LENA NYMAN, STAR OF ‘I AM CURIOUS’ FILMS
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: February 5, 2011
Lena Nyman, the Swedish actress whose performance in the sexually explicit movie “I Am Curious (Yellow)” raised the hackles of censors in the 1960s and helped turn the film into a box office bonanza, died on Friday in Stockholm. She was 66.
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Grove Press, via Photofest
Lena Nyman was a student at the National Theater School in Sweden when she was chosen for “I Am Curious (Yellow).”
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Anders Wiklund/European Pressphoto Agency
Ms. Nyman in 2006.
She died after a long illness, Ms. Nyman’s manager, Mats Nilemar, told The Associated Press.
Ms. Nyman went on to a distinguished career after “I Am Curious.” In all, she had roles in more than 50 Swedish films and television shows, notably Ingmar Bergman’s “Autumn Sonata” in 1978, in which she played the mentally impaired sister to Liv Ullmann’s accomplished pianist.
But it was in “I Am Curious” that she made perhaps her most indelible mark. In the film Ms. Nyman portrayed an intensely serious young woman, also named Lena, who wanders Stockholm as an amateur reporter, raising questions about mores that seem to her to have calcified Swedish life. She asks people if Sweden really is a classless society and badgers union officials about why the labor movement is so conservative.
Searching for her own sexual identity, Lena has a stormy affair with Borje (played by Borje Ahlstedt), after she meets him in a store. They have sex in a tree and on a balustrade in front of the royal palace, among other places.
Produced for $160,000 by the Swedish filmmaker Vilgot Sjoman, “I Am Curious (Yellow)” alarmed the United States Customs Service, which in January 1968 banned it from the country as obscene. That November a federal appeals court ruled that the movie was protected by the First Amendment, resulting in its release in March 1969. The movie made $5 million in six months and remained the most financially successful foreign film in the United States for 23 years.
If “the cavemen of the U.S. Customs office” hadn’t seized “I Am Curious (Yellow),” Newsweek wrote in March 1969, “there probably wouldn’t be thousands upon thousands of people standing on lines today for the privilege of paying $4.50 to see the movie.”
Reviews were mixed. “Miss Nyman’s performance is monotonous, and her only redeeming vice is her anger, which seems genuine and illimitable,” Joseph Morgenstern wrote in Newsweek. In The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Lena Nyman and Borje Ahlstedt are good, in addition to being perfectly presentable, in the central roles.” He added that the sex scenes were “so unaffectedly frank as to be nonpornographic.”
In Sweden some critics saw the film as offensive. Because of her full figure, others called Ms. Nyman fat. That did not deter her. In 1968 she again played Lena in “I Am Curious (Blue),” almost a reprise of “Yellow.” (The Swedish flag is blue and yellow.)
Ms. Nyman, who was born on May 23, 1944, in Stockholm, had been a student at National Theater School of Sweden when Mr. Sjoman chose her for “I Am Curious.” Information on survivors was not available.
Ms. Nyman was stunned by the reaction in her homeland to the “Curious” films, she told The Times in 1974. “You know,” she said, “some people get shocked about sex. I was shocked that everyone was so shocked. It was such a quarrel about that movie. Wow!
“You could believe nobody in Sweden had ever seen a naked man or woman.”
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MARIA SCHNEIDER, BRANDO’S LOVER IN ‘LAST TANGO IN PARIS’
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: February 3, 2011
Maria Schneider, the French actress whose sex scenes with Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris” set a new standard for explicitness on screen, died on Thursday in Paris. She was 58.
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UNITED ARTISTS, via Public Theater
Ms. Schneider with Marlon Brando in “Last Tango in Paris,” (1972); its sexually explicit scenes shocked some audiences.
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Abdelhak Senna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Maria Schneider in 2003.
A spokesman for her agency, Act 1, said she had died after a long illness but provided no other details.
The baby-faced, voluptuous Ms. Schneider was only 19 when the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci chose her for the role of the free-spirited, mysterious Jeanne in “Last Tango.” She seemed, he said in explaining the choice, “like a Lolita, but more perverse.” The part was originally intended for Dominique Sanda, who dropped out after becoming pregnant.
In the film, Jeanne enters into a brief but torrid affair with a recently widowed American businessman, played by Brando. Their erotically charged relationship, played out in an empty apartment near the Bir-Hakeim Bridge in Paris, shocked audiences on the film’s release in 1972, especially a scene in which Brando pins Ms. Schneider to the floor and, taking a stick of butter, seems to perform anal intercourse. The Motion Picture Association of America gave the film an X rating.
“Last Tango” fixed Ms. Schneider in the public mind as a symbol of the sexual revolution. She spent years trying to move beyond the role, for which she was paid $4,000, and the notoriety that came with it.
“I felt very sad because I was treated like a sex symbol,” she told The Daily Mail of London in 2007. “I wanted to be recognized as an actress, and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown. Now, though, I can look at the film and like my work in it.”
The famous scene, she said, was not in the script and made it into the film only at Brando’s insistence. “I felt humiliated, and to be honest I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci,” she said. “After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take.”
Ms. Schneider later appeared opposite Jack Nicholson in “The Passenger” (1975), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, playing an architecture student known simply as the Girl.
Although she went on to work with important directors like René Clément in “The Baby Sitter” (1975) and Jacques Rivette in “Merry-Go-Round” (1981), her film career declined after the mid- 1970s, in part because of a turbulent personal life that included drug abuse, at least one suicide attempt and messy affairs with both men and women.
She walked off the set of “The Baby Sitter” (also known as “Scar Tissue”) in Rome and checked herself into a mental hospital to be with her girlfriend at the time. In 1977 she was cast as Conchita in Luis Buñuel’s “That Obscure Object of Desire” but left the film after arguing with Buñuel. Her part was assigned to two actresses, Ángela Molina and Carole Bouquet.
Maria Schneider was born on March 27, 1952, in Paris, the illegitimate daughter of Marie-Christine Schneider, a Romanian-born model, and the prominent actor Daniel Gélin. She did not meet her father, who refused to acknowledge her, until she was in her teens. She was reared by her mother in a town near the German border and left home at 15 for Paris, where she scratched out a living as a film extra and a model.
Brigitte Bardot, who had worked with Mr. Gélin on several films, was appalled at the girl’s situation and intervened, giving her a room in her house and helping find her an agent with William Morris. Ms. Schneider played small parts in “The Christmas Tree,” with William Holden and Virna Lisi, and “The Love Mates,” with Alain Delon, before being cast in “Last Tango.”
Her more recent films included Cyril Collard’s “Savage Nights” (1992), Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jane Eyre” (1996), Bertrand Blier’s “Actors” (2000) and Josiane Balasko’s “Cliente” (2008).
“I was too young to know better,” she said of “Last Tango” in her Daily Mail interview. “Marlon later said that he felt manipulated, and he was Marlon Brando, so you can imagine how I felt. People thought I was like the girl in the movie, but that wasn’t me.”
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TURA SATANA, CULT ACTRESS OF ‘FASTER, PUSSYCAT, KILL, KILL!’
February 5, 2011, 5:53 pm — Updated: 12:26 pm
By DAVE ITZKOFF
Marvin Films/Eve Productions Tura Satana in “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”
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Marvin Films/Eve Productions
Tura Satana, right, in “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” |
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Tura Satana, the actress whose authoritative presence, exotic looks and buxom frame commanded the attention of viewers of Russ Meyer’s 1965 cult movie “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”, died on Friday evening in Reno, Nev.
The death was announced by her longtime manager, Siouxzan Perry, who said the cause of death was believed to be heart failure. Ms. Perry said Ms. Satana was 72 when she died, though other sources listed her birth year as 1935.
Born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi in Hokkaido, Japan, to a father of Japanese and Filipino descent and a mother who was Cheyenne Indian and Scots-Irish, Ms. Satana spent part of her childhood in the Manzanar internment camp near Independence, Calif., before her family settled in Chicago. Her Asian background and looks and the fact that she developed early led to frequent harassment and assaults, and she led an itinerant lifestyle, working as an exotic dancer and nude model. She even posed for erotic photographs taken by Harold Lloyd, the former silent comedian, who suggested she pursue an acting career.
Her breakthrough role came in “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”, a Meyer exploitation film that, in stark opposition to the director’s later works, featured no nudity. In that film, Ms. Satana played Varla, the leader of a gang of go-go dancers who kidnap a couple, murder the boyfriend and force the girlfriend to follow them on further lawless adventures.
Ms. Satana’s portrayal of Varla as a brazenly violent but unapologetically feminine woman who frequently upbraids the men who dare to ogle her — when a gas-station attendant tells her he believes in “seeing America first,” Varla replies, “You won’t find it down there, Columbus!” — earned her a cult following that endured long after the drive-in era. In later decades, the influence of Ms. Satana’s no-nonsense attitude could be seen in pop-cultural artifacts ranging from “Xena, Warrior Princess” to Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” movies.
Ms. Satana is survived by two daughters, Kalani and Jade, and two sisters, Pamela and Kim, according to Ms. Perry. Ms. Perry said a memorial service was being planned for around July 10, Ms. Satana’s birthday.
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MICHAEL TOLAN, STAGE AND TELEVISION ACTOR
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Published: February 4, 2011
Michael Tolan, an actor who became a recurring presence on television in the 1960s and ’70s after walking away from film and Broadway but who returned to the stage to help found the American Place Theater, a successful Off Broadway house, died on Monday in Hudson, N.Y. He was 85.
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CBS, via Photofest
Michael Tolan and Mary Tyler Moore on her show in 1971.
The cause was heart disease and renal failure, his partner, Donna Peck, said. They lived in Ancram, N.Y.
By the early 1960s Mr. Tolan had had roles in films, like Edwin L. Marin’s western “Fort Worth” (1951), and on Broadway, including big parts in long-running romantic comedies like Peter Ustinov’s “Romanoff and Juliet.” But he was dissatisfied.
“This Broadway is for the birds,” he told The New York Times in 1965. “In 99 percent of the cases it has nothing to do with acting as a craft, as an art.”
So Mr. Tolan began acting in televised plays, which led to roles on weekly series. In 1964 he starred as Dr. Alex Tazinski, a character he called “hard-hitting, uncompromising, somewhat antisocial” on the CBS prime-time medical drama “The Doctors and the Nurses.”
He later starred on the NBC drama “The Senator” (1970-71) and appeared on other shows, including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” as Ms. Moore’s journalism teacher and boyfriend, Dan Whitfield.
Mr. Tolan founded the nonprofit American Place Theater with Wynn Handman and Sidney Lanier at St. Clement’s Church on West 46th Street in 1963. The theater has since moved to 9th Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets.
“We wanted to attract some of the writers who wrote fine, intelligent, deep material about American life, and see if we could interest them in writing for the theater,” Mr. Tolan wrote in an unpublished memoir.
The American Place produced first plays by writers like Donald Barthelme and Anne Sexton. Faye Dunaway, Morgan Freeman and other Hollywood stars performed there early in their careers.
Michael Tolan was born Seymour Tuchow on Nov. 27, 1925, in Detroit. He graduated from Wayne State University in 1947 and performed with a repertory company in Detroit. In New York he studied under Stella Adler and won a fellowship to study acting at Stanford University.
A performance at Stanford led to his first movie role, as a gangster (under the name Lawrence Tolan, which he later changed) in “The Enforcer” (1951) with Humphrey Bogart.
He made his Broadway debut in George Axelrod’s “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” in 1955, and appeared in five more Broadway plays through 1961. He later had supporting roles in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965) and “Presumed Innocent” (1990), among other films.
His two marriages ended in divorce.
In addition to Ms. Peck, he is survived by a brother, Gerald Tuchow, of Detroit; a daughter, Alexandra, of Watertown, Mass., from his first marriage, to the actress Rosemary Forsyth; and two daughters, Jenny and Emilie, both of New York, from his marriage to Carol Hume.
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BARNEY HAJIRO, MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: February 2, 2011
After Barney Hajiro, an Army private, single-handedly wiped out two German machine gun nests and killed two snipers in a gallant charge in World War II, his superiors recommended him for the Medal of Honor.
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U.S. Department of Defense
Barney F. Hajiro as a soldier in World War II.
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Rick Bowmer/Associated Press
Mr. Hajiro receiving the Medal of Honor from President Bill Clinton.
As part of a regiment composed entirely of Japanese-Americans below the officers’ ranks, Private Hajiro epitomized the unit’s brash motto, “Go for Broke!” His commanding officer’s report said that in October 1944 in eastern France, he had run 100 yards through a stream of bullets, walked through a booby-trapped area and led the charge up “Suicide Hill” screaming “Banzai!” before taking out the machine gun nests.
He was shot four times — then insisted that 40 other wounded men be evacuated first.
But he, like Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, who was also a member of the regiment, did not initially receive the Medal of Honor for which he was recommended. Only in 2000, after 56 years and a belated Pentagon review, did President Bill Clinton present the medal, the nation’s top military honor, to Mr. Hajiro, Senator Inouye and 20 other Asian-American soldiers. Racial prejudice, Mr. Clinton said, had prevented such a ceremony after the war.
“I nearly gave up hope,” Mr. Hajiro said at the time.
“Barney was a good man,” Senator Inouye said in an interview on Wednesday. “He didn’t go around blowing his own horn. He would just say he was doing something he was supposed to do.”
Mr. Hajiro, who had battled cancer, died on Jan. 21 in Honolulu at 94, his family said. He had been the nation’s oldest Medal of Honor recipient. His background was modest: born in Hawaii, he dropped out of school in the eighth grade to work for 10 hours a day, at 10 cents an hour, on a sugar plantation. He was a dockworker when he was drafted into the Army in 1942 and assigned to dig ditches. He resented not being allowed to carry arms.
“I didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor,” Mr. Hajiro said in an interview in 1999. “Why did they blame us?”
As angry about Pearl Harbor as anybody, many Japanese-Hawaiians were eager to fight. Mr. Hajiro was one of the first to volunteer, in March 1943.
The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a newly formed unit, would go on to be called the most decorated regiment for its size and length of service: its 14,000 men earned 9,486 Purple Hearts, 8 Presidential Unit Citations and 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, the second-highest individual honor in the Army. Mr. Hajiro received three of those.
He and many of his comrades were decorated for the regiment’s most celebrated operation, known as “the rescue of the Lost Battalion,” in which they saved 211 fellow soldiers trapped in southern France while suffering more than 800 casualties.
One regiment member, Pfc. Sadao S. Munemori, actually did receive a Medal of Honor, posthumously, in 1945, after the Japanese American Citizens League persuaded a Utah senator to take up the soldier’s cause. A Filipino-American also won the medal in World War II. But they were the rare exceptions for Asian-Americans.
The battlefield exploits of Asian-Americans came under review by the Pentagon beginning in 1996, after a similar examination, prompted by the Congressional Black Caucus, had begun looking into why no blacks had been awarded the Medal of Honor in World War II. Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, had sought the review of Asian-Americans.
(In the review of African-Americans, seven were awarded the medal in 1997, six posthumously. The seventh, Vernon Baker, died last July.)
Some criticized the reviews of both blacks and Asian-Americans as political pandering, noting that similarly qualified whites were not part of the review. But President Clinton said that facing racial slurs and forced internment, Japanese-Americans had not gotten a fair deal.
James C. McNaughton, the Defense Department historian who led the Asian-American review, said in 2000 that the very fact that the 442nd was segregated amounted to “institutional discrimination.” But he said he could find no instance of white officers deliberately ignoring the valor of Asian-American troops.
Of the 22 Asian-Americans whose decorations were upgraded to the Medal of Honor, all but two were Japanese-Americans and members of either the 442nd or the 100th Infantry Battalion, which the 442nd absorbed in 1944. (Of the two others, one was of Filipino heritage and one of Chinese heritage.)
Senator Inouye, who lost his right arm in fierce fighting in Italy, said he and his former comrades had been modest about finally receiving the medal. “Why did we get recognized when there are hundreds of others who did the same thing?” he asked.
Barney Fushimi Hajiro, the oldest of nine children, was born on Sept. 16, 1916, in Puunene, on the island of Maui, where his parents had immigrated from Hiroshima during World War I. The family was so poor that the children were given a bottle of soda only on New Year’s Day. Barney left school as a teenager and would later say his biggest regret was not pursuing his dream of running track.
He fought in Italy, then moved with his unit to eastern France, where he was cited for bravery on Oct. 19 and Oct. 22, 1944, in battles in mountainous terrain.
On Oct. 29, in the fighting that brought him the Medal of Honor, the 442nd was pinned down, its soldiers picked off one by one by Germans on higher ground. Private Hajiro suffered wounds in his face, shoulder and wrist in leading the counterattack.
“I couldn’t run backward,” he said. “I had to run forward. That’s the job of a soldier.”
Mr. Hajiro, who lived in Waipahu, on Oahu, and refused to buy a Japanese car, is survived by his wife, Esther; his son, Glenn; his brothers, Tokuro and Umeo; his sister, Pearl Yoshikawa; and a grandson. The family asked guests to wear “aloha attire” to his military burial.
The oldest living Medal of Honor recipient is now Nicholas Oresko, 94, of Cresskill, N.J.
Though Mr. Hajiro came to be revered — accepting the French Legion of Honor, serving as grand marshal at county fairs — he never forgot where he had come from. On the day the Medal of Honor was pinned to his chest, he said, “Even after the war, they still called me a Jap, you know.”
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EUGENIO ARANGO, CUBAN-BORN MUSICIAN KNOWN AS TOTICO
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: February 1, 2011
Eugenio Arango, better known as Totico, a Cuban-born percussionist and singer who was one of the most celebrated figures in the drumming, dancing and singing culture of New York rumba, died on Jan. 21 in the Bronx, where he lived. He was 76.
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Martin Cohen
Eugenio (Totico) Arango, right, with Carlos (Patato) Valdez.
His death, in a hospice, was confirmed by his godson, the percussionist Carlos Sanchez, who did not specify the cause.
Born on June 2, 1934, in the Los Sitios district of Havana, Mr. Arango was a dockworker who played in local rumba circles; he shipped out of Cuba as a merchant seaman in 1959, landing in Boston and then moving to New York City.
He appeared on the jazz drummer Max Roach’s 1961 album “Percussion Bitter Sweet,” and with the Cuban flutist and violinist Pupi Legarreta’s charanga group on the 1963 record “Salsa Nova con Pupi Legarreta.” Later in the decade he recorded some of the most famous examples of rumba, the secular, percussion-forward Afro-Cuban music associated with street convocations and dancing — a sound that floats serene vocal melodies over interweaving drums.
Mr. Arango was an important singer in this style, with a strong, lean, high voice. He is best known for his role in the album “Patato & Totico,” released by Verve in 1968, which documented a historic arrangement of musicians: Mr. Arango and Carlos (Patato) Valdez sang and drummed in front of a group including the tres player Arsenio Rodríguez and the bassist Israel (Cachao) López, two of the most influential Cuban artists of the 20th century. That album also fed a social phenomenon in New York: the cross-generational and cross-cultural ritual of the rumba circles in places like Orchard Beach in the Bronx, Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, and Central Park.
More and more through the 1960s, Afro-Cubans, New York Puerto Ricans and African-Americans convened on Sunday afternoons to play various kinds of rumba; the music united people of different backgrounds forming their own connections to Afro-Latin culture and history. When “Patato & Totico” was released there were few other recorded examples of authentic rumba played by Cubans in New York City. The record became a primary document of the rumba subculture, something to emulate and practice along with.
“Any rumbero who was worth anything would have picked it up,” said Mr. Sanchez, who started playing with Mr. Arango in 1975, usually for religious ceremonies. In a coming essay for Centro Journal, Berta Jottar, an independent scholar who writes about New York rumba history, calls the record a “national hymn” for the so-called Nuyorican generation coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s.
Mr. Arango played in some nightclub bands in those years and made a few salsa records with the Puerto Rican percussionist Kako Bastar, under the name Kako y Totico. But he directed himself, musically and otherwise, more toward Santería, the Afro-Cuban religion for which he made religious articles for altars and rituals — which he sold directly or through local botanicas — and in which he would eventually become a high priest, or babalawo. And he taught many younger drummers, particularly in the 6/8 rhythms of the ceremonial style called guiro.
Another important album, “Totico y sus Rumberos” (1982), extended the model of “Patato & Totico,” with the Cuban percussionist Orlando (Puntilla) Rios and a younger generation of Afro-Latin rumberos. The cover depicts the album’s 11 musicians arranged around a lamppost near the Orchard Beach pavilion; inside are stately religious chants, rumba and a startling version of the 1962 doo-wop hit “What’s Your Name,” with drumming in Cuban clave rhythm.
Mr. Arango’s survivors include his wife, Zunilda Arango, and a daughter, Lazara Arango.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 3, 2011
An obituary on Wednesday about the Cuban-born percussionist and singer Eugenio Arango misspelled the nickname of another Cuban percussionist, Orlando Ríos. He was known as Puntilla, not Puntillo.
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JOHN BARRY, COMPOSER FOR JAMES BOND FILMS
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: January 31, 2011
John Barry, whose bold, jazzy scores for “From Russia With Love,” “Goldfinger” and nine other James Bond films put a musical stamp on one of the most successful film franchises of all time, and who won five Academy Awards as a composer for “Born Free,” “Dances With Wolves” and other films, died on Sunday in New York. He was 77.
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PBS, via Photofest
John Barry scored dozens of films that called for music to express a wide variety of human emotions and situations.
His death was announced in a statement by family members and reported by The Associated Press. No other details about the cause of death or where he died were provided.
Mr. Barry scored dozens of films, big and small, that called for music to express a wide variety of human emotions and dramatic situations. He composed taut, pulsing, jittery music for the espionage thrillers “The Ipcress File” (1965) and “The Quiller Memorandum” (1966), delivered a sultry sound for the noirish “Body Heat” (1981) and established an offbeat intimacy for “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), with its haunting harmonica theme.
“I like to score the inner feelings of a character — get into their shoes in an imaginative way and take the audience there and enlighten them in a poetic rather than realistic way,” he told The New York Times in 2000.
His throbbing, expansive score for “Born Free” (1966) earned him two Oscars, one for best score and the other for best song.
Although he won Oscars for his work on “The Lion in Winter” (1968), “Out of Africa” (1985) and “Dances With Wolves” (1990), he was known first and foremost as the resident composer for most of the Bond films.
The musical template he established was as much a part of the films as Bond’s double entendres, Q’s gadgetry and Miss Moneypenny’s flirtatious repartee. The films began with a catchy song performed by a pop star, its themes picked up and reprised throughout the movie, most effectively in the tense transitions when Bond moved from one exotic location to the next or prepared to execute a choice bit of spycraft.
His role in composing the most famous Bond music of all, the theme that has been a signature of the films since “Dr. No” (1962), remains unclear. When he took credit for the theme in an interview with The Sunday Times of London in 1997, the original composer hired for the film, Monty Norman, successfully sued the newspaper for libel, asserting that Mr. Barry had only done the orchestration.
After being called in as a kind of musical special agent for “Dr. No” by the film’s producers, Mr. Barry went on to score “From Russia With Love” (1963), “Goldfinger” (1964), “Thunderball” (1965), “You Only Live Twice” (1967), “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971), “The Man With the Golden Gun” (1974), “Moonraker” (1979), “Octopussy” (1983), “A View to a Kill” (1985) and “The Living Daylights” (1987).
Jonathan Barry Prendergast was born on Nov. 3, 1933, in York, England. His father ran a chain of movie theaters in the north of England, and early on he became entranced by film music. He later credited film composers like Max Steiner, Erich Korngold and Bernard Herrmann as important influences, as well as Stan Kenton’s big band.
“I think the genesis of the Bond sound was most certainly that Kentonesque sharp attack,” he told Film Score Monthly in 1996, calling it a brassy wall of sound with notes hitting extreme highs and lows.
He studied piano and took instruction in composition with Francis Jackson, the organist and composer at York Minster. He later played the trumpet with dance bands and, during his military service, with an Army band.
In 1957 he formed the John Barry Seven, a rock ’n’ roll band styled after the popular guitar-based instrumental group the Ventures. His group recorded several instrumental hits as well as “Hit and Miss,” the theme song for the popular television program “Juke Box Jury.”
The band reached its widest audience as the backup group for Adam Faith on the BBC pop show “Drumbeat.” When the singer was cast in the 1959 film “Beat Girl,” released in the United States as “Wild for Kicks,” and the Peter Sellers film “Never Let Go,” Mr. Barry came along to write the music.
He quickly found himself in demand at a time when British directors looked to jazz and pop music to create a cool image for their films. He was the composer for “Man in the Middle” (1963), “The Wrong Box” (1966), “The L-Shaped Room” (1962) and “Zulu” (1964).
He inched closer to the center of the British New Wave when he married the actress Jane Birkin in 1965, inspiring Newsweek to call him the man “with the E-type Jag and the E-type wife.”
It was his second marriage. He is survived by his fourth wife, Laurie; four children, Kate, Suzanne, Sian and Jonpatrick; and five grandchildren.
The origins of the James Bond theme are disputed. Mr. Norman said that he brushed off a musical passage from “Bad Sign, Good Sign,” a song he had written for a musical version of the V. S. Naipaul novel “A House for Mr. Biswas.” With a few adjustments, it became the theme to “Dr. No.” The John Barry Orchestra, an expanded version of Mr. Barry’s group, performed the theme, with Vic Flick supplying the twangy, Duane Eddy-style guitar sound.
Mr. Barry testified in court in 2001 that he had entered into a secret agreement with the film’s producers to write the theme for a flat fee, with Mr. Norman, whose authorship claims he called “absolute nonsense,” retaining the credit. He adopted a more circumspect tone after the libel judgment in 2001.
When he was not scoring the Bond films, Mr. Barry composed the music for films like “The Tamarind Seed” (1974), “The Day of the Locust” (1975), “Robin and Marian” (1976), “The Deep” (1977), “The Cotton Club” (1984), “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986), “Jagged Edge” (1985) and, perhaps least of all, “Howard the Duck” (1986). He also composed the theme for the 1970s television series “The Persuaders,” with Tony Curtis and Roger Moore.
His scores for “Mary, Queen of Scots” (1971) and “Chaplin” (1992) were nominated for Academy Awards.
Mr. Barry decided to quit the Bond game while the going was still good. “I gave up after ‘The Living Daylights’ in 1987,” he told The Sunday Express of London in 2006. “I’d exhausted all my ideas, rung all the changes possible. It was a formula that had run its course. The best had been done as far as I was concerned.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 2, 2011
An obituary on Tuesday about the film composer John Barry misstated the surname of one of the composers he considered an influence. He was Max Steiner, not Stern. The obituary also misstated part of the title under which the British movie “Beat Girl,” for which Mr. Barry wrote the music, was released in the United States. It was “Wild for Kicks,” not “Living for Kicks.”
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MARGARET PRICE, SOPRANO WITH RICH VOICE
By ZACHARY WOOLFE
Published: February 1, 2011
Margaret Price, the Welsh soprano who brought a voice of pure, floating richness to lieder and the operas of Mozart and Verdi, died on Friday in Wales. She was 69.
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Winnie Klotz/Metropolitan Opera
Margaret Price as Elisabetta in Verdi’s “Don Carlo” at the Metropolitan Opera in 1989.
Her death was confirmed by Paul Jenkins, a funeral home director. The BBC reported that she died of heart failure at her home near Cardigan, overlooking the Irish Sea.
Ms. Price was known for the clear beauty of her voice and the modest eloquence of her interpretations. After a recital at Carnegie Hall in 1985, Tim Page wrote in The New York Times, “Her voice has both majesty and intimacy — an all but impossible combination — and her artistry seems capable of illuminating every human truth.”
Margaret Berenice Price was born on April 13, 1941, in Blackwood, Wales. Her father was an amateur pianist who would accompany his daughter in songs when she was young but opposed the idea of a singing career, and she initially planned on becoming a biology teacher. Her music teacher interceded and brought her to audition at Trinity College for the eminent choral conductor Charles Kennedy Scott, who offered her admission on the spot.
She began her career as a mezzo-soprano, making her operatic debut in 1962 as Cherubino in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” at the Welsh National Opera. Her audition for London’s Royal Opera House featured the unlikely combination of Cherubino’s charming “Voi che sapete” and the seething “O don fatale” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo.” It was these two composers, if not these parts, with whom she became most closely associated.
The company hired her as an understudy, over the objections of the music director, Georg Solti, but in June 1963 she had a career breakthrough when she replaced an indisposed Teresa Berganza as Cherubino.
She developed her luminous upper register and gradually moved into the soprano repertoire under the guidance of James Lockhart, the conductor and accompanist with whom she had a long professional and personal relationship.
She sang her first Verdi role, Nanetta in “Falstaff,” in Wales in 1969, the same year she made her American debut in San Francisco as Pamina in “The Magic Flute.” She sang for the first time in Cologne as Donna Anna in “Don Giovanni” in 1971, the beginning of several happy years when her career was based there.
In 1973 Ms. Price made her debut at the Paris Opera, where she sang two of the roles that would become her trademarks: Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” and the Countess in “The Marriage of Figaro.” She performed both parts in the company’s acclaimed 1976 American tour.
She made a belated debut at the Metropolitan Opera, as Desdemona, in 1985, and returned as Elisabetta in “Don Carlo” in 1989. She spent much of the later years of her career in Munich, where she lived and where the Bavarian State Opera gave her the title “Kammersängerin,” honoring her service to the company. She was made a dame of the British Empire in 1993.
Despite her success in opera, her great love was lieder, and she released classic recordings of songs by Brahms, Schubert, Mahler and others. She preferred piano accompanists to conductors, whom she called “my pet hates,” but she worked closely with some of the century’s greatest, from Otto Klemperer, who cast her in the small role of Barbarina in his 1970 recording of “The Marriage of Figaro” and as Fiordiligi in his 1972 “Così Fan Tutte,” to Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti. And long after he expressed reservations about her in those first Covent Garden auditions, Georg Solti collaborated with her on several performances and recordings.
In 1982, Carlos Kleiber cast her against type as a radiant Isolde in his recording of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” which became one of her best-loved performances, though she never attempted the role onstage. Indeed, Ms. Price chose her parts carefully and retired them promptly when she outgrew them.
She left her core repertory — the Mozart heroines and four or five Verdi roles — only for Adriana Lecouvreur and Strauss’s Ariadne. The single role she regretted never trying was Lady Macbeth, and a Covent Garden “Norma” in 1987 was a rare misstep.
Ms. Price leaves no immediate survivors; her younger brother died several years ago. A shy, down-to-earth woman, she retired in 1999 to the Welsh coast, where she taught a few students and bred golden retrievers.
She professed not to miss singing at all, and was unsentimental when reviewing her career. Though Mr. Kleiber asked her to do it, she never sang the nostalgic Marschallin in Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier.” “That whole thing about turning the clock back,” she called it with mock disgust. She could never identify with that kind of regret.
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Ann
