REV. FRED L. SHUTTLESWORTH, CIVIL RIGHTS ICON AND LEADER
The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, left, with Ralph Abernathy and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963.
Published: October 5, 2011
The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a storied civil rights leader who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama a half-century ago as he fought against racial injustice alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala. He was 89.
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Dave Martin/Associated Press
The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in Montgomery, Ala., in 2007.
He died at Princeton Baptist Medical Center, his wife, Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, said. He also lived in Birmingham.
It was in that city in the spring of 1963 that Mr. Shuttlesworth, an important ally of Dr. King, organized two tumultuous weeks of daily demonstrations by black children, students, clergymen and others against a rigidly segregated society.
Graphic scenes of helmeted police officers and firefighters under the direction of T. Eugene (Bull) Connor, Birmingham’s intransigent public safety commissioner, scattering peaceful marchers with fire hoses, police dogs and nightsticks, provoked a national outcry.
The brutality helped galvanize the nation’s conscience, as did the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of a black church in Birmingham that summer, which killed four girls at Sunday school. Those events led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after the historic Alabama marches that year from Selma to Montgomery, which Mr. Shuttlesworth also helped organize. The laws were the bedrock of civil rights legislation.
“Without Fred Shuttlesworth laying the groundwork, those demonstrations in Birmingham would not have been as successful,” said Andrew M. Manis, author of “A Fire You Can’t Put Out,” a biography of Mr. Shuttlesworth. “Birmingham led to Selma, and those two became the basis of the civil rights struggle.”
Mr. Shuttlesworth, he added, had “no equal in terms of courage and putting his life in the line of fire” to battle segregation.
Mr. Shuttlesworth joined with Dr. King in 1957 as one of the four founding ministers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the engine of Dr. King’s effort to unify the black clergy and their flocks to combat Jim Crow laws. At the time, Mr. Shuttlesworth was leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which he had helped form in 1956 to replace the Alabama offices of the N.A.A.C.P., shut down for years by court injunction.
Outside their roles as men of the cloth and civil rights advocates, however, Mr. Shuttlesworth and Dr. King stood in sharp contrast to each other in terms of background, personality and strategies.
Dr. King was a polished product of Atlanta’s black middle class. A graduate of Morehouse College, he held a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University. Fred Shuttlesworth was a child of poor black Alabama whose ministerial degree was from an unaccredited black school. (He later earned a master’s degree in education from Alabama State College.)
Where Dr. King could deliver thunderous oratory and move audiences by his reasoned convictions and faith, Mr. Shuttlesworth was fiery, whether preaching in the pulpit or standing up to Bull Connor, who dueled with him for years in street protests and boycotts leading up to their historic 1963 showdown.
Diane McWhorter, the author of “Carry Me Home,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 book about the struggle in Birmingham, wrote in an e-mail that Mr. Shuttlesworth was known among some civil rights activists as “the Wild Man from Birmingham.”
“Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement,” she added, “he was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory — meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.”
Mr. Shuttlesworth was temperamental, even obstinate, and championed action and confrontation over words. He could antagonize segregationists and allies alike, quarreling with his allies behind closed doors.
But few doubted his courage. In the years before 1963 he was arrested time and again — 30 to 40 times by his count — on charges aimed at impeding peaceful protests. He was repeatedly jailed and twice the target of bombs.
In one instance, on Christmas night 1956, he survived an attack in which six sticks of dynamite were detonated outside his parsonage bedroom as he lay in bed. “The wall and the floor were blown out,” Ms. McWhorter wrote, “and the mattress heaved into the air, supporting Shuttlesworth like a magic carpet.”
When he tried to enroll his children in an all-white school in 1957, Klansmen attacked him with bicycle chains and brass knuckles. When a doctor treating his head wounds marveled that he had not suffered a concussion, Mr. Shuttlesworth famously replied, “Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”
Freddie Lee Robinson was born on March 18, 1922, in rural Mount Meigs, Ala. He took the surname Shuttlesworth from a man his mother, Alberta Robinson, later married. He had eight siblings, and the family supplemented its income by sharecropping and making moonshine liquor, an activity for which Mr. Shuttlesworth was sentenced to two years’ probation in 1940.
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Linda Stelter/The Birmingham News, via Associated Press
In 2007, Senator Barack Obama pushed Mr. Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair as he greeted former President Bill Clinton.
He was a truck driver in the early 1940s but was soon drawn to pulpits in Selma and Birmingham. He became pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1953 and joined the Alabama chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. before it was outlawed from the state in 1956. He and others established the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to carry on the chapter’s work and came to challenge the white power structure on many fronts.
In 1963 he welcomed Dr. King to Birmingham to take part in the protests. They planned a boycott of white merchants coupled with large marches that they expected would provoke overreaction by city officials and show the world the depth of white resistance.
“We wanted confrontation, nonviolent confrontation, to see if it would work,” Mr. Shuttlesworth later said. “Not just for Birmingham — for the nation. We were trying to launch a systematic, wholehearted battle against segregation, which would set the pace for the nation.”
Mr. Shuttlesworth suffered chest injuries when the pummeling spray of fire hoses was turned on him. “I’m sorry I missed it,” Mr. Connor said when told of the injuries, The New York Times reported in 1963. “I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”
After 1965, with the new civil rights legislation on the books and Dr. King turning his attention to poverty and black problems in the urban North, Mr. Shuttlesworth remained focused on local issues in Birmingham and Cincinnati, where he had moved to take the pulpit of a black church. He traveled frequently between Ohio and Alabama before returning permanently to Birmingham in 2008 for treatment after suffering a stroke the previous year.
Besides his wife, Mr. Shuttlesworth is survived by four daughters, Patricia Massengill, Ruby “Ricky” Bester, Carolyn Shuttlesworth and Maria Murdock; a son, Fred Jr.; a stepdaughter, Audrey Wilson; five sisters, Betty Williams, Truzella Brazil, Ernestine Grimes, Iwilder Reid and Eula Mitchell; 14 grandchildren; 20 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.
With the death of Dr. King, and later Dr. King’s chief aide, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Mr. Shuttlesworth eventually assumed the role of elder statesman in the civil rights movement. In 2004 he was named president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but he stepped down the same year, complaining that “deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten at the core of this once-hallowed organization.”
He also came under criticism by gay rights advocates in 2004 when he lent his name to a campaign in Cincinnati to stop the city from passing a gay rights ordinance.
He remained an honored figure in Birmingham, however. In 2008, the city renamed its principal airport Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.
In 2009, in a wheelchair, he was front and center among other dignitaries in an audience of about 6,000 at the city’s Boutwell Auditorium to watch a live broadcast as the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was sworn in.
He had encountered Mr. Obama, then a senator from Illinois, two years earlier, along with former President Bill Clinton, during a commemoration in Selma of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches. As a crowd crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where demonstrators were beaten and tear-gassed on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, Mr. Obama pushed Mr. Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair.
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.
Such dedication. Such stalwart, unwavering courage in the face of virulent racist hatred.
Through the KKK detonating a bomb outside his church, threats, beatings, slurs, and assaults against his humanity, Rev. Shuttlesworth never gave up the good fight, even until the end.
He never lost his love or faith in the city that he fought to free from the vise-like grip of segregation, and today, because of Rev. Shuttlesworth’s activism, Birmingham, Alabama is a better city. because of Rev. Shuttlesworth, America is a better place.
Thank you, Rev. Shuttlesworth for keeping your eyes on the prize.
Rest in peace, Rev. Shuttlesworth.
Rest in peace.
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MARVIN TARPLIN, MOTOWN GUITARIST AND SONG WRITER
Published: October 4, 2011
Marv Tarplin, the Motown guitarist and songwriter who shaped the sound of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and was a co-writer of “The Tracks of My Tears” and other hits, died on Friday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 70.
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Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Marv Tarplin, standing at center with a guitar, with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles around 1962 in Detroit.
The cause of death has not been determined, a spokeswoman for the Miracles, Jeanne Sorensen, said.
Mr. Tarplin had a knack for coming up with catchy riffs and melodies. He was fooling around with a calypso song he had heard Harry Belafonte sing, rearranging the chords, when he came up with the three-chord vamp that formed the backbone of the 1965 hit “The Tracks of My Tears,” for which Mr. Robinson wrote some of the most poignant lines in pop music.
Mr. Tarplin wrote much of the music for several other Miracles hits, including “My Girl Has Gone,” “Going to a Go-Go” and “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage.”
He also collaborated on several songs that Marvin Gaye recorded. Two of the songs he wrote for Mr. Gaye (with Mr. Robinson and others) reached No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1965: “I’ll Be Doggone” and “Ain’t That Peculiar.”
Mr. Tarplin first came to Berry Gordy Jr.’s Motown label in the late 1950s as a guitar player for the Primettes, a teenage girl group that later became the Supremes. Mr. Robinson, who was already with the label, auditioned the group and told the singers to keep working, but he hired away Mr. Tarplin on the spot to play for the Miracles. It was the start of a five-decade collaboration.
“Marvin was a brilliant guitarist whose music has always inspired me,” Mr. Robinson told the British newspaper The Guardian.
When Mr. Robinson began his solo career in 1972, Mr. Tarplin initially stayed with the Miracles in Detroit, but he moved to Los Angeles to work with Mr. Robinson the next year. Over the next decade he contributed music to many of Mr. Robinson’s most memorable songs as a solo artist, including the hit “Cruisin’ ” in 1979. He continued touring with Mr. Robinson until he retired in 2008.
Mr. Tarplin was born in Atlanta on June 13, 1941, and moved with his family to Detroit, where his mother enrolled him in piano classes before he picked up a guitar and found his vocation. He was walking into a Detroit nightclub called the Flame Show Bar when members of the Primettes shouted out to him, saying they had seen him from their rehearsal space across the street. Two of them, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, had gone to Northeastern High School with Mr. Tarplin. He agreed to become their guitarist, playing with them at their early gigs and attending their Motown audition. It was a decision that changed his life.
Mr. Tarplin’s wife, Sylvia, died in 2004. He is survived by their daughter, Talese Tarplin, and two daughters from another relationship, Lisa and Ebony Tarplin.
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DERRICK BELL, PIONEERING HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR AND RIGHTS ACTIVIST
Derrick Bell walking with a group of Harvard law students after taking a voluntary unpaid leave of absence to protest the lack of tenured minority female professors.
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
Published: October 6, 2011
Derrick Bell, a legal scholar who saw persistent racism in America and sought to expose it through books, articles and provocative career moves — he gave up a Harvard Law School professorship to protest the school’s hiring practices — died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side.
The cause was carcinoid cancer, his wife, Janet Dewart Bell, said.
Mr. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and later one of the first black deans of a law school that was not historically black. But he was perhaps better known for resigning from prestigious jobs than for accepting them.
While he was working at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in his 20s, his superiors told him to give up his membership in the N.A.A.C.P., believing it posed a conflict of interest. Instead he quit the department, ignoring the advice of friends to try to change it from within.
Thirty years later, when he left Harvard Law School, he rejected similar advice. At the time, he said, his first wife, Jewel Hairston Bell, had asked him, “Why does it always have to be you?” The question trailed him afterward, he wrote in a 2002 memoir, “Ethical Ambition,” as did another posed by unsympathetic colleagues: “Who do you think you are?”
Professor Bell, soft-spoken and erudite, was “not confrontational by nature,” he wrote. But he attacked both conservative and liberal beliefs. In 1992, he told The New York Times that black Americans were more subjugated than at any time since slavery. And he wrote that in light of the often violent struggle that resulted from the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, things might have worked out better if the court had instead ordered that both races be provided with truly equivalent schools.
He was a pioneer of critical race theory — a body of legal scholarship that explored how racism is embedded in laws and legal institutions, even many of those intended to redress past injustices. His 1973 book, “Race, Racism and American Law,” became a staple in law schools and is now in its sixth edition.
Mr. Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” said Lani Guinier, the first black woman hired to join Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty, in an interview on Wednesday.
At a rally while a student at Harvard Law, Barack Obama compared Professor Bell to the civil rights hero Rosa Parks.
Professor Bell’s core beliefs included what he called “the interest convergence dilemma” — the idea that whites would not support efforts to improve the position of blacks unless it was in their interest. Asked how the status of blacks could be improved, he said he generally supported civil rights litigation, but cautioned that even favorable rulings would probably yield disappointing results and that it was best to be prepared for that.
Much of Professor Bell’s scholarship rejected dry legal analysis in favor of stories. In books and law review articles, he presented parables and allegories about race relations, then debated their meaning with a fictional alter ego, a professor named Geneva Crenshaw, who forced him to confront the truth about racism in America.
One of his best-known parables is “The Space Traders,” which appeared in his 1992 book, “Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.” In the story, as Professor Bell later described it, creatures from another planet offer the United States “enough gold to retire the national debt, a magic chemical that will cleanse America’s polluted skies and waters, and a limitless source of safe energy to replace our dwindling reserves.” In exchange, the creatures ask for only one thing: America’s black population, which would be sent to outer space. The white population accepts the offer by an overwhelming margin. (In 1994 the story was adapted as one of three segments in a television movie titled “Cosmic Slop.”)
Not everyone welcomed the move to storytelling in legal scholarship. In 1997 Richard Posner, the conservative law professor and appeals court judge, wrote in The New Republic that “by repudiating reasoned argumentation,” scholars like Professor Bell “reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites.”
Professor Bell’s narrative technique nonetheless became an accepted mode of legal scholarship, giving female, Latino and gay scholars a new way to introduce their experiences into legal discourse. Reviewing “Faces at the Bottom of the Well” in The New York Times, the Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote: “The stories challenge old assumptions and then linger in the mind in a way that a more conventionally scholarly treatment of the same themes would be unlikely to do.”
Derrick Albert Bell Jr. was born on Nov. 6, 1930, in Pittsburgh, to Derrick Albert and Ada Elizabeth Childress Bell. After graduating from Schenley High School near Pittsburgh’s Hill District, he became the first member of his family to go to college, attending Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1952.
A member of the R.O.T.C. at Duquesne, he was later an Air Force officer for two years, one of them in Korea. Afterward he attended the University of Pittsburgh Law School, where he was the only black student, earning his degree in 1957.
In 1969, after teaching briefly at the University of Southern California, he was recruited and hired by Harvard Law School, where students were pressuring the administration to appoint a black professor. Mr. Bell conceded that he did not have the usual qualifications for a Harvard professorship, like a federal court clerkship or a degree from a top law school.
In 1980 he left Harvard to become dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, but he resigned in 1985 when the school did not offer a position to an Asian-American woman. After returning to Harvard in 1986, he staged a five-day sit-in in his office to protest the school’s failure to grant tenure to two professors whose work involved critical race theory.
In 1990 he took an unpaid leave of absence, vowing not to return until the school hired, for the first time, a black woman to join its tenured faculty. His employment effectively ended when the school refused to extend his leave. By then, he was teaching at New York University School of Law, where he remained a visiting professor until his death. Harvard Law School hired Professor Guinier in 1998.
Mr. Bell said his personal decisions took a toll on his first wife, Jewel, who had cancer when he left Harvard in 1990 and died that year. In 1992 he began a correspondence with Janet Dewart, who was the communications director of the National Urban League. Ms. Dewart proposed marriage before the couple even met. A few months later, Mr. Bell accepted.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three sons from his first marriage, Derrick A. Bell III and Douglas Dubois Bell, both of Pittsburgh, and Carter Robeson Bell of New York; two sisters, Janet Bell of Pittsburgh and Constance Bell of Akron, Ohio; and a brother, Charles, of New York.
In “Ethical Ambition,” Mr. Bell expressed doubts about his legacy: “It is not easy to look back over a long career and recognize with some pain that my efforts may have benefited my career more clearly than they helped those for whom I have worked.”
But Professor Guinier, who continues to teach at Harvard, differed with that view. “Most people think of iconoclasts as lone rangers,” she said on Wednesday. “But Derrick was both an iconoclast and a community builder. When he was opening up this path, it was not just for him. It was for all those who he knew would follow into the legal academy.”
Professor Derrick Bell exhorted us all to realize that the faces at the bottom of the well were our own. Professor Bell championed us to never forget that disregarding the humanity of our fellow humans diminished us all. Most importantly, Professor Bell never forgot that Black Americans who have put so much into this nation, still have to fight with the Sysiphus stone of economic, environmetal, social, and legal discrimination.
Dr. Bell spoke that the Space Traders still are a sword of Damocles in the lives of Black Americans. He was a prophet, and he stood alone when he knew he was right, even if it cost him tenure, position and social standing.
Thank you for gracing us with your presence.
Rest in peace, Dr. Bell.
Rest in peace.
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STEVE JOBS, APPLE’S VISIONARY WHO REDEFINED DIGITAL AGE
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Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday. He was 56.
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Steven P. Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 in San Francisco in 2010. More Photos »
The death was announced by Apple, the company Mr. Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage. A friend of the family said the cause was complications of pancreatic cancer.
Mr. Jobs had waged a long and public struggle with the disease, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment, introducing new products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.
He underwent surgery in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple’s chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer. When he left, he was still engaged in the company’s affairs, negotiating with another Silicon Valley executive only weeks earlier.
“I have always said that if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s C.E.O., I would be the first to let you know,” Mr. Jobs said in a letter released by the company. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”
By then, having mastered digital technology and capitalized on his intuitive marketing sense, Mr. Jobs had largely come to define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centered on the Internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion.
Tributes to Mr. Jobs flowed quickly on Wednesday evening, in formal statements and in the flow of social networks, with President Obama, technology industry leaders and legions of Apple fans weighing in.
“For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it’s been an insanely great honor,” said Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder. “I will miss Steve immensely.”
A Twitter user named Matt Galligan wrote: “R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.”
Eight years after founding Apple, Mr. Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use. After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories like music players and cellphones but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.
During his years outside Apple, he bought a tiny computer graphics spinoff from the director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.
Starting with “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hit movies, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form enjoyed by children and adults worldwide.
Mr. Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.
It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.
“He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book “Insanely Great,” which chronicles the creation of the Mac. “Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs.”
“Toy Story,” for example, took four years to make while Pixar struggled, yet Mr. Jobs never let up on his colleagues. “‘You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”
Read the rest of the article here.
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DIANE CILENTO, OSCAR-NOMINATED ACTRESS
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: October 8, 2011
Diane Cilento, an Australian actress whose long stage and screen career included an Oscar-nominated performance in the 1963 movie “Tom Jones,” died in Queensland, Australia, on Thursday, a day after her 78th birthday.
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Lopert Pictures, via Photofest
Diane Cilento in the 1963 movie “Tom Jones.”
Her death was announced by Anna Bligh, the premier of Queensland. No cause was given.
Ms. Cilento began acting in her teens and was 22 when she was nominated for a Tony Award in 1956 for her portrayal of Helen of Troy in a production of the Jean Giraudoux play “Tiger at the Gates.” On screen she appeared with Charlton Heston in “The Agony and the Ecstasy” (1965) and with Paul Newman in the western “Hombre” (1967).
She received an Academy Award nomination in 1963 for her supporting performance in “Tom Jones,” Tony Richardson’s hugely successful film version of Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, as a gamekeeper’s daughter who lusts after the roguish title character, played by Albert Finney. The film was nominated for 10 Oscars and won 4, including best picture and best director.
Ms. Cilento was born in Queensland on Oct. 5, 1933, to parents who were both doctors, and moved to New York after her father took a job with the United Nations. She later moved to London, where she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
In 1962 she divorced her husband of seven years, Andrea Volpe, and married Sean Connery, who began his career as James Bond in “Dr. No” and his rapid ascent to stardom that same year. She divorced Mr. Connery in 1973 and 12 years later married the playwright Anthony Shaffer, whom she had met while making the suspense film “The Wicker Man,” for which Mr. Shaffer wrote the screenplay.
She and Mr. Shaffer lived in Queensland, where she ran a successful open-air theater in the rain forest. Mr. Shaffer died in 2001.
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CHARLES NAPIER, ACTOR WHO PLAYED TOUGH GUYS
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Published: October 6, 2011
Charles Napier, a character actor who portrayed ruffians, military officers and other strong men in films like the second Rambo movie, but who played against type as a judge in “Philadelphia,” died on Wednesday in Bakersfield, Calif. He was 75.
Anabasis Investments, via Photofest
Charles Napier in 1985’s “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”
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Pyramid Film Distribution/Everett Collection
Charles Napier in the 1992 film “Center of the Web.”
His death was confirmed by his agency, Bauman, Redanty & Shaul.
Mr. Napier also had an active career on television. One role, which has become something of a camp classic among fans of the 1960s “Star Trek” series, was as a space age hippie musician who comes aboard the Starship Enterprise with a group of others like him and sings and strums a futuristic guitar.
But with his formidable jaw, gruff demeanor and growling bass voice, Mr. Napier was typically cast in rugged parts. He played Tucker McElroy, the irate frontman for the country band the Good Ole Boys, in “The Blues Brothers” (1980); Murdock, the villain in “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (1985); and Lt. Bill Boyle, who is murdered by Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991).
He appeared on television shows like “The Rockford Files,” “B. J. and the Bear” and, more recently, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” He provided voices for “The Simpsons,” “The Critic” and other animated series. His most high-profile role was the contemplative Judge Garnett in “Philadelphia” (1993).
“I always felt I played myself or some kind of version of myself,” he told The Bakersfield Californian last March. “If you think about it, old actors probably don’t even have a self.”
Charles Napier was born near Scottsville, Ky., on April 12, 1936, and became interested in acting after performing in plays while at graduate school at Western Kentucky University in the early 1960s.
He then moved to Hollywood, where he spent time with young unknowns like Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper and got his first part, as a guard on an episode of “Mission: Impossible,” in 1968. In 1970, he played Harry, a corrupt sheriff, in Russ Meyer’s sex-and-drugs movie romp “Cherry, Harry & Raquel!” (1970).
His survivors include two sons, Charles Whitnel and Hunter, and a daughter, Meghan.
His voice was most recently heard this year on the animated comedy series “Archer.”
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 