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HOUSE PETERS, JR., ACTOR WHO GAVE HEFT TO ‘MR.CLEAN’
LOS ANGELES (AP) — House Peters Jr., an actor who appeared with bald head and hoop earring as the original Mr. Clean in Procter & Gamble’s commercials for household cleaners, died here on Wednesday. He was 92.
The cause was pneumonia, said his son, Jon Peters.
The elder Peters played many supporting roles in his career, usually as a heavy or villain.
But he is best remembered as Mr. Clean, a muscular man with a no-nonsense attitude toward dirt and grime. From the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, he helped advertise the household cleaner.
Mr. Peters’s prime acting career ran from mid-1930s to the late 1960s. He worked with Roy Rogers and Gene Autry on their television shows and appeared in “Perry Mason,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Twilight Zone” and “Lassie.” He also wrote an autobiography, “Another Side of Hollywood,” in which he describes growing up the son of an actress and silent film actor in Beverly Hills, Calif. His father, Robert House Peters Sr., has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Robert House Peters Jr. was born Jan. 12, 1916, in New Rochelle, N.Y. He studied drama in high school and became inspired to pursue acting as a profession.
Besides his son Jon, his survivors include his wife, Lucy Pickett; a daughter; another son; and four grandchildren.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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J.L. CHESNUT, JR., SELMA LAWYER AND EARLY LEADER IN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
J. L. Chestnut Jr., who after attending law school in Washington returned to his hometown, Selma, Ala., and set up shop in 1958 as the city’s first black lawyer, and who went on to fight for voting rights for blacks, laying the groundwork for the march led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965, died Tuesday in Birmingham, Ala. He was 77 and lived in Selma.
“Black in Selma”/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
J. L. Chestnut Jr., an underpublicized figure in the civil rights movement, conferring with the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1984.
The cause was kidney failure after an illness of several months, his daughter Vivian said.
Long a well-known figure among Alabama lawyers, Mr. Chestnut was an underpublicized figure in the civil rights movement, a black man who began his career by taking on the ordinary legal briefs of ordinary black men and women, daring to work within the white establishment to achieve just ends. He was a pioneer for blacks in the legal field in Alabama, founding a law firm, eventually known as Chestnut, Sanders, Sanders & Pettway, that through the 1990s was the largest black firm in the state.
Among other successes, his firm represented a coalition of black farmers in Pigford vs. Glickman, in which the claim that the farmers were discriminated against over a period of decades in programs overseen by the Department of Agriculture was adjudicated in 1999 and eventually settled, with nearly $1 billion in reparations paid to black farmers through this June.
Known as a clever and mesmerizing speaker with an easy charm in front of a jury and a flair for drama in a closing argument, Mr. Chestnut was at home in the courtroom even when the courtroom was an unfriendly place.
“I remember a trial in Jasper, Ala., where a Klansman was being tried for killing a black man,” one of his law partners, Rose Sanders, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
“He was so effective that the judge stopped the trial, and said, ‘Chestnut, it’s getting dark, and I got to get you on the road out of town.’ ”
In the early 1960s, as the voting rights movement coalesced around Selma, Mr. Chestnut’s experience in the local community was invaluable to civil rights leaders who visited the area. And when demonstrators arrived and were thrown in jail, it was often as not Mr. Chestnut who got them out.
“I don’t know what would have happened to us in Selma if it wasn’t for Chestnut,” said Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, who was jailed and beaten by the Selma police. “Selma was a vicious place, vicious. I don’t know how he survived there, I really don’t. He used the law to help liberate the black folk of Alabama. He was a lawyer, but he was also a foot soldier. He was a brave and courageous man.”
J. L. Chestnut Jr. was born in Selma on Dec. 16, 1930. The initials were his name; according to his autobiography, “Black in Selma,” written with Julia Cass, his father was named after a white banker his father’s mother had admired. J. L. Sr., with his two brothers, owned a grocery; young J. L.’s mother was an elementary school teacher. J. L. Jr. He attended Selma’s segregated schools and graduated from Dillard University in New Orleans before going to law school at Howard University, at a time when the landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education was being prepared and argued. He moved back to the South with the belief that that was where the next legal battles for civil rights would be fought.
In Selma, he told the writer Gay Talese, who met Mr. Chestnut in 1965 and wrote about him in his 2006 memoir, “A Writer’s Life,” that he decided early on not to kowtow to judges who disdained him, recalling one instance where a judge warned him not to be disrespectful to any of the women in his office.
“I have never been disrespectful of a lady in my life,” Mr. Chestnut replied, “and unlike you, I also respect black women.”
On the other hand, Mr. Chestnut often recalled that before George Wallace became the segregationist governor of Alabama, he was the one judge who treated him with respect and insisted that others do so as well.
“Judge George Wallace was the most liberal judge I ever practiced law in front of,” Mr. Chestnut said in an interview for the public television documentary “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire.” “He was the first judge to call me ‘mister’ in an Alabama courtroom.”
Mr. Chestnut pried dozens if not hundreds of voting rights demonstrators out of Selma’s jails, and he was present at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, a day that became known as Bloody Sunday when the police beat demonstrators to prevent them from beginning a march to Montgomery. It was two weeks later that the march, led by Dr. King, was actually completed.
In subsequent years, Mr. Chestnut filed civil rights cases to have blacks allowed on juries in Dallas County, which includes Selma; to desegregate the Selma public schools; and to ensure blacks the opportunity to be coaches and principals in the desegregated schools.
In addition to his daughter Vivian, he is survived by his wife of 56 years, also named Vivian; two other daughters, Shandra and Gearld; three sons, J. L. 3rd, Terrance and Gregory; a sister, Johnnie Mae; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
“He was a legend down here,” said Michael Jackson, the district attorney for Dallas County, who is currently the only black district attorney in Alabama. “As a young attorney, he was the best trial attorney I’d ever seen. I certainly wouldn’t be in office if it wasn’t for people like him.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
RELATED LINKS: http://www.legacy.com/houstonchronicle/DeathNotices.asp?Page=Lifestory&PersonID=118244377
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MILT DAVIS, DEFENSE BACK WHO HELPED BALTIMORE COLTS TO 2 TITLES
BALTIMORE (AP) — Milt Davis, an All-Pro defensive back who helped the Baltimore Colts win two National Football League championships in the 1950s, died Monday in Oregon. He was 79.
Associated Press
The Colts’ Milt Davis in 1959.
The cause was cancer, the Baltimore Ravens confirmed. Davis spent four seasons with the Colts (1957-60) and led the N.F.L. in interceptions in 1957 and 1959. He played a key role on the 1958 team that beat the Giants, 23-17, in overtime in the championship game. Davis played with two broken bones in his right foot and forced a first-half fumble by Frank Gifford.
That season, Davis earned $7,000 as the Colts’ right cornerback. After two more seasons, he left football. He was angered at racism against black players and eager to finish work on his doctorate at U.C.L.A., where he played in college.
Davis was born on an Indian reservation near Muskogee, Okla., to parents of African-American and American Indian ancestry.
In 1954, Davis was drafted by the Detroit Lions — and the Army. After two years of military service, Davis joined the Lions but said he was told, “We don’t have a black teammate for you to go on road trips, therefore you can’t stay on our team.”
Davis received a tryout with the Colts in 1957 and signed as a 28-year-old free agent. He had 10 interceptions as a rookie, returned two for touchdowns and made the Associated Press All-Pro team.
Davis had seven interceptions in the 1959 season, and the Colts beat the Giants in the N.F.L. title game. When he retired, he had 27 interceptions in 45 games.
After his playing career, Davis scouted college players for N.F.L. teams. He taught high school in the Los Angeles area before working as a natural history professor at Los Angeles City College from 1964 to 1989. That year, he and his wife, Yvonne, retired and moved to Oregon.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Allison and Hilary, and a son, Brian.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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GEORGE JONES, WHO WROTE THE DOO-WOP HIT ‘RAMA LAMA DING DONG’
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (AP) — George Jones, who wrote the doo-wop hit “Rama Lama Ding Dong” and performed it as a member of the Edsels, died on Sept. 27 at his home. He was 71.
His death, from cancer, was confirmed by his son Steffon.
“Rama Lama” peaked at No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1961. The Edsels, based in Youngstown, also included Jimmy Reynolds, Harry Green, Marshall Sewell and Larry Green.
In their heyday the Edsels performed at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and appeared on “American Bandstand.”
Mr. Jones, who was known as Wydell, was born in Richmond, Va., and as a child moved to Youngstown, where his father worked in a steel mill. After high school Mr. Jones joined the Air Force, where he sang in a vocal group with other servicemen and wrote “Rama Lama.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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ANTHONY SPERO, A NAME IN THE BONANNO CRIME FAMILY
Anthony Spero, long a high-ranking member of the Bonanno crime family, died on Monday at the Federal Medical Center, part of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, N.C. He was 79.
Anthony Spero
Greg Norton, a medical center spokesman, confirmed the death but would not give the cause. He said Mr. Spero was transferred to Butner on Aug. 28 from a federal prison in Coleman, Fla., where he was serving a life sentence for racketeering, including ordering three murders. Before he went to prison, Mr. Spero lived on Staten Island.
For more than three decades, Mr. Spero served the Bonanno family, one of five Mafia clans in New York City, in a variety of roles, rising to consigliere and taking over as acting family boss when his superiors, Philip Rastelli and Joseph Massino, were in prison. He was a reserved man often described as an old-time gangster, the antithesis of the flashy celebrity don personified by John J. Gotti of the Gambino family. Mr. Spero was known not for his wardrobe or his conspicuous presence in society but for his hobby, breeding racing pigeons.
For much of his life he lived in Brooklyn, operating in the Bensonhurst neighborhood, where he tended his birds on the roof of a building on Bath Avenue; he held meetings with mob associates, not only at the West End Social Club on the same street, but among the rooftop pigeon coops. Next to the club, Mr. Spero ran a livery business, the Big Apple Car Service, described by crime experts as a cover for illegal enterprises like forcing the owners of stores and restaurants to accept video gambling machines on which the Bonannos would share heartily in the profits.
The West End Social Club was a hangout for a group of young thugs known as “the Bath Avenue crew,” who admired Mr. Spero and did his bidding. In 2001, Mr. Spero was convicted of ordering three murders — including that of Vincent Bickelman, a burglar who had made the mistake of robbing Mr. Spero’s daughter Jill; and Paul Gulino, the leader of the Bath Avenue crew who was said to have received Mr. Spero’s instructions to kill Mr. Bickelman and subsequently hatched a plot to kill Mr. Spero.
The case against him was largely circumstantial, but Mr. Spero was undone by the testimony of other criminals — including the killer of Mr. Gulino, Joseph Calco — who cooperated with the district attorney in the hope of receiving lighter punishments for their own crimes.
Besides his daughter Jill, his survivors include another daughter, Diana Clemente, and a brother.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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MARIO MAYA, INTERPRETER OF FLAMENCO STYLE DANCING
Mario Maya, who fused his Gypsy heritage and training in experimental American dance to become one of Spain’s most influential flamenco dancers and choreographers, died on Monday at his home in Seville. He was 71.
Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
Mario Maya and Merche Esmeralda leading the finale of the Flamenco Festival New York gala at City Center in February.
The cause was cancer, according to the World Music Institute in New York. In February Mr. Maya served as artistic director of a gala program during Flamenco Festival New York, produced annually by the institute and Miguel Marin.
In her review in The New York Times Jennifer Dunning wrote that the program “offered stunning proof that the old art lives on vitally in committed new interpreters.”
A rebel in the 1960s, Mr. Maya consistently passed on to the young dancers in his companies an unwavering belief that flamenco could be radically renewed and yet remain true to its essence. Among his disciples are the most brilliant experimental flamenco dancers of today, including his daughter Belén Maya and Israel Galvan.
Born in Cordoba into a Gypsy family that moved to Granada when he was 2, Mr. Maya took the conventional route of dancing as a child before the Gypsy caves of the Sacromonte quarter in Granada before turning professional. His “maestra,” as he called her, was the distinguished dancer Pilar López, in whose company he performed from 1956 to 1958 after studying in Madrid.
In the early ’60s, however, he suddenly moved to New York and studied modern dance at the Alwin Nikolais and Alvin Ailey schools. In the opinion of one Spanish critic Mr. Maya’s involvement with “new wave theater” in New York led him to adopt “ideas and concepts that he later applied to flamenco dance.”
The fruit of those efforts was already clear in his New York concerts of 1967 and 1968. By 1993, after more than 25 years of touring, the performances of the Mario Maya Flamenco Dance Company in New York confirmed that his was not the standard approach to traditional forms.
Looking amazingly like Merce Cuningham and dancing with similar surprises, Mr. Maya offered an impressive foray into abstraction in “Three Flamenco Movements.” Emotions seemed to come out of the choreography’s patterns rather than literal passion. The structure of the dance was spare, but the dancers moved at great speed; Mr. Maya’s own solos were colored by skimming filigreed footwork.
Although Mr. Maya had started out independently with Carmen Mora and Eduardo Serrano in the Trio Madrid, he later directed large troupes, including the Andalusian Dance Company. In the ’70s he included text in his productions, often inspired by the poet Federico García Lorca. In 1983 he founded a school in Seville that taught flamenco, ballet and jazz dance.
In addition to his daughter Belén, Mr. Maya is survived by his wife, Mariana Ovalle Ibarra; another daughter, Mariaostalinda Maya; and a son, Mario Adonay Maya.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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NICK REYNOLDS, WHO SANG HIGH HARMONIES WITH THE FOLK-MUSIC KINGSTON TRIO
Nick Reynolds, a founding member of the Kingston Trio whose smooth tenor and gift for harmonizing helped propel the group to worldwide fame in the folk-music revival of the late 1950s and early ’60s, died Wednesday in San Diego. He was 75 and lived in Coronado, Calif.
The cause was acute respiratory disease syndrome, said his son Joshua Stewart Reynolds.
Whether singing high harmony or taking the lead part in songs like “M.T.A.,” “The Wanderer” and “Hobo’s Lullaby,” Mr. Reynolds, who played tenor guitar, helped define the clean, close-harmony style that brought folk music into countless American homes for the first time.
“Nobody could nail a harmony part like Nick,” said Bob Shane, another founding member of the group. “He could hit it immediately, exactly where it needed to be, absolutely note perfect, all on the natch.”
Although regarded as overly commercial by purists, the trio inspired the folk-music revival and paved the way for the breezy and ingratiating Limeliters and Chad Mitchell Trio and later for more political artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. “We got America up and singing,” Mr. Reynolds said.
Wary of the political songs that had caused trouble for the Weavers during the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Kingston Trio, formed in 1957, steered clear of protest music and stuck to a mixture of traditional songs like “Tom Dooley” and “A Worried Man” and humorous ballads like “M.T.A.” and “Tijuana Jail,” with storytelling between songs during their live performances. Mr. Reynolds, called the Budgie or the Runt of the Litter by his fellow founding members, Dave Guard and Mr. Shane, often added a zinger for comic effect.
The formula was astonishingly successful. Thirteen of the group’s albums reached the Top 10, and in 1959 alone four of its albums placed in the Top 10, a record matched only by the Beatles.
Nicholas Wells Reynolds was born in San Diego and raised in Coronado. His father, a Navy captain, played guitar and led his three children in singalongs that Nick credited with developing his keen ear for harmony. After graduating from Coronado High School, he attended the University of Arizona and San Diego State University before earning a business degree from Menlo College in Atherton, Calif., in 1956.
While at Menlo he met Mr. Shane, who introduced him to Mr. Guard, a graduate student at Stanford University. (Mr. Guard died in 1991.) The three friends formed a group that added and subtracted members and performed under different names, including Dave Guard and the Calypsonians.
Frank Werber, a publicist who caught their act at the Cracked Pot in Palo Alto, booked them at the Purple Onion nightclub in San Francisco and, after their one-week engagement became an extended sold-out run, signed them to a contract with Capitol Records. By this time they had renamed themselves the Kingston Trio, in a nod to the popularity of calypso music, and chosen a team uniform — button-down, striped, short-sleeve shirts — that exuded a wholesome, collegiate image.
Mr. Reynolds’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Leslie Yerger; his sons Joshua of Portland, Ore., and John Pike Reynolds of Coronado; his daughters Annie Clancy Reynolds Moore of San Diego and Jennifer Kristie Reynolds of Bandon, Ore.; two sisters, Jane Reynolds Meade and Barbara Reynolds Haines, both of Coronado; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Reynolds remained with the Kingston Trio until it disbanded in 1967, as folk music lost its audience to rock. After a brief time building and racing Formula B cars, he moved to a cabin in Port Orford, Ore., without a television, telephone or radio. There he worked as a rancher and antiques dealer. He also ran the Star, Port Orford’s only movie theater.
In 1983 he and John Stewart, who had replaced Mr. Guard in the Kingston Trio in 1961, joined with Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac to record the album “Revenge of the Budgie.” (Mr. Stewart died in January.) In 1988 he joined a reconstituted version of the Kingston Trio and performed with them until retiring in 1999.
Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Stewart also ran an annual fantasy camp in Scottsdale, Ariz., where fans could join them onstage and, for a brief moment, sing as honorary members of the Kingston Trio.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 4, 2008
An obituary on Friday about Nick Reynolds, a founding member of the Kingston Trio, misidentified the site of Menlo College, where he earned a business degree. It is in Atherton, Calif., not Palo Alto.
An obituary on Friday about Nick Reynolds, a founding member of the Kingston Trio, misidentified the site of Menlo College, where he earned a business degree. It is in Atherton, Calif., not Palo Alto.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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COL. DONALD BLAKESLEE, DECORATED WORLD WAR II FLYING ACE
Col. Donald Blakeslee, one of the most decorated fighter pilots of World War II and the commander of the first American fighter squadrons to reach Berlin as the Allies ground down the German Luftwaffe, died Sept. 3 at his home in Miami. He was 90.
U.S. Army Air Corps
Mr. Blakeslee in 1944.
The cause was heart failure, said his daughter and only immediate survivor, Dawn Blakeslee. Ms. Blakeslee said she did not announce her father’s death last month because of his reluctance to talk about his achievements.
As commander of the Fourth Fighter Group of the Eighth Fighter Command, Colonel Blakeslee led three squadrons of 16 single-seat, single-engine P-51 Mustangs, each equipped with six machine guns mounted in the wings and sighted so that the bullet streams could converge on the Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulf fighters that were trying to down Allied bombers.
By war’s end, the Fourth Fighter Group was credited with destroying 1,020 German aircraft, 550 shot out of the air and 470 hit while on the ground. That total surpassed the 992 German planes taken out by the 56th Fighter Group, led by another fighter ace, Col. Hubert Zemke.
Walter J. Boyne, a former director of the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, said on Tuesday that Colonel Blakeslee was one of the cadre of commanders who “blunted the edge of the Luftwaffe” and “went on to lead the progressive destruction of the German air force.”
In his four years in the European theater, Colonel Blakeslee flew nearly 500 missions and had about 1,000 combat hours to his credit, believed to be more missions and hours “than any other American fighter pilot of World War II,” said Barrett Tillman, a former executive secretary of the American Fighter Aces Association.
On March 6, 1944, Colonel Blakeslee’s fighter group became the first to fly above the fleet of Boeing B-17s and Consolidated B-24s as they each dropped up to 4,000 pounds of bombs on Berlin. As German fighters tried to intercept the bombers, Colonel Blakeslee’s planes swooped down.
Of the aerial combat, the colonel later told reporters: “There’s nothing unusual in the missions. They all follow the same pattern. Either you get on Jerry’s tail or he gets on yours. That’s all.”
“We got low enough to see Berlin only once,” he said. “We were down to around 10,000 feet and we could see that blocks and blocks of Berlin had been bombed absolutely flat.”
On April 8, 1944, the Fourth Fighter Group set a record for the European theater, shooting down 31 planes in one day. Then, in late June, Colonel Blakeslee led his fighters on one of their most arduous missions, escorting shuttle-bombers to Russia.
“When the war had progressed to a certain point where American bombers had the range to over-fly German-held territory,” Mr. Boyne said, “the idea was to land them in the Soviet Union, then return and bomb on the way back. You double the utilization of your bombers.”
“This required, particularly on the part of the fighters,” Mr. Boyne continued, “great endurance and navigation abilities. It strained the plane and strained the pilot.”
In a ceremony in England on March 6, 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, awarded the Distinguished Service Cross to Colonel Blakeslee. Beside the colonel was Capt. Don Gentile, a member of his flight group, who was receiving the same decoration, for destroying 30 German planes.
In all, according to Mr. Tillman of the fighter aces association, Colonel Blakeslee received two Distinguished Service Crosses, seven Distinguished Flying Crosses, two Silver Stars, six Air Medals and the British Distinguished Flying Cross. A decade later, for his Korean War service, he received the Legion of Merit, another Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medals.
Donald James Mathew Blakeslee was born on Sept. 11, 1917, in Fairport Harbor, Ohio. As a child, he became fascinated with planes while watching the Cleveland National Air Races. In the mid-1930s, he and a friend bought a Piper Cub. In 1940, after his friend crashed the plane, Mr. Blakeslee went to Canada to join the Royal Canadian Air Force.
After pilot training, he was sent to Britain, where he flew combat missions for the Royal Air Force, mostly with American Eagle squadrons composed of American volunteers. In September 1942, he was transferred to the United States Army Air Forces and assigned to the Fourth Fighter Group. He became group commander in January 1944. That year, the colonel married Leola Fryer; she died in 2003. He retired from the Air Force in 1965.
Colonel Blakeslee was a taciturn man with a no-nonsense presence that commanded respect from his fighters. A New York Times article described how, on Sept. 11, 1944, he was “ill at ease” in front of photographers and reporters while being interviewed about his exploits.
“It’s more fun facing a squadron of Jerries,” he said.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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DAVID JONES, DIRECTOR OF THE FILMS, ‘BETRAYAL’ AND ’84 CHARING CROSS ROAD’
David Jones, a cerebral and versatile British-born director who worked on projects as esoteric as the neglected plays of Maxim Gorky, as admired as the films “84 Charing Cross Road” and “Betrayal” and as mundane as TV’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” died on Sept. 18 in Rockport, Me.
Mr. Jones
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He was 74 and lived in New York City and Rockport, having moved to this country some two decades ago.
The cause was a heart attack, said Joyce Tenneson, his companion for the last 19 years.
As a stage director in England, Mr. Jones was prolific, working with both classical and contemporary texts, and anchoring dozens of productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he was hired in the early 1960s by the artistic director Peter Hall.
As an associate artistic director, Mr. Jones was given credit for resurrecting the reputation of Gorky, the early-20th-century Russian playwright, whose skills as a dramatist had been largely subsumed by his revolutionary politics.
In the 1970s Mr. Jones directed four Gorky plays, including “Enemies” — with a remarkable cast of Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart and John Wood — as well as “The Lower Depths,” “Summerfolk” and “The Zykovs,” all at the Aldwych Theater, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s London home. In 1990 he added a fifth Gorky work, “Barbarians.”
In addition, Mr. Jones brought lesser-known works of Chekhov, Brecht, O’Casey and Harley Granville-Barker to the Royal Shakespeare’s audiences.
“He was underestimated in his own country,” the playwright Hugh Whitemore (“Breaking the Code”), said in a phone interview Monday. “His R.S.C. work in the 1970s was colossal.”
Indeed, Mr. Jones was an unsung member of the theatrical generation in England that included the writers Harold Pinter, Simon Gray and Mr. Whitemore, and actors like Mr. Stewart, Mr. Kingsley and Ms. Mirren, many of whom had extended artistic partnerships with Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones’s films brought him greater renown. Released in 1987, “84 Charing Cross Road,” with a screenplay by Mr. Whitemore, was an adaptation of the memoir of an American book lover, Helene Hanff (played by Anne Bancroft), about her correspondence and friendship with a London bookseller (Anthony Hopkins).
“Betrayal” was Mr. Jones’s film adaptation of Mr. Pinter’s reverse-chronology play about an adulterous affair; the movie, with an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Mr. Pinter, starred Mr. Kingsley as the cuckolded husband, Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodge.
Mr. Jones also directed two of Mr. Pinter’s works on Broadway, “No Man’s Land,” with Christopher Plummer and Jason Robards Jr., in 1994, and “The Caretaker,” with Mr. Stewart, in 2003.
Known among his circle as cultured and curious, modest and civil, Mr. Jones had a deep voice and a quietly commanding presence on any set.
“As a director he was patriarchal without the pomposity that normally accompanies patriarchy,” Mr. Kingsley said in a phone interview Monday. “He never infantilized the actor. We were always equal with him, which in a theater director especially is very rare.”
David Hugh Jones was born Feb. 19, 1934, in Poole, Dorset, on the south coast of England. His mother was a mathematician and a teacher, his father a Congregational minister. He studied English at Cambridge, where he absorbed the respect-for-text discipline espoused by F. R. Leavis, the critical giant of the time. Afterward, he joined the army and served in Hong Kong, working as a program host at a military radio station.
Back home, he worked for the BBC, where he began directing, notably for Monitor, a pioneering television arts magazine.
His marriage to Sheila Allen, an actress, ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Tenneson, a photographer, Mr. Jones is survived by a sister, Gwyneth Jones, of Somerset, England, and two sons, Jesse, of Brooklyn and Joseph of Tucson, Ariz.
Mr. Jones came to prominence as a theater director in this country in 1980, when he became artistic director of a classical repertory company established by the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was an unusual undertaking, the creation of an American acting company by an English director, and it was, to judge from critical response to its productions, a semi-success.
Mr. Jones subsequently taught at Yale School of Drama and continued to direct films, including “Jacknife” (1989), starring Robert De Niro as a troubled Vietnam veteran; and “The Confession,” a 1999 legal thriller with Mr. Kingsley, Amy Irving and Alec Baldwin.
In recent years much of Mr. Jones’s work had been on series television, directing episodes of “The Practice,” “Chicago Hope” and other shows in addition to “Law & Order.”
When they were working together on the “84 Charing Cross Road,” Mr. Whitemore said, Mr. Jones “took the most enormous pains with every detail of the script and the set and the performances.” But it wasn’t that he was fastidious.
“That’s not the proper word,” Mr. Whitemore said. “He just wanted things to be right. He took the same pains when he was making himself a martini.”
A previous version of this article misspelled Simon Gray’s name as Simon Grey.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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ELINOR GUGGENHEIMER, ADVOCATE FOR WOMEN, CHILDREN AND THE ELDERLY
Elinor Guggenheimer, who was already a grandmother when she began advocating for children, women and the elderly, and went on to be a national spokeswoman for their concerns as well as hold prominent positions in New York City government, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 96.
Bill Cunningham/The New York Times
Elinor C. Guggenheimer at her 90th birthday party in 2002.
The death was confirmed by her daughter-in-law Jane Guggenheimer.
Mrs. Guggenheimer became the first woman to serve on the New York City Planning Commission, in 1961. She was the city’s commissioner of consumer affairs in the 1970s, and led organizations that fought for more women on corporate boards and for the improvement of centers for the elderly.
She represented the New Yorkers, usually women, who have the advantage of wealth and the approbation of high society but need to do something more. In a profile in 1986, The New York Times described her type: “They work long hours, trade contacts, raise capital and wield influence.”
Mrs. Guggenheimer made her Park Avenue home a center for Democratic Party fund-raising, and in 1969 she ran unsuccessfully in the party’s primary to be the candidate for president of the City Council. She played major roles in charities, particularly Jewish ones, and used her position as a planning commissioner to help shape the city’s policy toward parks and jails, and delighted in visiting both.
In the late 1960s, Mrs. Guggenheimer also had a large role in helping New York beat out other cities to obtain the Temple of Dendur from Egypt for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Without Ellie Guggenheimer, it wouldn’t have happened,” Thomas P. F. Hoving, then the museum’s director, said.
Among her many passions, the greatest may have been finding ways to care for children while their parents were working. Day care had been plentiful when women were needed in the workforce during World War II, but then became harder to find. Mrs. Guggenheimer’s first step was founding the Day Care Council of New York in 1948.
From then on she was prominent among activists from around the United States trying to find day-care solutions. She emphasized that the welfare of children was at stake, not just the convenience of working mothers.
In 1973, Mrs. Guggenheimer founded the New York Women’s Forum, to help women establish social networks to help one another, then expanded it nationally and internationally. The idea was that powerful women could help one another in the same manner as men who met in exclusively male clubs. She told The Times that she wanted an “unabashedly elitist organization of women who would pool their collective clout.”
She started the New York Women’s Agenda in 1992 as a similar vehicle, and also founded the Council of Senior Centers and Services.
Elinor Sophia Coleman was born on April 11, 1912, in Manhattan Her father, Nathan Coleman, was a commercial banker. She attended Vassar, then transferred to Barnard and graduated in 1933. She said in an interview in 1996 that her girlhood dream was to be a mathematician, but that her mother explained no man would marry one.
In June 1932, she married Randolph Guggenheimer, a lawyer in a family of prominent lawyers. He died in 1999.
As consumer affairs commissioner, Mrs. Guggenheimer had a high profile, once inveighing against a store in Queens that was selling fake lox. She led a nationwide boycott of high-priced coffee, ostentatiously giving up her own 14 cups a day. When chicken prices plunged, she urged people to get two for every pot.
Mrs. Guggenheimer wrote the books “Planning for Parks and Recreation in Urban Areas” and “The Pleasure of Your Company,” a guide to entertaining. She also wrote “Potholes,” an off-Broadway musical spoof of Manhattan, which had a short run at the Cherry Lane Theater in 1983.
Mrs. Guggenheimer is survived by her sons, Charles and Randolph Jr., both of Manhattan; three grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Her nimble wit came out in some doggerel she wrote for a commission hearing in 1970 on protecting Jamaica Bay from an airport runway extension. . She wrote of the environmental threat:
“Oysters that could once delight us, now just give us hepatitis.”
She also liked to recall the time she visited a prison and told a prostitute she would help her get job training as a secretary after her release.
“I make $500 a night,” the prostitute said. “Can you do that for me?”
“Go and enjoy yourself,” Mrs. Guggenheimer replied.
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