Passages: A Year of the departed (Globe and Mail)
Hyfler/Rosner
Passages: A year of the departed
They came from every corner of Canada and the world, but
2008 produced a bumper crop of boldface deaths. Sandra
Martin provides her guide
December 31, 2008
JANUARY
Milt Dunnell, 102
Toronto Star sports columnist for more than half a century,
he covered New York Yankees pitcher Don Larsen's perfect
game in the 1956 World Series, Northern Dancer's Kentucky
Derby win in 1964, Muhammad Ali's Thrilla in Manila in 1975
and a lot more before and after.
Philip Agee, 72
CIA spy and suspected KGB double agent, he turned against
the agency and wrote the exposé Inside the Company: CIA
Diary.
Dusty Cohl, 78
Cowboy-hatted film buff and world class schmoozer, he
co-founded the Toronto International Film Festival.
Judah Folkman, 74
A vascular biologist, whose theory that malignant tumours
can be starved by choking their blood supply, encouraged the
development of drugs such as Avastin.
Bobby Fischer, 64
By defeating Soviet chess master Boris Spassky in 1972, in a
match that was trumpeted as the triumph of democracy over
communism, the media shy Mr. Fischer became a reluctant
American hero and the game soared in popularity.
John McHale, 86
He brought the Expos to life in Montreal and ran the club
for nearly two decades.
Talivaldis Kenins, 88
Latvian-born music teacher and innovator, he composed
chamber music, symphonies, concertos, and cantatas.
Robert Lemieux, 66
Lawyer and sovereigntist, he negotiated for the FLQ after
the kidnapping of James Cross and the murder of Pierre
Laporte and unsuccessfully defended the accused as
"political prisoners."
Heath Ledger, 28
Named after Heathcliff, Emily Bronte's tragic romantic hero,
the Australian actor (Brokeback Mountain, The Dark Knight)
was remembered by his parents as "the most amazing 'old
soul' in a young man's body" after he died of an accidental
drug overdose.
Suharto, 86
The self-styled "Smiling General," and president of
Indonesia (1967-1998), was lauded in the West until the
collapse of the Soviet Union turned a critical flashlight on
his flagrant human-rights abuses and the Asian financial
crisis exposed his regime's corruption and nepotism.
Robert Weaver, 87
Literary editor and CBC Radio producer who nurtured the
nascent talent of Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Mavis
Gallant, Margaret Laurence and Al Purdy.
FEBRUARY
Barry Morse, 89
As the implacable policeman Philip Gerard, he relentlessly
chased David Janssen, the wrongly accused murderer on The
Fugitive, the hit 1960s television show, and made himself
universally loathed. "I got more hate mail than anyone since
Adolf Hitler," Mr. Morse complained cheerfully. A versatile
and prolific veteran of the fledgling days of CBC TV, the
actor was also briefly the artistic director of The Shaw
Festival.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 91
Guru to the Beatles, he originated the Transcendental
Meditation movement in the 1950s and later bought two
islands off the coast of Nova Scotia where he planned, but
never erected, an international peace palace.
Willie P. Bennett, 56
A reluctant star, Willie P. Bennett was a singer songwriter
in the 1970s folk music scene that made headliners of Bruce
Cockburn and Stan Rogers. His hits included White Line and
Music in Your Eyes.
William F. Buckley Jr., 82
A libertarian and a public intellectual, he founded the
biweekly conservative magazine National Review, hosted
Firing Line, the Emmy-winning TV interview show for more
than three decades, and wrote a nationally syndicated
newspaper column. On the side, he was a prolific and erudite
writer of novels and polemics, beginning with God and Man at
Yale, his first and best known book.
Earl Butz, 98
Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon, he was forced
to eat his own words when his vulgar and racist remark about
the clothing tastes and personal hygiene habits of African
Americans was so widely reported that the President fired
him.
Roy Scheider, 75
A former boxer, whose broken nose and pugnacious style
earned him kudos in The French Connection, he uttered the
famous line, "You're gonna need a bigger boat," as Martin
Brody, the traumatized police chief in a resort town
terrorized by a killer shark in Steven Spielberg's film
Jaws.
Buddy Miles, 60
He played drums for Jimi Hendrix and later had the hit song
Them Changes.
Milt Harradence, 85
As a criminal lawyer, he learned his courtroom techniques by
aping a pro - his childhood hero and family friend, John
George Diefenbaker. A mentor to young lawyers, including the
boxer Willie de Wit, he sat on the Alberta Court of Appeal
and, as a private citizen, collected and flew vintage
airplanes, including an F-86 Sabre - at a time when many
good-sized countries were still using it as a fighter plane
in their armed forces.
MARCH
Simon Reisman, 88
MARCH 9
As a young Communist sympathizer in Montreal, or as Brian
Mulroney's tough-talking, cigar- chomping, free-trade
negotiator with the Americans, he spoke with brutal
frankness to his superiors, his colleagues and his
subordinates. Underneath, he was loyal and true. Born the
son of a factory worker, Mr. Reisman earned two economics
degrees, served as a troop commander in the Italian campaign
during the Second World War, and then joined the federal
civil service where he earned his stripes working on the
GATT treaty and the Auto Pact. He took early retirement in
1975, but was called back to negotiate the FTA talks in the
mid 1980s.
Jeff Healey, 41
Cancer robbed him of his eyes when he was a baby, but it
didn't stop him from learning to play the guitar as a
toddler, by stretching the instrument across his lap. His
hits included Angel Eyes, Hideaway, and a cover of the
Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps. But he grew weary of
bands, bars and the rock scene and began playing American
jazz from the 1920s and 1930s. He returned to rock for the
album, Mess of Blues, which was released a month after he
died of cancer.
Arthur C. Clarke, 90
A visionary, he gave the world HAL 9000 (Heuristically
programmed ALgorithmic Computer) the sentient artificial
intelligence aboard the spaceship Discovery. Stanley Kubrick
turned Mr. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey saga into the film
with Canadian actor Douglas Rain playing Hal's soft,
discursive, voice. Mr. Clarke, the British-born son of an
engineer, moved to Colombo in 1956 to think about the
universe and to plumb the ocean along the coast of Sri
Lanka.
Anthony Minghella, 54
A writer as well as a director, he transformed Michael
Ondaatje's poetic novel, The English Patient, into a
cinematic treasure - despite breaking his own ankle during
shooting - that won nine Oscars, including direction and
best picture. He also directed The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold
Mountain and Breaking and Entering.
Geoffrey Pearson, 80
His poker face belied his dry wit and, at school, earned him
the nickname Joker. He followed his famous father, Liberal
prime minister Lester B. Pearson, into External Affairs,
where the diplomat eventually became Ambassador to Moscow
and Pierre Trudeau's special representative on nuclear arms
control.
Paul Scofield, 86
A British stage actor, who never lived more than 15
kilometres from the village where he was born in West
Sussex, he often turned down roles because he didn't want to
leave home. A contemporary of Laurence Olivier and John
Gielgud, he practised the art of stillness - the ability to
convey complex emotions and thoughts with a twitch, a glance
or a pause. His greatest fame came from reprising his stage
role as Sir Thomas More, the Tudor statesman executed for
treason in 1535, after clashing with King Henry VIII, in the
film version of A Man for All Seasons.
APRIL
Beryl Plumptre, 99
APRIL 4
With stagflation rampant, prime minister Pierre Trudeau
named the 64-year old Mrs. Plumptre chair of the Food Prices
Review Board. Her appointment was ridiculed until the
rotten-egg scandal of 1974. The Canadian Egg Marketing
Agency, established by tough-talking agriculture minister
Eugene Whelan, had created such "eggflation" that warehouses
were bulging with 28 million rotten eggs. Overnight, Mrs.
Plumptre, who had lobbied to have marketing boards
dismantled, was transformed from scapegoat into champion.
Charlton Heston, 84
Devoutly religious and a fervent supporter of frontier
values and the right to bear arms, Mr. Heston got his break
as an actor because of his looks, not his beliefs. In the
early 1950s, Cecil B. DeMille saw the young actor's muscular
physique and steely gaze and cast him as Moses in The Ten
Commandments. Specializing in macho characters, including
Judah Ben Hur, Michelangelo, and John the Baptist, he once
said: "I have played three presidents, three saints and two
geniuses. If that doesn't create an ego problem, nothing
does."
Maggy Reeves, 85
Born Margarethe Weisz in Austria, she found her name and her
vocation in Canada. With backing from her client, Reva
Joseph, she opened the Maggy Reeves Salon in Toronto in
1957. Her signature designs were embellished with beading,
quilting and embroidery and she once made a cream coloured
jacket for publisher Jack McClelland decorated with the
names, titles and cover designs of his favourite M&S
authors.
Edward Lorenz, 90
An American meteorologist, he tried unsuccessfully to
predict the weather using computer models and in analyzing
his failure he pioneered chaos theory, the concept that
small disturbances can create enormous consequences, or "the
butterfly effect."
Albert Hofmann, 102
While studying the medicinal uses of a common fungus, the
chemist isolated lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in a Swiss
lab in 1938. When he repeated the experiment five years
later, he spilled some LSD on his finger, an accident that
induced "wonderful visions." Three days later he took a
larger dose and experienced the world's first scientifically
documented bad trip. He hoped that LSD would contribute to
psychiatric research, but its greatest fame came when
Timothy Leary urged everybody to "turn on, tune in and drop
out" in the 1960s.
MAY
Buzzie Bavasi, 93
His parents called him Emil, but his sister dubbed him
Buzzie because he was "always buzzing around." General
manager of the Dodgers from 1951 to 1968, his clubs won
eight National League pennants and four World Series with
star players such as Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Jackie
Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella and Maury Wills.
Charles Caccia, 78
Known as the environmental conscience of the Liberal Party,
the Italian-born trade analyst and politician was elected in
the Trudeaumania sweep of 1968 and served as an MP and
cabinet minister for the next three decades.
Arthur Kroeger, 75
The son of Mennonites from Ukraine, he grew up hungry in
Alberta during the Depression, won a Rhodes Scholarship in
the mid-1950s, and then joined the Canadian Civil Service.
Known as the "dean of deputy ministers," he served for more
than three decades, offering wise and prudent counsel to
prime ministers of varying political persuasions.
Robert Rauschenberg, 82
A prolific American artist who blurred the boundaries
between painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture, he
combined objects and media in an effervescently intuitive
and inventive way. Broke and unknown, he made collages out
of junk he found in the streets; later, when he was rich and
famous, he worked on vast international collaborations but
always with the same experimental spirit.
Eddy Arnold, 89
Country singer, actor and canny investor, Mr. Arnold, "The
Tennessee Plowboy," once advised a young singer, "Get a good
lawyer, a good accountant and be on time." His mellow
baritone delivered hits with That's How Much I Love You
(1946), I'll Hold You in My Heart (1947), Bouquet of Roses
(1948) and Make the World Go Away (1965).
Robert Mondavi, 94
After a row with his younger brother, he quit Charles Krug,
his family's modest wine business and started his own winery
in the Napa valley in 1966. A stellar salesman and promoter,
he organized the "Judgment of Paris" a decade later, a blind
tasting in which several Californian wines beat out French
vintages. Once the sixth-largest winery in the U.S., Mondavi
went public in 1993 and was sold to Constellation in 2004.
Jack Duffy, 81
A ringer for Frank Sinatra, he sang with the Tommy Dorsey
band in the 1940s, appeared regularly on The Perry Como Show
in the 1960s and was a fixture on Canadian variety shows,
including the long running Party Game in the 1970s.
Hamilton Jordan, 63
A whiz kid political strategist, he managed Jimmy Carter's
campaign for governor of Georgia and helped propel the
peanut farmer into the White House. After losing his own
race for a Senate seat, he became disillusioned with
big-party politics and supported maverick Ross Perot's
presidential bid in 1992.
Sydney Pollack, 73
An actor and director with a penchant for appearing in his
own movies, Mr. Pollack won an Oscar for Out of Africa,
starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, and was nominated
as a director for several more including They Shoot Horses,
Don't They? with Jane Fonda and Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman.
In Michael Clayton, his last big film, he was both producer
and actor, playing the sinister lawyer who browbeats George
Clooney.
JUNE
Sheela Basrur, 51
JUNE 2
Before SARS made her famous as Toronto's calm, authoritative
voice of reason and information, Dr. Basrur had an extensive
public health career, including working on rural health
projects in India and Nepal. Acutely aware that social
factors affect health and well-being, she pushed for
restaurant inspections, no-smoking policies, pesticide
controls, intervention on childhood obesity, and clear,
timely and informative dialogues with the public as the
first chief medical officer of health ever appointed by the
Ontario Legislature.
Yves Saint Laurent, 71
The Algerian-born Mr. Saint Laurent was only 18 when
Christian Dior spotted him at a Parisian design school.
Three years later the protégé was head of the House of Dior.
As a couturier, Mr. Saint Laurent put women in trousers -
tuxedos for evening, white pants and pea jackets for day -
and gave them the power to be both themselves and
fashionable in clothes that were inspired by art, the animal
kingdom and the zeitgeist.
Bo Diddley, 79
Before Elvis, there was Bo Diddley with his signature
syncopated beat - three strokes/rest/two strokes, a
rollicking rhythm that fans called "bone" music because
that's where you felt it. And before Mick Jagger, Mr.
Diddley, who was born Otha Ellas Bates, was kicking his
heels and leaping and strutting about the stage.
John Templeton, 95
A Yale graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, an audacious investor who
made billions in his globally diversified Templeton funds,
he was also an open-minded Presbyterian and philanthropist.
In business he practised the creed of "buy low, sell high,"
but he never failed to begin annual meetings of his mutual
funds investment company with prayers. What better way to
clear the minds of shareholders, he was fond of observing.
James Reaney, 81
The complete creative spirit, Mr. Reaney was a poet,
playwright, short-story writer, musician and scholar. The
tumultuous history of his "Sowesto" roots were the conduits
to his imagination in monumental works including The
Donnellys, a theatrical trilogy based on a feud in
Tipperary, Ireland, that culminated in the murders of James
Donnelly and five members of his family near Lucan, Ont. The
story allowed Mr. Reaney to mine ideas about myth, innocence
and guilt.
Tim Russert, 58
Felled by a heart attack while recording voiceovers for Meet
the Press, the NBC Sunday morning program, Mr. Russert's
death shocked the journalistic world into momentary silence.
The former NBC News Washington bureau chief, who was the
epitome of the hard-working, tough-minded patriotic
American, was the author of Big Russ and Me, a memoir of
growing up in a working class neighbourhood as the son of a
Second World War veteran.
Cyd Charisse, 86
The legs went on forever, and the rest of her wasn't bad
either. She danced with Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain
and with Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon. He called her,
"beautiful dynamite."
George Carlin, 71
The Grammy-winning comedian made irreverence funny as he
mocked the quotidian absurdities of life, busted the
boundaries of good taste and championed free speech in
routines such as Seven Words You Can Never Use on
Television.
JULY
Hamilton Southam, 91
After turning his back on the family newspaper business, he
embarked on a diplomatic career in the Pearsonian heyday at
External Affairs and later became a visionary cultural
figure. The founding general director of the National Arts
Centre, inaugural chair of Canada Day celebrations and a
force behind the Canadian War Museum, he died peacefully on
Canada Day.
Jesse Helms, 86
The right-wing senator from North Carolina and powerful
chair of the foreign relations committee was against school
integration, voting rights for African-Americans, gay
rights, foreign aid, welfare, modern art, abortion,
communism and doing business with Fidel Castro - to the
dismay of Canadian business interests.
Michael Debakey, 99
As a cardiovascular surgeon, he performed more than 60,000
operations on the famous - Russian president Boris Yeltsin
and movie actress Marlene Dietrich - and the unknown and
trained scores of doctors, many of whom withered under his
scathing criticism. He also invented more than 50 devices
and techniques to repair broken heart valves, clogged blood
vessels and ruptured arteries beginning, at age 23, with the
roller pump, an essential component of the heart-lung
machine.
Randy Pausch, 47
A computer scientist, he became famous, and perhaps
immortal, when The Last Lecture, a talk he gave about living
life to the fullest, was broadcast on the Internet and
turned into a bestselling book. "Context is everything," he
cheerfully admitted. "If I'd given that lecture, but I
weren't dying [of pancreatic cancer] it wouldn't have had
the gravitas."
Fenwick Lansdowne, 70
Contracting polio as a baby hobbled his movement, but it
probably heightened his sensory perceptions. A self-taught
Audubon-style water colourist, he had a precise and
capacious visual memory, acute hearing and a sensitivity to
movement and colour. Unlike most formal bird art, which
often looks frozen, his work conveyed the spirit of the
bird.
AUGUST
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 89
AUGUST 3
His literary career began where his military one ended: in
prison. As an artillery captain in the Red Army, he groused
about the way "the whiskered one," Joseph Stalin, was
conducting the war. He was arrested, tortured and sent to a
labour camp for seven years and then to internal exile. One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his novella about life
in "the human meat grinder" was published just as Khrushchev
launched his destalinization campaign. The Gulag Archipelago
earned Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize - and exile. After the
collapse of the Soviet Union, he returned, but his disgust
with capitalism was out of sync with the new Russia.
Isaac Hayes, 65
An early rapper and disco enthusiast, he not only wrote and
sang the theme for the blaxploitation film Shaft, he looked
the part with his shaved head, gold chains and sunglasses.
Ted Medland, 80
As head of Wood Gundy, he weathered the 1987 stock-market
crash and then co-founded the Ontario Teachers' Pension
Plan, still a major investment player.
Killer Kowalski, 81
Despite his sinister moniker and his penchant for eye
gouging, twisting his Iron Claw around an opponent's head
and leaping from the ropes onto a supine victim, the
6-foot-7, 275-pound hulk was a mild-mannered vegetarian who
composed poetry and eschewed tobacco and alcohol.
SEPTEMBER
Paul Newman, 83
SEPTEMBER 26
On screen, he played the cad with such grace and sexiness
that you almost forgot that falling for him wasn't worth the
heartache. Off screen, he played himself - an amateur
race-car driver and the devoted husband of Joanne Woodward,
living away from the Hollywood glare in Connecticut, and
raising millions for charity with his recipe for salad
dressing. Private life wasn't all wine and roses - a broken
first marriage and an adult son who committed suicide - but
his persona and his celebrity melded into a memorable human
being.
Thomas Bata, 93
He fled Czechoslovakia ahead of the Nazis, leaving behind
the shoe empire he had inherited, but he, and the families
he brought with him, built a new one in Canada and made Bata
an international synonym for shoes, especially in Africa.
Eph Diamond, 87
A smart boy from a poor immigrant family, he made millions
transforming the postwar urban and suburban landscape as a
co-founder of Cadillac Fairview, the real estate developer
behind the Eaton Centre in Toronto, the Pacific Centre in
Vancouver and dozens of other apartment, office and shopping
complexes.
Erik Nielsen, 84
Political tough guy and brother of comedian Leslie Nielsen,
Yukon Erik, who won the DFC as a pilot in the Second World
War, served in the governments of prime ministers John
Diefenbaker, Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney.
Richard Monette, 64
As an actor he bared all in Oh! Calcutta and broke
boundaries in Michel Tremblay's Hosanna, drawing upon his
Québécois accent and his mother's mannerisms to play the
troubled transvestite who dresses up as Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra. As a director, he earned raves for his production
of Taming of The Shrew and gratitude from audiences and
actors for re-energizing the Stratford Festival and keeping
it afloat during his 14 years as artistic director.
David Foster Wallace, 46
A virtuoso writer with a capacious intellect, he captured
the deeply meaningless weirdness of contemporary life in
America in essays, short stories and his tour de force
novel, Infinite Jest, but he was unable to conquer his own
suicidal despair.
Ron Lancaster, 69
Although stumpy in stature, he was a dramatic passer, an
evasive runner and such a powerful leader on the field and
behind the bench he was called the Little General. He played
quarterback for the Rough Riders or the Roughriders,
depending on whether he was in Ottawa or Regina, but he won
a Grey Cup for both teams and later displayed his
Cup-winning ways as a coach with the Edmonton Eskimos and
the Hamilton Tiger Cats.
Dora de Pedery Hunt, 94
A Hungarian émigrée, who was befriended by sculptors Frances
Loring and Florence Wyle, she galvanized the art of medal
making in this country, created symbolic decorations for
many of our highest honours and moulded the image of a
"mature" sovereign on our coins.
OCTOBER
Constance Rooke, 65
Literary critic, anthologist and human-rights activist, she
co-founded the Eden Mills Literary Festival with her husband
Leon Rooke.
Frankie Kerr, 52
Born to be punk, the front man for Teenage Head changed his
name to Venom when the mother of one of his band mates,
disturbed by the sounds emanating from her basement, said:
"That Frankie is full of venom." And that's the way
audiences, who tended to riot after performances, liked him
for more than 30 years.
Ben Weider, 85
With his brother Joe, he launched a global bodybuilding and
fitness empire that attracted an unknown Austrian muscleman
named Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even now, as Governor of
California, the former movie star credits his success to the
Weider brothers, calling them father figures. Besides
muscles, Mr. Weider, who was fascinated by Napoleon, built
up an impressive collection of Bonaparte memorabilia, which
he donated it to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Charley Fox, 88
A train-busting Spitfire pilot, he won the DFC and bar for
bravery and is credited with strafing German Field Marshal
Erwin Rommel's car after the Allied invasion of Normandy in
1944.
Charles Dubin, 87
A highly skilled lawyer who could argue a criminal case one
day and a civil one the next, he presided over the federal
inquiry into doping in amateur sport after Ben Johnson was
stripped of his gold medal at the Seoul Olympics. His
recommendations are still in force today.
Studs Terkel, 96
Trained as a lawyer, he worked in radio before finding his
métier as an interviewer recording ordinary people's
memories of the past. Among Mr. Terkel's books are the
Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Good War: An Oral History of
World War Two, Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great
Depression and Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel
About The American Obsession.
NOVEMBER
Miriam Makeba, 76
NOVEMBER 9
The first African woman to win a Grammy award, she had a
distinctive style that combined jazz, folk and township
rhythms. After starring in an anti-apartheid documentary and
calling for an international boycott of South Africa, her
passport was revoked and her records, including Pata Pata,
The Click Song and Malaika, were banned. More than three
decades later, the newly freed Nelson Mandela invited her
back to South Africa. Her "haunting melodies gave voice to
the pain of exile and dislocation," he said, even as "her
music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us."
Michael Crichton, 66
The five-times-married, nearly seven-foot-tall polymath "was
the greatest at blending science with big theatrical
concepts," said director Steven Spielberg, who turned Mr.
Crichton's bestseller Jurassic Park into an even more
popular film. Mr. Crichton, the author of Congo, Disclosure,
Rising Sun, Timeline, State of Fear, Prey, Next and the
creator of the long-running TV medical drama ER, trained to
become a doctor, but never practised because the novels he
wrote to pay his tuition - beginning with The Andromeda
Strain - were stellar hits with readers and filmmakers
alike.
Clive Barnes, 81
The British-born, Oxford-educated writer was both a dance
and a theatre critic in New York - distinction enough in
itself - but he was something more: a consummate
professional who understood that a critic's role is not
merely to damn or praise a performance, but to respond to it
openly and thoughtfully.
DECEMBER
Ted Rogers, 75
DECEMBER 2
A sickly child whose father died prematurely of heart
disease, Mr. Rogers was a visionary, a scrapper, a
micromanager, an aggressive entrepreneur, a patriotic
Canadian and a diehard supporter of the Conservative Party.
Having cheated death for so long, he embraced business risk,
flirted with bankruptcy, and ended up king of the heap in
the Canadian communications universe. His company owned a
cable television system, radio and TV stations, magazines
and a wireless network - and he made convergence work for
him by combining media content and transmission in a single
corporate entity.
Betty Goodwin, 85
She explored death, loss, mourning and memory in haunting,
seemingly evanescent paintings that embedded a narrative
punch in your psyche.
Odetta, 77
She sang at the 1963 March on Washington at which Martin
Luther King delivered his "I have a dream" speech and was a
deep influence on Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.
Sunny Von Bulow, 76
For 28 years the comatose heiress lay oblivious while two
attempted-murder trials and estate wrangles swirled about
her second husband, Claus von Bulow.
Mark Felt, 95
The FBI official blabbed about Watergate, but Washington
Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein protected him
until Mr. Felt himself finally revealed he was Deep Throat
in 2005.
Harold Pinter, 78
A playwright who turned silence into emotional menace, he
won the Nobel Prize in 2005 for a definitive and imitated
body of work including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker,
The Homecoming and Betrayal. An outspoken human-rights
advocate, he was savagely critical of the Bush
administration.
Eartha Kitt, 81
The sultry cabaret singer and self-described sex kitten was
a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Her 1953 hit Santa Baby
finally went gold this year.
Gordon Fairweather, 85
The New Brunswick lawyer and long-time Progressive
Conservative MP left politics in 1977 to become the first
chair of the Canadian Human Rights Commission.