of leading lyric soprano roles, including Puccini’s Mimi (from “La Bohème”) and Madama Butterfly, Verdi’s Violetta (from “La Traviata”), and Massenet’s Manon, Bizet’s Carmen and Debussy’s Mélisande.
Victoria De Los Angeles
Victoria de los Angeles

NY Times
Elizabeth Janeway, who began her career as a best-selling novelist in the 1940’s and later distinguished herself as a critic, a lecturer and an early advocate of the women’s movement, died yesterday at a retirement home in Rye, N.Y. She was 91.

Her death was reported by her son Michael Janeway, a writer and editor who is a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Most of Ms. Janeway’s earlier books were novels that focused on family situations and occasionally the pressures on women of modern society and were cited for their psychological acuteness and good sense. All the while, she reviewed books for The New York Times and other newspapers, and was credited for helping to introduce English writers like Anthony Powell to an American audience and for defending the artistic merits of “Lolita,” by Nabokov.
Man’s World, Woman’s Place
Powers of the Weak
Women: Their Changing Roles (The Great Contemporary Issues)
Between Myth and Morning Women Awakening
Improper behavior
The Walsh girls (Pocket books)
More books at Amazon.com