RITA MILJO, GUARDIAN OF SOUTH AFRICAN BABOONS
Rita Miljo established a South African rescue operation for baboons, which she called “nature’s unwanted little people.”
Published: July 31, 2012
- Rita Miljo, whose devotion to rescuing orphaned, injured and mostly reviled baboons earned her the sobriquet “the Mother Teresa of Baboons,” died on Friday in a fire in her home on her 50-acre preserve in South Africa. She was 81.
Bobby, the first baboon she ever saved, in 1980, also perished in the blaze, as did two other baboons that were in her small apartment at the Center for Animal Rehabilitation and Education, a rescue operation she established in the bush of Limpopo Province about 250 miles northeast of Johannesburg.
The center announced Ms. Miljo’s death. Much of its headquarters was destroyed in the fire.
Shirley McGreal, founder of the International Primate Protection League, said in a statement that baboons are regarded as “vermin” in South Africa, despite their high intelligence and social skills. Baboons have long been shot and killed as a nuisance species. At one time, monetary rewards were offered for handing in a scalp and tail of the animal, and it is still legal to shoot baboons in some circumstances.
Tourism officials say baboons raid cars and frighten tourists, farmers say they attack farm animals, and suburban residents say they get too close to their homes. With its snout, the baboon’s face can seem less charming than the more humanlike one of the chimpanzee.
“Just as Mother Teresa cared for the most persecuted human beings in India, Rita cared for the pariah primates of Africa,” Ms. McGreal said.
Ms. Miljo’s conservation work followed the pattern of Jane Goodall’s with chimpanzees in Tanzania, Dian Fossey’s with gorillas in Rwanda and Biruté Galdikas’s with orangutans in Indonesian Borneo. But unlike those women, Ms. Miljo did not begin her work as a scientific researcher.
Rather, she had the same motivation as people who rescue stray cats. She began by spiriting away a battered young Bobby from a national park in Angola. She saved orphans, including one clinging to the decomposing body of its mother in a garbage dump. Some baboons she found were being held captive so that their feces could be collected for use in native medicines. Others had been used in medical experiments. She called baboons “nature’s unwanted little people.”
The 2011 book “Kalahari Dream,” by Chris Mercer and Beverly Pervan, told how Ms. Miljo had repeatedly been charged with transporting and keeping an animal without a permit. In one courtroom, a prosecutor demanded to know why she wasted her time on “problem animals like baboons.”
She responded, “Who are you to tell God that he should not have created baboons?”
Ms. Miljo had earlier rescued warthogs, porcupines, reptiles and birds as well. But by 1989 she had decided to concentrate on her beloved baboons and create a haven for them on the 50 acres she owned near Kruger National Park in South Africa.
The center’s private preserve is home to more than 400 baboons, according to its Web site. Some arrived as orphans or with injuries, and some wandered by as wild baboons attracted by their own kind. The center says the wild and tame baboons live together peacefully, which some people did not think possible.
The sanctuary was only the first step. Ms. Miljo also nudged her baboons into forming “troops,” as they would in the wild, and released them together in what she called a “walk to freedom.” More than a dozen troops, totaling about 250 baboons, have been released in the last 20 years; Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa, witnessed one.
Rita Neumann was born into an upper-middle-class family in 1931 in northeastern Germany. At 8 she joined the Hitler Youth and became one of its youngest local leaders. She liked the sports competition the organization provided, and the opportunity to escape an “overprotective mother,” she told The Washington Post Magazine in 2008.
“Only today, in hindsight, do I understand the total madness we were subjected to,” she said.
Though her ambition was to be a veterinarian, Ms. Miljo said, she was thwarted by a West German policy of giving veterans preferential admissions to universities. She worked in the zoo in Hamburg and moved to South Africa in 1953 with her husband, Lothar Simon, a mining engineer. A decade later, she bought the 50 acres of bush that would become her baboon center.
Ms. Miljo is survived by a brother. In 1972, her husband and 17-year-old daughter were killed in a small-plane crash. A brief second marriage, to Piet Miljo, a South African, ended in divorce.
Ms. Miljo was known to remember the location of each unmarked grave of her baboons. She was to be buried with them.
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NORMAN ALDEN, CHARACTER ACTOR FOR 50 YEARS
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Published: August 1, 2012
- Norman Alden, a character actor who played a soda jerk in “Back to the Future,” a cameraman in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” and the title role in the cult director Richard C. Sarafian’s first film, “Andy,” died Friday in Los Angeles. He was 87.
Deran Productions
Norman Alden in “Andy,” a drama that was directed by Richard C. Sarafian in 1965.
His death was confirmed by Linda Thieben, his partner of more than 30 years.
Mr. Alden acted in television and film for 50 years, appearing regularly on shows like “The Legend of Wyatt Earp,” “The Untouchables” and “My Three Sons.”
His television career led to parts in films like “Tora! Tora! Tora!” and “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.” He also voiced many cartoon characters, including King Arthur’s foster brother, Sir Kay, in Walt Disney’s “Sword in the Stone,” and Kranix, a robot who narrowly escapes destruction by Unicron, voiced by Orson Welles, in the 1986 animated film “Transformers.”
Mr. Alden’s star turn came in 1965, in the picaresque “Andy.” Andy, the 40-year-old mentally disabled son of Greek immigrants in New York, sets out for a last night of seedy adventures before his parents commit him to an asylum.
“Norman Alden, as the leading character, gropes his clumsy way, giving a throbbing sense of the great, gross energy and the pitiful childishness and inadequacy of the man,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.
Norman Adelberg was born in Fort Worth, Tex., on Sept. 13, 1924. He attended Texas Christian University and served in Europe during World War II before he began acting on the radio and performing stand-up comedy. He also performed in commercials, most notably as Lou the mechanic in AC Delco advertisements.
In addition to his partner, Ms. Thieben, Mr. Alden is survived by a son, Brent, and a daughter, Ashley, from a prior marriage; two stepsons, Randy and Kevin Thieben; a stepdaughter, Sherri Thieben; one grandson; and one step-granddaughter.
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MIHAELA URSULEASA, ROMANIAN BORN PIANIST
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: August 3, 2012
- Mihaela Ursuleasa, a Romanian-born pianist renowned for her prodigious technique and often idiosyncratic interpretations, was found dead on Thursday at her home in Vienna. She was 33.
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
Mihaela Ursuleasa performing in 2008.
The death was announced on Ms. Ursuleasa’s Web site, ursuleasa.com. The Vienna police told European news services that the cause was apparently a brain aneurysm.
Ms. Ursuleasa, who was performing internationally by the time she was a teenager, was known for her large tone, fleet fingers and eclectic programming, though she was perhaps most closely associated with Romantic composers like Prokofiev, Chopin and Schumann.
The winner of the 1995 Clara Haskil International Piano Competition, Ms. Ursuleasa was heard on some of the world’s most renowned recital stages, among them Wigmore Hall in London and Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall in New York. She appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the Vienna Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de France and the Minnesota Orchestra.
Critical response to Ms. Ursuleasa’s work ranged from the effusive to the bewildered, often within a single review. Where some reviewers heard tonal power, others heard unwelcome percussiveness. What some saw as interpretive passion, others viewed as excessive liberty with tempos and rhythm.
A 2008 review by Allan Kozinn in The New York Times, of Ms. Ursuleasa’s performance of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto at the Mostly Mozart Festival, encapsulates her singular approach:
“Ms. Ursuleasa played with a combination of ferocity and clarity that put Beethoven’s already striking contrasts into sharper relief and turned the score into a tense drama,” Mr. Kozinn wrote. “Interpretively she was out on the edge, but it was the kind of high-risk performance that makes the war horses worth revisiting.”
Ms. Ursuleasa was born in Brasov, Romania, on Sept. 27, 1978; her father was a jazz pianist and her mother a singer. Mihaela started piano lessons at 5 under her father’s supervision and began playing in public soon afterward.
Her father died when she was still a girl. Without his moderating influence, she later said, she was pushed harder and harder by her teachers, who urged her to tour heavily and tackle difficult repertory that was beyond her emotional ken — a set of pressures that devolves on many child prodigies.
“I didn’t have time for recreation then,” Ms. Ursuleasa told The St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1997. “I worked at the piano from 8 in the morning until 8 at night.”
When she was about 12, she played for the conductor Claudio Abbado, who arranged for her to study at the Vienna Conservatory. There, with her concert schedule curtailed, she could simply learn, and she did, earning a diploma from the conservatory in 1999.
Ms. Ursuleasa’s survivors include her mother and a daughter.
Her recordings include “Piano & Forte” (2009) and “Romanian Rhapsody,” released last year.
Writing in the classical music magazine American Record Guide, Harold C. Schonberg, a former senior music critic of The New York Times, reviewed Ms. Ursuleasa’s first album in 1996.
The recording, of Beethoven and Mozart concertos with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra under Jesús López-Cobos, was part of Ms. Ursuleasa’s prize for having won the Haskil Competition.
“Well, well. A competition winner who can convey strength without relentless pounding; who has temperament; who has a completely finished technique; who has a wide tonal palette,” Mr. Schonberg wrote, going on to praise Ms. Ursuleasa’s “sparkling finger work and a general feeling of joie de vivre.”
He added, “Here we have a real pianist, and we shall be hearing from her.”
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GORE VIDAL, ELEGANT WRITER
Published: August 1, 2012
- Gore Vidal, the elegant, acerbic all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization, died on Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, where he moved in 2003 after years of living in Ravello, Italy. He was 86.
Bernard Gotfryd/Pictorial Parade—Getty Images
GORE VIDAL in a 1969 portrait. An author, screenwriter and essayist with definite opinions and no inhibitions about sharing them, he took great pleasure in being one of the larger-than-life figures of his time.
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PhotographsRelated
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Master Polemicists From Similar Roots(August 2, 2012)
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Taking Note: Gore Vidal, R.I.P.(August 1, 2012)
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said.
Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent. He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of stylish, magisterial essays. He also wrote plays, television dramas and screenplays. For a while he was even a contract writer at MGM. And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment aphorism, put-down or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy.
Perhaps more than any other American writer except Norman Mailer or Truman Capote, Mr. Vidal took great pleasure in being a public figure. He twice ran for office — in 1960, when he was the Democratic Congressional candidate for the 29th District in upstate New York, and in 1982, when he campaigned in California for a seat in the Senate — and though he lost both times, he often conducted himself as a sort of unelected shadow president. He once said, “There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”
Mr. Vidal was an occasional actor, appearing in animated form on “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy,” in the movie version of his own play “The Best Man,” and in the Tim Robbins movie “Bob Roberts,” in which he played an aging, epicene version of himself. He was a more than occasional guest on talk shows, where his poise, wit, good looks and charm made him such a regular that Johnny Carson offered him a spot as a guest host of “The Tonight Show.”
Television was a natural medium for Mr. Vidal, who in person was often as cool and detached as he was in his prose. “Gore is a man without an unconscious,” his friend the Italian writer Italo Calvino once said. Mr. Vidal said of himself: “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”
Mr. Vidal loved conspiracy theories of all sorts, especially the ones he imagined himself at the center of, and he was a famous feuder; he engaged in celebrated on-screen wrangles with Mailer, Capote and William F. Buckley Jr. Mr. Vidal did not lightly suffer fools — a category that for him comprised a vast swath of humanity, elected officials particularly — and he was not a sentimentalist or a romantic. “Love is not my bag,” he said.
By the time he was 25, he had already had more than 1,000 sexual encounters with both men and women, he boasted in his memoir “Palimpsest.” Mr. Vidal tended toward what he called “same-sex sex,” but frequently declared that human beings were inherently bisexual, and that labels like gay (a term he disliked) or straight were arbitrary and unhelpful. For 53 years, he had a live-in companion, Howard Austen, a former advertising executive, but the secret of their relationship, he often said, was that they did not sleep together.
Mr. Vidal sometimes claimed to be a populist — in theory, anyway — but he was not convincing as one. Both by temperament and by birth he was an aristocrat.
A Child on the Senate Floor
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. was born on Oct. 3, 1925, at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where his father, Eugene, had been an All-American football player and a track star and had returned as a flying instructor and assistant football coach. An aviation pioneer, Eugene Vidal Sr. went on to found three airlines, including one that became T.W.A. He was director of the Bureau of Air Commerce under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mr. Vidal’s mother, Nina, was an actress and socialite and the daughter of Thomas Pryor Gore, a Democratic senator from Oklahoma.
Mr. Vidal, who once said he had grown up in “the House of Atreus,” detested his mother, whom he frequently described as a bullying, self-pitying alcoholic. She and Mr. Vidal’s father divorced in 1935, and she married Hugh D. Auchincloss, the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — a connection that Mr. Vidal never tired of bringing up.
After her remarriage, Mr. Vidal lived with his mother at Merrywood, the Auchincloss family estate in Virginia, but his fondest memories were of the years the family spent at his maternal grandfather’s sprawling home in the Rock Creek Park neighborhood of Washington. He loved to read to his grandfather, who was blind, and sometimes accompanied him onto the Senate floor. Mr. Vidal’s lifelong interest in politics began to stir back then, and from his grandfather, an America Firster, he probably also inherited his unwavering isolationist beliefs.
Mr. Vidal attended St. Albans School in Washington, where he lopped off his Christian names and became simply Gore Vidal, which he considered more literary-sounding. Though he shunned sports himself, he formed an intense romantic and sexual friendship — the most important of his life, he later said — with Jimmie Trimble, one of the school’s best athletes.
Trimble was his “ideal brother,” his “other half,” Mr. Vidal said, the only person with whom he ever felt wholeness. Jimmie’s premature death at Iwo Jima in World War II at once sealed off their relationship in a glow of A. E. Housman-like early perfection, and seemingly made it impossible for Mr. Vidal ever to feel the same way about anyone else.
After leaving St. Albans in 1939, Mr. Vidal spent a year at the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico before enrolling at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He contributed stories and poems to the Exeter literary magazine, but he was an indifferent student who excelled mostly at debating. A classmate, the writer John Knowles, later used him as the model for Brinker Hadley, the know-it-all conspiracy theorist in “A Separate Peace,” his Exeter-based novel.
Mr. Vidal graduated from Exeter at 17 — only by cheating on virtually every math exam, he later admitted — and enlisted in the Army, becoming first mate on a freight supply ship in the Aleutian Islands. He began work on “Williwaw,” a novel set on a troopship and published in 1946, while he was an associate editor at the publishing company E. P. Dutton, a job he soon gave up. Written in a pared-down, Hemingway-like style, “Williwaw” (the title is a meteorological term for a sudden wind out of the mountains) won some admiring reviews but gave little clue to the kind of writer Mr. Vidal would become. Neither did his second book, “In a Yellow Wood” (1947), about a brokerage clerk and his wartime Italian mistress. Mr. Vidal later said it was so bad, he couldn’t bear to reread it. He nevertheless became a glamorous young literary figure, pursued by Anaïs Nin and courted by Christopher Isherwood and Tennessee Williams.
In 1948 Mr. Vidal published “The City and the Pillar,” which was dedicated to J. T. (Jimmie Trimble). It is what would now be called a coming-out story, about a handsome, athletic young Virginia man who gradually discovers that he is homosexual. By today’s standards it is tame and discreet, but at the time it caused a scandal and was denounced as corrupt and pornographic. Mr. Vidal later claimed that the literary and critical establishment, The New York Times especially, had blacklisted him because of the book, and he may have been right. He had such trouble getting subsequent novels reviewed that he turned to writing mysteries under the pseudonym Edgar Box and then, for a time, gave up novel-writing altogether. To make a living he concentrated on writing for television, then for the stage and the movies.
Politics Onstage, and for Real
Work was plentiful. He wrote for most of the shows that presented hourlong original dramas in the 1950s, including “Studio One,” “Philco Television Playhouse” and “Goodyear Playhouse.” He became so adept, he could knock off an adaptation in a weekend and an original play in a week or two. He turned “Visit to a Small Planet,” his 1955 television drama about an alien who comes to earth to study the art of war, into a Broadway play. His most successful play was “The Best Man,” about two contenders for the presidential nomination. It ran for 520 performances on Broadway before it, too, became a well-received film, in 1964, with a cast headed by Henry Fonda and a screenplay by Mr. Vidal. It was revived on Broadway in 2000 and is now being revived there again as “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.”
Mr. Vidal’s reputation as a script doctor was such that in 1956 MGM hired him as a contract writer; among other projects he helped rewrite the screenplay of “Ben-Hur,” though he was denied an official credit. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of his friend Tennessee Williams’s play “Suddenly, Last Summer.”
By the end of the ’50s, though, Mr. Vidal, at last financially secure, had wearied of Hollywood and turned to politics. He had purchased Edgewater, a Greek Revival mansion in Dutchess County, N.Y., and it became his headquarters for his 1960 run for Congress. He was encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, a neighbor who had become a friend and adviser.
The 29th Congressional District was a Republican stronghold, and though Mr. Vidal, running as Eugene Gore on a platform that included taxing the wealthy, lost, he received more votes in running for the seat than any Democrat in 50 years. And he never tired of pointing out he did better in the district than the Democratic presidential candidate that year, John F. Kennedy.
Mr. Vidal also returned to writing novels in the ’60s and published three books in fairly quick succession: “Julian” (1964), “Washington, D.C.” (1967) and “Myra Breckinridge” (1968). “Julian,” which some critics still consider Mr. Vidal’s best, was a painstakingly researched historical novel about the fourth-century Roman emperor who tried to convert Christians back to paganism. (Mr. Vidal himself never had much use for religion, Christianity especially, which he once called “intrinsically funny.”) “Washington, D.C.” was a political novel set in the 1940s. “Myra Breckinridge,” Mr. Vidal’s own favorite among his books, was a campy black comedy about a male homosexual who has sexual reassignment surgery. (A 1970 film version, with Raquel Welch and Mae West, proved to be a disaster.)
Perhaps without intending it, Mr. Vidal had set a pattern. In the years to come he found his greatest successes with historical novels, notably what became known as his American Chronicles: “Washington, D.C.,” “Burr” (1973), “1876” (1976), “Lincoln” (1984), “Empire (1987),“Hollywood” (1990) and “The Golden Age” (2000).
He turned out to have a gift for this kind of writing. These novels were learned and scrupulously based on fact, but also witty and contemporary-feeling, full of gossip and shrewd asides. Harold Bloom wrote that Mr. Vidal’s imagination of American politics “is so powerful as to compel awe.” Writing in The Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said, “Mr. Vidal gives us an interpretation of our early history that says in effect that all the old verities were never much to begin with.”
But Mr. Vidal also persisted in writing books like “Myron” (1974), a sequel to “Myra,” and “Live From Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal” (1992), which were clearly meant as provocations. “Live From Golgotha,” for example, rewrites the Gospels, with Saint Paul as a huckster and pederast and Jesus a buffoon. John Rechy said of it in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, “If God exists and Jesus is his son, then Gore Vidal is going to hell.”
In the opinion of many critics, though, Mr. Vidal’s ultimate reputation is apt to rest less on his novels than on his essays, many of them written for The New York Review of Books. His collection “The Second American Revolution” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1982. About a later collection, “United States: Essays 1952-1992,” R. W. B. Lewis wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Vidal the essayist was “so good that we cannot do without him,” adding, “He is a treasure of state.”
Mr. Vidal’s essays were literary, resurrecting the works of forgotten writers like Dawn Powell and William Dean Howells, and also political, taking on issues like sexuality and cultural mores. The form suited him ideally: he could be learned, funny, stylish, show-offy and incisive all at once. Even Jason Epstein, Mr. Vidal’s longtime editor at Random House, once admitted that he preferred the essays to the novels, calling Mr. Vidal “an American version of Montaigne.”
“I always thought about Gore that he was not really a novelist,” Mr. Epstein wrote, “that he had too much ego to be a writer of fiction because he couldn’t subordinate himself to other people the way you have to as a novelist.”
Vidal vs. Buckley (and Mailer)
Success did not mellow Mr. Vidal. In 1968, while covering the Democratic National Convention on television, he called William F. Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Buckley responded by calling Mr. Vidal a “queer,” and the two were in court for years. In a 1971 essay he compared Norman Mailer to Charles Manson, and a few months later Mailer head-butted him in the green room while the two were waiting to appear on the Dick Cavett show. They then took their quarrel on the air in a memorable exchange that ended with Mr. Cavett’s telling Mailer to take a piece of paper on the table in front of them and “fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine.” In 1975 he sued Truman Capote for libel after Capote wrote that Mr. Vidal had been thrown out of the Kennedy White House. Mr. Vidal won a grudging apology.
Some of his political positions were similarly quarrelsome and provocative. Mr. Vidal was an outspoken critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and once called Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, and his wife, the journalist Midge Decter, “Israeli fifth columnists.” In the 1990s he wrote sympathetically about Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing. And after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he wrote an essay for Vanity Fair arguing that America had brought the attacks upon itself by maintaining imperialist foreign policies. In another essay, for The Independent, he compared the attacks to the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, arguing that both Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush knew of them in advance and exploited them to advance their agendas.
As for literature, it was more or less over, he declared more than once, and he had reached a point where he no longer much cared. He became a sort of connoisseur of decline, in fact. America is “rotting away at a funereal pace,” he told The Times of London in 2009. “We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.”
In 2003 Mr. Vidal and his companion, Mr. Austen, who was ill, left their cliffside Italian villa La Rondinaia (the Swallow’s Nest) on the Gulf of Salerno and moved to the Hollywood Hills to be closer to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Mr. Austen died that year, and in “Point to Point Navigation,” his second volume of memoirs, Mr. Vidal recalled that Mr. Austen asked from his deathbed, “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?”
“Of course it had,” Mr. Vidal wrote. “We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals.” Mr. Austen was buried in Washington in a plot Mr. Vidal had purchased in Rock Creek Cemetery. The gravestone was already inscribed with their names side by side.
Besides his nephew, Burr Steers, Mr. Vidal’s survivors include his sister, Nina Gore Auchincloss Straight.
After Mr. Austen’s death, Mr. Vidal lived alone in declining health himself. He was increasingly troubled by a knee injury he suffered in the war, and used a wheelchair to get around.
In November 2009 he made a rare public appearance to attend the National Book Awards in New York, where he was given a lifetime achievement award. He had evidently not prepared any remarks, and instead delivered a meandering impromptu speech that was sometimes funny and sometimes a little hard to follow. At one point he even seemed to speak fondly of Buckley, his old nemesis. It sounded like a summing up.
“Such fun, such fun,” he said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 3, 2012
An obituary about the author Gore Vidal in some copies on Wednesday included several errors. Mr. Vidal called William F. Buckley Jr. a crypto-Nazi, not a crypto-fascist, in a television appearance during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. While Mr. Vidal frequently joked that Vice President Al Gore was his cousin, genealogists have been unable to confirm that they were related. And according to Mr. Vidal’s memoir “Palimpsest,” he and his longtime live-in companion, Howard Austen, had sex the night they met, but did not sleep together after they began living together. It is not the case that they never had sex.
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R.G. ARMSTRONG, CHARACTER ACTOR IN WESTERNS AND TV
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Published: July 31, 2012
- R. G. Armstrong Jr., a rough-hewed character actor known for playing sheriffs, outlaws and other macho roles, died on Friday at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 95.
Everett Collection
R.G. Armstrong in the 1960 film “The Fugitive Kind.”
His death was confirmed by his daughter Robbie Armstrong-Dunham.
Mr. Armstrong’s five-decade career took off with guest spots on virtually all the popular Western television shows of the 1950s and ’60s, including “Have Gun — Will Travel” and “Gunsmoke.”
After meeting the writer and director Sam Peckinpah on the set of his 1960 series “The Westerner,” Mr. Armstrong became a regular in his films, playing an outspoken Christian fundamentalist in “Ride the High Country,” with Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea; a minister in “Major Dundee,” with Charlton Heston in the title role; and a vicious deputy sheriff alongside Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan (in a small role) in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”
Departing from westerns, Mr. Armstrong performed with James Earl Jones in “The Great White Hope” and with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the alien-thriller “Predator.” He appeared on innumerable non-western television shows like “The Twilight Zone” and “The Andy Griffith Show,” and was a favorite of Warren Beatty’s. Mr. Beatty cast him in the films “Heaven Can Wait,” “Reds” and as Pruneface in “Dick Tracy.”
Robert Golden Armstrong Jr. was born on April 7, 1917, in Birmingham, Ala. He graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and moved to New York to attend Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in the mid-1950s. That led him to parts in Elia Kazan’s original production of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1955 (as Dr. Baugh) and in other Broadway shows like “Orpheus Descending” and “The Miracle Worker” before heading for Hollywood’s television studios.
Besides his daughter Robbie, Mr. Armstrong, who was married three times, is survived by two other daughters from his first marriage, Laurie Nell and Daryl Armstrong; a son, Wynn; a daughter from an earlier relationship, Betty; and five grandchildren.
Mr. R.G. Armstrong was a very versatile character actor who always made quite an impression on me whenever I saw him performing.
Not mentioned in the article were three of my favourite R.G. Armstrong films: “Children of the Corn” (1984), theatrical film release; “Devil Dog : Hound of Hell” (1978), TV movie; and “The Beast Within” (1982), theatrical film release.
It was always fun to see him and hear his voice no matter the role he played.
He will be missed.
Rest in peace, Mr. Armstrong.
Rest in peace.
Ann
