P. T. BARNUM

July 4, 1810–April 7, 1891

BRIDGEPORT, Conn.—At 6:22 o’clock tonight the long sickness of P. T. Barnum came to an end by his quietly passing away at Marina, his residence in this city.

Shortly after midnight there came an alarming change for the worse. Drs. Hubbard and Godfrey, who were in attendance, saw at once that the change was such as to indicate that the patient could not long survive.

Among the sorrowing group in the sick room were Mrs. Barnum, the Rev. L. B. Fisher, pastor of the Universalist church of this city, of which Mr. Barnum was a member; Mrs. D. W. Thompson, Mr. Barnum’s daughter; Mrs. W. H. Buchtelle of New York, another daughter; C. Barnum Seeley, his grandson; Drs. Hubbard and Godfrey, his physicians; and W. D. Roberts, his faithful colored valet. The scene at the deathbed was deeply pathetic. All were in tears.

Throughout the city tonight there is the deepest sorrow. Day before yesterday Mr. Barnum was 80 years and nine months of age.

For more than 40 years, the great American showman toiled to amuse the public, and his life was filled with many remarkable adventures.

Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in Bethel, Connecticut, on July 5, 1810. His father, Philo Barnum, was a tailor, a farmer, and a tavern keeper.

The boy was early taught that if he would succeed in the world he must work hard. When he was only six years of age he drove cows to and from pasture, weeded the kitchen garden at the back of the humble house in which he was born, and as he grew older rode the plow horse, and whenever he had an opportunity attended school.

In arithmetic he was particularly apt, and he was also at a remarkably early age aware of the value of money. When he was six he had saved coppers enough to exchange for a silver dollar. This he “turned” as rapidly as he could, and by peddling homemade molasses candy, gingerbread, and a liquor made by himself called cherry rum, he had accumulated when he was not quite 12 a sum sufficient to buy a sheep and a calf.

For years the life of young Barnum was one of constant struggle. His father died when he was 15, and he was left almost penniless. He was by turns a peddler and trader, a clerk in Brooklyn and New York, the keeper of a small porter house, the proprietor of a village store, and editor of a country newspaper. After this he kept a boarding house, made a trip to Philadelphia and was married to a young tailoress, whom he years after described as “the best woman in the world.”

Then in 1835, he found the calling for which he seems to have been born. In short, he went into “the show business.”

Regarding this period in his life he later wrote: “By this time it was clear to my mind that my proper position in this busy world was not yet reached. I had not found that I was to cater for that insatiate want of human nature—the love of amusement; that I was to make a sensation in two continents, and that fame and fortune awaited me so soon as I should appear in the character of a showman. The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a worldwide fame Princes well might envy. Men, women, and children who cannot live on gravity alone need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is, in my opinion, in a business established by the Creator of our nature.”

The first venture to which Mr. Barnum thus refers was a remarkable negro woman, who was said to have been 161 years old and a nurse of Gen. George Washington. The wonders of this person are set forth in this notice, from the Pennsylvania Inquirer of July 15, 1835:

“CURIOSITY.—The citizens of Philadelphia and its vicinity have an opportunity of witnessing at Masonic Hall one of the greatest natural curiosities ever witnessed, viz., Joice Heth, a negress, aged 161 years, who formerly belonged to the father of Gen. Washington. She has been a member of the Baptist Church 116 years, and can rehearse many hymns and sing them according to former custom. She was born near the old Potomac River, in Virginia, and has for 90 or 100 years lived in Paris, Ky., with the Bowling family.”

For $1,000, Mr. Barnum bought the “wonderful negress,” and, making money by the venture, he continued to follow the business of a showman. During the years which followed he traveled all over this country and in many other parts of the world.

Of all his enterprises, however, he regarded his connection with the American Museum and his management of Jenny Lind and Tom Thumb as the most important. On the 27th of December, 1841, he obtained control of the American Museum, on the corner of Ann Street and Broadway in New York, and for years afterward he continued to conduct that establishment.

It became one of the most famous places of amusement in the world. In it were exhibited “the Feejee Mermaid,” “the original bearded woman,” and giants and dwarfs almost without end.

It was in November, 1842, that Mr. Barnum engaged Charles S. Stratton, whom he christened Tom Thumb. With him he traveled and made large sums of money in different parts of the world.

Regarding a visit which he made with Tom Thumb to the Queen of England, Mr. Barnum wrote: “We were conducted through a long corridor to a broad flight of marble steps, which led to the Queen’s magnificent picture gallery… The General familiarly informed the Queen that her pictures were ‘first-rate.’”

Mr. Barnum regarded his engagement of Jenny Lind as one of the great events in his career. That engagement was entered into in 1850. It resulted in a fortune for Mr. Barnum, and in the payment to Jenny Lind for 95 concerts of the sum of $176,675.09.

After his engagement with Jenny Lind, Mr. Barnum was everywhere regarded as being “a made man.” But, as the years went on, trouble fell upon him, and by unwise speculation he lost every penny he had in the world.

Still he did not give up the fight, but by the help of friends, the increase in value of certain real estate owned by him, and the great energy which was one of his chief traits, he again commenced in a small way, subsequently took Tom Thumb to Europe for a second visit, and repaired his broken fortunes. Later on he again undertook the management of the museum in New York, and upon its destruction by fire established “the new museum” further up Broadway. It was also burned, and he lost much money. But fortune again smiled upon him, and as a manager of monster circuses and traveling shows he met with much success in all parts of the country.

During all his life Mr. Barnum was a great believer in the power of advertising. No man knew better than he the value of printer’s ink, and nothing was too ambitious for him to undertake.

One of the greatest chances of his life came with Jumbo. He had often gazed on that monster in the Zoological Gardens at London, but it had never occurred to him as possible to possess the English pet. One of his agents induced the manager of the garden to offer the animal for $2,000. Mr. Barnum snapped up the offer at once. There was a cry of protest from all England. Pictures of Jumbo, Jumbo stories and poetry, Jumbo collars, neckties, cigars, fans, polkas, and hats were put on the market and worn, sung, smoked, and danced by the entire English nation.

Mr. Barnum was importuned to name the price at which he would relinquish his contract and permit Jumbo to remain in London. He said he had promised to show the animal in America and had advertised him extensively. Therefore, $100,000 would not induce him to cancel the purchase.

When Jumbo and his movements became a matter of deep public interest, the newspapers printed all they could get about him. His untimely death was mourned by two nations.

Mr. Barnum published his will in 1883. He valued his share in the show at $3,500,000, and the Children’s Aid Society was named as a beneficiary of a certain percentage of each season’s profits. “To me there is no picture so beautiful as smiling, bright-eyed, happy children; no music so sweet as their clear and ringing laughter,” the great showman explained. “That I have had power to provide innocent amusement for the little ones, to create such pictures, to evoke such music, is my proudest reflection.”

EDWIN BOOTH

November 13, 1833–June 7, 1893

Edwin Booth, the well-known actor, died at the Players’ this morning at 1:17 o’clock. For several days he had been growing weaker, and all hope of his recovery had been abandoned.

It was in a heavy, painless sleep that Mr. Booth’s spirit passed away.

Mrs. Grossman, Mr. Booth’s daughter, had maintained a silent vigil, and it was in her arms that her father died.

Within half an hour every club in New York knew of the great tragedian’s death.

His father, Junius Brutus Booth, came to America in 1821, discouraged with the treatment he received in the English theater. There is no doubt that this Booth was a great actor, greater in many parts than his rival, Edmund Kean. But no place in the public heart could be found for another Kean while Kean lived.

Junius Brutus Booth’s second wife, had been Mary Ann Holmes of Reading, England. They had 10 children. Of these John Wilkes took to the stage, but, because of his profligacy, such gifts as he had were wasted.

The elder Booth bought a farm near the town of Belair, near Baltimore, Md., and there Edwin was born, Nov. 13, 1833.

He was, almost from his infancy, his father’s favorite. But the father did not want his favorite son to be an actor. He never dreamed that little Edwin, in whom he saw no traces of talent, would be for years the foremost actor of a Nation of 60 million, and in his time the wisest and most eloquent interpreter of Shakespeare on the English-speaking stage.

Edwin Booth made his first appearance on the stage Sept. 10, 1849, at the Boston Museum, in the insignificant part of Tressel in “Richard III.” He made his first appearance in New York Sept. 27, 1850, at the old National Theatre, in “The Iron Chest,” acting Wilford to his father’s Mortimer.

Edwin Booth and his father went to California in June, 1852, and appeared in several plays at the American Theatre in Sacramento. The father died later that year.

Edwin Booth became a member of the stock company of the Sacramento Theatre in 1855. He played Richard III on Aug. 11, and was hailed as “a promising young actor.” The next week, he appeared as Hamlet for the first time.

He was hailed as the rising star, upon whose shoulders the mantle of the elder Booth had fallen. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who was then a Lieutenant, told in an after-dinner speech nearly 35 years later at Delmonico’s, as he stood beside the chair of Mr. Booth, how, when he could not afford to go to the theater, he used to sit at night on the veranda of his hotel across the way and listen to the thunders of applause that greeted the young tragedian.

Mr. Booth’s first New York engagement was at Burton’s New Theatre. It began May 4, 1857. The young tragedian appeared as Richard III, King Lear, Hamlet, and Romeo. These engagements were not profitable, but the tide had turned in his favor Nov. 26, 1860, when he began another engagement at the same house, which had been renamed Winter Garden Theatre.

His Hamlet began to be spoken of seriously. The popular applause indicated that his Hamlet was already preferred to all other Hamlets.

Mr. Booth went to England for the first time in 1861 and acted in London. He was married that year to Mary Devlin, who had been an actress. She died on Feb. 21, 1863, when she was not yet 23, leaving an infant daughter, Edwina.

At Winter Garden Theatre Sept. 29, 1862, Mr. Booth reappeared and was cordially received. “Hamlet” and “The Merchant of Venice” drew large audiences. Mr. Booth’s next engagement at Winter Garden Theatre began with “Hamlet” May 3, 1864. This theater was then leased by him and his brother-in-law, John Sleeper Clarke.

The manager, William Stuart, an energetic Irish adventurer, was a skillful advertiser, and spared no pains in trumpeting the merits of Edwin Booth. The posters on the fences bearing his name were big enough for a circus.

Public excitement about the actor was at fever heat. Critics who doubted “if the modern stage had anything to equal his Hamlet” were plentiful. The handsome face of the actor, shaded by dark flowing locks and bearing an expression of poetic melancholy, was impressed on the eye of the multitude. His beautiful voice was raved about. His hour of triumph was at hand.

The celebrated long run of “Hamlet”—100 nights—began at Winter Garden, Oct. 31, 1864. His “Hamlet” was transferred to the Boston Theatre on March 24, 1865.

Three weeks later the country received the dreadful shock caused by the assassination of President Lincoln by Edwin Booth’s younger brother. Edwin suffered no indignity, but the shame of the family disgrace burdened his mind. He never afterward appeared in Washington.

He returned to the New York stage at Winter Garden Theatre, Jan. 3, 1866, as Hamlet. He was received with cheers which expressed the sympathy of the public and the confidence in his patriotism, but perhaps also indicated the delight of the crowd at the sight of the man who had inevitably become more conspicuous since his brother’s dastardly crime.

Booth had now reached his zenith. He had never before acted with the firmness, repose, strength, and exquisite delicacy that then marked his work, and he never surpassed the portrayals of Shakespeare’s heroes which he gave during that last year at Winter Garden Theatre. In December, 1866, he played Iago to the Othello of Bogumil Dawison, the renowned German actor. Each used his own native language, and this was the first of many similar performances on the New York stage.

The Hamlet Medal, testifying to public approbation of Booth’s impersonation of the Prince of Denmark, was presented to him at Winter Garden, Jan. 22, 1867, after a performance of Shakespeare’s most esteemed tragedy. The medal, now preserved among the treasures of The Players in their clubhouse in Gramercy Park, is of gold, oval in shape, surrounded by a golden serpent. In the center is the head of Booth as Hamlet.

Mr. Booth was now, in his 34th year, the most popular actor in the United States. An enormous fortune seemed to be within his grasp. He had long desired to own a theater in which Shakespeare should be fittingly represented.

The cornerstone of Booth’s Theatre, at Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street, was laid April 8, 1868, and the house was opened to the public Feb. 3, 1869. The exterior was of stone, massive and imposing in appearance. The auditorium was spacious and handsome. The acoustics were perfect. There was a great crowd in the theater on opening night for “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Romeo and Juliet” ran until April 12, when “Othello” was produced with equal magnificence, Mr. Booth playing the Moor to the Iago of Adams, and the young actress Mary McVicker playing Desdemona. She and Mr. Booth were married on June 2, 1869.

Mr. Booth came forward again on Jan. 5, 1870, in “Hamlet.” Booth’s Hamlet, as graceful, touching, and picturesque as ever, was then supported, none too well, by the Claudius of Theodore Hamilton, the Laertes of William E. Sheridan, and the Polonius of D. C. Anderson.

But the money went out faster than it came in. Booth had mortgaged the property heavily, and borrowed large sums to meet his expenses. His advisers and assistants were neither wise nor competent. The stage was neglected, and the plays badly mounted. After the performance June 21, 1873, Booth formally retired from the management.

In February, 1874, Mr. Booth filed a petition in voluntary bankruptcy. His assets were announced as $9,000; the liabilities were enormous. Jarrett & Palmer, the firm of theatrical speculators who had inflicted Boucicault’s “Formosa, or the Railroad to Ruin,” on New York at Niblo’s, secured the lease of the theater at an annual rental of $40,000. Mr. Booth protested against their use of his name as a trademark, but they found another Booth, the owner of a printing house, who cheerfully lent his name to the theater, which was called Booth’s to the end. The property was sold, in foreclosure, Dec. 3, 1874.

The theater passed through many vicissitudes. Clara Morris tried to act Lady Macbeth there and failed. Sarah Bernhardt there made her American début.

The ill-fated theater, the noblest home the drama ever had in New York, was sold in 1883 to the notorious James D. Fish and Ferdinand Ward, who rebuilt it for mercantile purposes.

In March, 1891, at the Broadway Theatre, Booth played Shylock to the Bassanio of Mr. Barrett. Although his acting had been listless in his later years, he had never before offered a performance so feeble. His speech was halting; he could not always he heard; he walked with difficulty. He had been ill, and he lacked the strength to continue his labors. The sudden death of Lawrence Barrett, March 20, 1891, caused an early close of the season.

Booth then appeared in Brooklyn, at the Academy of Music. The representation of “Hamlet” there Saturday afternoon, April 4, 1891, was generally regarded as his “farewell,” and such, indeed, it proved to be.

The club known as The Players, designed to provide a social meeting place for actors, dramatists, managers, and persons interested in the welfare of the stage, and to get together a great theatrical library and preserve valuable dramatic mementos and works of art, was founded in 1888 by Edwin Booth and others. Mr. Booth bought the house at 16 Gramercy Park and paid for its redecoration under the direction of Stanford White. This he presented to The Players. He retained the use of rooms in the house, which he made his home. The clubhouse was opened to the members and their friends on Dec. 31, 1888.

In recognition of this splendid gift a supper was given at Delmonico’s in Mr. Booth’s honor, March 30, 1889. The following Wednesday Mr. Booth was seized with an alarming fainting fit on stage in Rochester, N.Y., during a performance of “Othello.” His physicians said at the time of his last engagement in New York that he was afflicted with malaria, caused by the bad ventilation and imperfect plumbing of some of the theaters in which he had been acting.

SARAH BERNHARDT

October 22 or 23, 1844–March 26, 1923

PARIS—Sarah Bernhardt is dead. The “greatest actress” passed away at 7:59 P.M. in the arms of her son, Maurice. Death came in her home with windows open on the Boulevard Pereire. It was the sudden closing of these windows that gave the signal to those waiting and watching without that Bernhardt was dead.

Bernhardt’s grandson, M. Grosse, brought the first flowers into the death chamber—mauve and white lilacs. Flowers came from many friends, and soon the room was heaped with them, those from the family and dearest friends being placed on the bed.

The actress’s son, her granddaughter, Lysiane, and Mlle. Louise Abbema, who was Bernhardt’s best friend, had remained close to the chamber where the patient lay.

Bernhardt suffered greatly in her last illness. From time to time she became delirious and declaimed passages from the tragedy “Phèdre” and “L’Aiglon,” her two greatest triumphs.

Word of Bernhardt’s death spread through Paris rapidly. At the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, where “L’Aiglon” was playing, the announcement was made in the middle of the first act. The play was stopped and the audience filed out sorrowfully.

Crowds collected outside the residence on the Boulevard Pereire, gazing at the shuttered windows and watching the carriages and automobiles bringing celebrities of the literary and dramatic world.

Mme. Bernhardt was 78 years old. An acute uremic condition was the cause of death.

“I dream of dying, like the great Irving, in the harness,” said Mme. Bernhardt in September, 1910. That sentence sums up her whole life. Work was her fountain of youth. She was never idle; she never rested.

Sarah Bernhardt was the natural child of Julie Bernhardt and a merchant of Amsterdam, who died shortly after her birth, on Oct. 22, 1844. At the age of eight she was placed in Mme. Fressard’s school at Auteuil, and two years later, in 1855, was a scholar at the Grandchamps Convent at Versailles. The religious atmosphere of the convent made a strong appeal to her emotional nature, and after being converted to the Catholic faith she decided to become a nun.

Here also she appeared in her first play, called “Toby Recovering His Eyesight.” This was a miracle play, and Mme. Bernhardt appeared, as she wrote in her “Memoirs,” in “heavenly blue tarletan, with a blue sash around my waist to help confine the filmy drapery, and two paper wings fastened upon each shoulder for celestial atmosphere.”

Her mother was much alarmed when her daughter announced that she would become a nun, and a family council was called. She was taken to the theater every night, but she persisted in her wish to enter the nunnery. When 14 years old, she was taken to a performance of “Britannicus” at the Théâtre Français, and was so moved and impressed that her family decided to make her an actress.

Two years later she competed for the National Conservatoire, and at the public trials recited a simple fable of La Fontaine’s, “The Two Pigeons.” Her performance so astonished that she was immediately and unanimously entered.

In 1862 Edmond Thierry called her to the Comédie Francaise, and she made her professional début in a minor part on “Iphigenie.” Then came four years of hard work done in obscurity.

She entered the Gymnase de Montigny in 1866. Duquesnel of the Odéon recognized her latent genius and engaged her, paying her first year’s salary out of his own pocket.

In 1867 Mme. Bernhardt made her debut as Armande in “Les Femmes Savantes.” This appearance is considered the real starting point of her career, and she began to be famous by the end of 1869.

Then came the Franco-Prussian war, and she became a nurse. She turned a Parisian theater into a hospital and for more than a year gave herself up to the care of the wounded and dying.

In 1872 Mme. Bernhardt signed a contract to become a life member of the Comédie Francaise and scored great successes in “Phèdre,” as Berthe in “La Fille de Roland,” and as Posthumia in “Rome Vaincue.” Three years later she was elected a sharing life member of the Comédie Française.

Then came a period of clashes with M. Perrin, the managing director of the Comédie Française. Mme. Bernhardt received roles that were uncongenial. One day, after remonstrating with M. Perrin for assigning her the part of Clorinda in “L’Aventurière,” she burst out of his office like a tempest and gave up the stage.

She returned to the Comédie Française, only to break with M. Perrin permanently shortly after. This last break was brought about by an incident typical of the Bernhardt temperament.

She insisted on going up in a balloon—this was during the Exposition of 1878—and M. Perrin was sure she would break her engagement to play at the matinée that day. She landed just in time to keep the appointment, but Perrin was furious and announced that she was fined 1,000 francs.

Mme. Bernhardt immediately resigned. She then played for the first time outside France, appearing in London in “Phèdre” and as Mrs. Clarkson in “L’Etrangère.”

“The English people,” she said after this invasion, “first among all foreign nations welcomed me with such kindness that they made me believe in myself.”

On Nov. 8, 1880, she made her first appearance in New York at Booth’s Theatre. Mme. Bernhardt’s first American tour comprised 27 performances in this city and 136 in 39 other cities during a period of seven months. She played eight dramas, including “La Dame aux Camelias” and “Frou Frou.”

Then came a tour of Russia and Denmark, and in 1882 she earned fresh triumphs at the Vaudeville in Paris. One year later she became the owner of the Porte Sainte-Martin Theatre and played in repertoire until 1886, when she made her second American tour. Her third American tour followed in 1888–1889.

Then in 1891–1893 Mme. Bernhardt made an extended tour covering the United States, South America and many capitals of Europe. On her return to Paris she undertook the management of the Theatre de la Renaissance.

Mme. Bernhardt made her fifth American tour in 1896, and that December was present at a festival given in her honor in Paris. She was crowned queen of the drama before 500 artists, actors and authors.

Her sixth American tour was made in 1901–1902, during which she gave 180 performances in the principal cities. Mme. Bernhardt returned to her playhouse in Paris and presented a number of new plays with brilliant success, and in 1905 made her seventh visit to this country under the management of the Shuberts.

She played in both North and South America, and in Quebec, Canada, she went through, an unpleasant experience. She was credited by the newspapers with making certain criticisms of French Canadians, and she and her company were attacked by a mob on their way to the station after the engagement. Eggs, stones, sticks and snowballs were thrown.

She played in halls, armories, skating rinks, and churches, and in Texas, owing to the fact that no theaters could he obtained, she played in a Barnum & Bailey tent.

In 1910 she returned to this country for the first of her “farewell tours.” In 35 weeks she gave 285 performances.

Mme. Bernhardt returned to this country again in December, 1912. Her repertoire consisted of famous scenes from her great successes, and the tour was an unqualified success. When the war came, she converted her theater into a hospital, just as she had nearly a half-century before.

Then in the midst of her ministrations she was stricken with inflammation of the right knee and had to undergo an operation which cost her her right leg. The operation was performed in February, 1915. That she was acting again at the end of six months was typical of her indomitable will.

In November she returned to the Paris stage and acted in a dramatic sketch called “Les Cathedrales,” in which the players represented the voices of the devastated cathedrals of France. Mme. Bernhardt was the voice of the Cathedral of Strasbourg, and when she recited the closing words, “Weep, Germans, weep: thy Prussian Eagles have fallen bleeding into the Rhine,” the audience became wild with emotion.

Mme. Bernhardt arrived on her last visit here in October, 1916. She then set off on one of the most arduous tours of her career, playing first in legitimate theaters and then on the Keith vaudeville circuit. At the Palace in this city she invariably received an ovation, particularly for her performance as the young French officer in “Du Theatre au Champ d’Honneur.” She closed her season in Cleveland in October, 1918.

In October, 1921, she presented at her own theater “La Gloire,” a play written for her by Maurice Rostand. Admitted to be the greatest actress of all time, Mme. Bernhardt also won distinction as a sculptor, writer, and artist. Her group “After the Storm” received honorable mention at the Salon in 1878. Her book “Dans les Nuages,” written in 1878, describing her balloon ascension, was widely read, as were her “Memoirs.”

She was married in 1882 to Jacques Damala, a handsome Greek actor of her own company, but they parted after one year. Later, when he was dying of consumption, she removed him to her home and nursed him until the end.

For 40 years Mme. Bernhardt’s residence in Paris was the old house on the Boulevard Pereire. Her natural son lived with her there.

Her best work was done where she was able to display her powerful emotions. She was never surpassed and never will be, her critics say, in the emotional school. She played more than 200 parts and created most of them.

She received honors without number. Public fêtes for her were given in London and Paris and other capitals, and in Vienna one night after playing “Hamlet” the audience tore the horses from her carriage and dragged her through the street shouting “Vive Bernhardt!”—Associated Press

HARRY HOUDINI

March 24, 1874–October 31, 1926

DETROIT—Harry Houdini, world famous as a magician, a defier of locks and sealed chests and an exposer of spiritualist frauds, died here this afternoon after a week’s struggle for life.

Death was due to peritonitis, which followed an operation for appendicitis. A second operation was performed last Friday. Like a newly discovered serum, used for the first time in Houdini’s case, it was of no avail. He was 52 years old.

The chapter of accidents that ended fatally for the man who so often had seemed to be cheating the jaws of death began early in October at Albany, N.Y. On the opening night of his engagement a piece of apparatus used in his “water torture cell” trick struck him on the foot.

A bone was found to be fractured and Houdini was advised to discontinue his tour. He declined.

On Tuesday, Oct. 19, while in Montreal he addressed a class of students on spiritualistic tricks. After the address he commented on the ability of his stomach muscles to withstand hard blows without injury.

One of the students without warning struck him twice over his appendix. After he had boarded a train for Detroit he complained of pain.

Upon his arrival, Dr. Leo Kretzka, a physician, told the patient there were symptoms of appendicitis. At his hotel after the performance the pain increased. The following afternoon he underwent an operation for appendicitis.

According to the physicians, one of the blows he received in Montreal caused the appendix to burst.

Whatever the methods by which Harry Houdini deceived a large part of the world for nearly four decades, his career stamped him as one of the greatest showmen of modern times. With few exceptions, he invented all his tricks and illusions. In one or two cases Houdini alone knew the whole secret.

Houdini was born on March 24, 1874. His name originally was Eric Weiss and he was the son of a rabbi. He did not take the name Harry Houdini until he had been a performer for many years.

Legend has it that he opened his first lock when he wanted a piece of pie in the kitchen closet. When scarcely more than a baby he showed skill as an acrobat and contortionist, and both these talents helped his start in the show business and his development as an “escape king.”

At the age of nine Houdini joined a traveling circus, touring Wisconsin as a contortionist and trapeze performer. Standing in the middle of the ring, he would invite anyone to tie him with ropes and then free himself inside the cabinet.

In the ring at Coffeyville, Kan., a sheriff tied him and then produced a pair of handcuffs with the taunt, “If I put these on you, you’ll never get loose.”

Houdini, still only a boy, told him to go ahead. After a much longer stay in the cabinet than usual, the performer emerged, carrying the handcuffs in his hands.

That was the beginning of his long series of escapes from every known sort of manacle. For years he called himself the Handcuff King.

From 1885 to 1900 he played all over the United States, in museums, music halls, circuses, and medicine shows.

During a six-year tour of the Continent he escaped from dozens of famous prisons. He returned to America to find his fame greatly increased and a newly organized vaudeville ready to pay him many times his old salary.

In 1908 Houdini dropped the handcuff tricks for more dangerous and dramatic escapes, including one from an airtight vessel, filled with water and locked in an iron-bound chest. He would free himself from the so-called torture cell, his own invention. In this he was suspended, head down, in a tank of water. He would hang from the roof of a skyscraper, bound in a straitjacket, from which he would wriggle free to the applause of the crowd in the street below. Thrown from a boat or bridge into a river, bound hand and foot and locked and nailed in a box, doomed to certain death by drowning or suffocation, he would emerge in a minute or so, swimming vigorously to safety.

An evidence of the deep impression his work made on the public mind is the fact that the Standard Dictionary now contains a verb, “houdinize,” meaning “to release or extricate oneself (from confinement, bonds, or the like), as by wriggling out.”

Houdini, who lived at 278 West 113th Street and in 1894 married Wilhelmina Rahner of Brooklyn, for 33 years tried to solve the mysteries of spiritism. He told friends he was ready to believe because he would find joy in proof that he could communicate with his parents and friends who had passed on. He had agreed with friends and acquaintances that the first to die was to try to communicate from the spirit world to the world of reality. Fourteen of those friends had died, but none had ever given a sign, he said.

“Such an agreement I made with both my parents,” Houdini said. “They died and I have not heard from them. I thought once I saw my mother in a vision, but I now believe it was imagination.”

Houdini counted that he had had “four close-ups with death” in his career of more than 30 years as a mystifier. The closest was in California, where he risked his life on a bet. Seven years ago in Los Angeles he made a wager that he could free himself from a six-foot grave into which he was to be buried after being manacled.

“The knowledge that I was six feet under the sod gave me the first thrill of horror I had ever experienced,” Houdini was wont to say. “The momentary scare, the irretrievable mistake of all daredevils, nearly cost me my life, for it caused me to waste a fraction of breath when every fraction was needed to pull through. I had kept the sand loose about my body so that I could work dexterously. I did. But as I clawed and kneed the earth my strength began to fail. Then I made another mistake. I yelled. Or, at least, I attempted to, and the last remnants of my self-possession left me. Then instinct stepped in to the rescue. With my last reserve strength I fought through, more sand than air entering my nostrils. The sunlight came like a blinding blessing, and my friends about the grave said that, chalky pale and wild-eyed as I was, I presented a perfect imitation of a dead man rising.

“The next time I am buried it will not be alive if I can help it.”

D. W. GRIFFITH

January 22, 1875–July 23, 1948

By Seymour Stern

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—David Wark Griffith, one of the first and greatest contributors to the motion picture art, died this morning in Temple Hospital after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. His age was 73.

The producer of “The Birth of a Nation,” and pioneer in such techniques as closeups, fade-outs and flashbacks, was stricken at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel, where he lived. Mr. Griffith, who is survived by a brother, was divorced from his second wife, the former Evelyn Marjorie Baldwin.

Mr. Griffith had been inactive in recent years. But the name of D. W. Griffith, the master producer and director of silent motion pictures, is synonymous with “father of the film art” and “king of directors.”

He produced and directed almost 500 pictures costing $23,000,000 and grossing $80,000,000. His most famous film, “The Birth of a Nation,” has grossed more than $48,000,000.

Although Mr. Griffith did not originate all the technical devices credited to him, he originated many of them, and vastly improved others. Chief among his improvements was his development of the closeup, first used in 1895, into a dramatic psychological contribution that shaped the entire art of the cinema.

Among the multitude of advanced methods which he started were the long shot, the vista, the vignette, the iris or eye-opener effect, the cameo-profile, the fade-in and fade-out, soft focus, back lighting, tinting, rapid-cutting, parallel action, mist photography, high and low angle shots, night photography, and the moving camera.

He was the first director to depart from the standard 1,000-foot film. This caused a break between him and the old Biograph Company. He then made the first four-reeler. “Judith of Bethulia,” which had instantaneous success. When Mr. Griffith ordered a close-up shot of a human face, his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, quit in disgust. At the first close-up there were hisses and cries of “Where are their feet?”

It was as a creator of significant content in the films themselves, however, that Mr. Griffith was a mighty force in the cinema. Even before “The Birth of a Nation,” that epic of the Civil War and the Reconstruction Period, which, directed by a man whose family had been ruined by the fall of the Confederacy, was deeply biased but was filled with great sweep and movement, he had exercised his bold conception of the exalted purpose which the medium might serve.

Long before the names of Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, and Frank Capra were heard of, Mr. Griffith brought to the screen important historical and philosophical themes, challenging social questions, visionary prophecies. His films were emotional, dramatic, intellectual and esthetic.

In 1916 his “Intolerance” appeared, with four parallel stories, a stupendous re-creation of the Ancient World and an apocalyptic image-prophecy of the Second Coming of Christ. In this film, Griffith used 16,000 “extras” in a single scene.

Mr. Griffith brought lyric poetry and high tragedy to the screen in 1919 in “Broken Blossoms,” a passionate plea for a renewal of the Christian ideal in interracial relations. His “Way Down East,” a folk-melodrama of New England in the Nineties, produced in 1920, used landscapes and natural backgrounds as vital psychological and dramatic elements of a story.

In “Orphans of the Storm,” in 1922, Mr. Griffith combined magnificent spectacle with a social theme, using the French Revolution as a platform from which to attack communism and Soviet Russia.

In 1924, Mr. Griffith produced the mammoth “America,” another great historical pageant, this time of the American Revolution.

His last important film, in 1925, was “Isn’t Life Wonderful,” a grim tale of Polish refugees in post–World War I Germany.

In the days of his greatest glory Mr. Griffith never used a shooting script. “Intolerance,” although it was 22 months in production and consumed 125 miles of film, was photographed entirely from his “mental notes.”

Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish were outstanding examples of his genius in choosing and training performers for the new art. He induced Douglas Fairbanks to leave the stage for the screen. Dorothy Gish, Mabel Normand, Lionel Barrymore, and the Talmadge sisters owed their film careers to him.

Born at La Grange, Ky., on Jan. 22, 1875, the son of Colonel Jacob Wark Griffith and Margaret Oglesby Griffith, David Wark Griffith started work at 16 on a local newspaper.

After seeing Julia Marlowe in “Romola,” he decided to become an actor. After working in various stock companies, he won entry to moving pictures as an actor, working at the Edison studio and then at Biograph.

In July, 1908, he made his first film, “The Adventures of Dollie.”

In 1919, with Pickford, Fairbanks and Charles Chaplin, he formed United Artists Corporation, under whose seal some of the screen’s outstanding productions were released.

Is Griffith merely the remarkable director who in 23 years of filmmaking employed upwards of 75,000 persons; who discovered, trained and launched so many directors and “stars” that to list them is to compile a “Who’s Who in Hollywood, Today and Yesterday”? Is he merely an inventor of cinematic devices and technical devices?

The central fact in the director’s story is the monumental, single-handed fight Griffith waged for freedom of expression in a medium cursed with censorship and control. He was the one creative figure who fought alone against financial monopoly and cultural dictatorship.

His most important masterpieces, “The Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance,” were financed, produced and exhibited in entire independence of the Hollywood film industry, which refused backing for both films. Three other major works—“Way Down East,” “Orphans of the Storm” and “America”—were financed and produced independently of the industry.

The last three films were produced not in Hollywood but at Mamaroneck, N.Y. Griffith stuck his flag at Mamaroneck in 1924, after he had made the small but powerful film “Isn’t Life Wonderful.”

Although he made films for eight more years, practically none of his later output reflects the greatness and originality of mind that conceived Belshazzar’s feast in “Intolerance,” the imagination that fashioned the ride of the Clansmen in “The Birth of a Nation,” or the cinematic wizardry that flashcut Paul Revere’s ride in “America.”

JAMES DEAN

February 8, 1931–September 30, 1955

PASO ROBLES, Calif.—James Dean, 24-year-old motion picture actor, was killed tonight in an automobile accident near here.

A spokesman for Warner Brothers, for whom Mr. Dean had just completed “The Giant,” said he had no details of the accident except that the actor was en route to a sports car meeting at Salinas. He was driving a small German speedster.

Mr. Dean was the star of Elia Kazan’s film “East of Eden,” released last April and taken from John Steinbeck’s novel. It was his first starring role in films.

He also appeared in “Rebel Without a Cause,” still unreleased.

In 1954 he attracted [the] attention of critics as the young Arab servant in the Broadway production of “The Immoralist.” His portrayal won for him the Donaldson and Perry awards.

HUMPHREY BOGART

December 25, 1899–January 14, 1957

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—Humphrey Bogart died in his sleep this morning in his Holmby Hills home. The 57-year-old movie actor, an Academy Award winner, had been suffering for more than two years from cancer of the esophagus.

Mr. Bogart leaves his wife, Lauren Bacall, the actress, whom he married in 1945, and who was his fourth wife. Mr. Bogart is also survived by a son, a daughter, and a sister.

Mr. Bogart was one of the most paradoxical screen personalities in the recent annals of Hollywood. He often deflated the publicity balloons that keep many a screen star aloft, but he remained one of Hollywood’s top box-office attractions for more than two decades.

On screen he was most often the snarling, laconic gangster who let his gun do his talking. In private life, however, he could speak wittily on a wide range of subjects and make better copy off the cuff than the publicists could devise for him.

Mr. Bogart received an Academy Award in 1952 for his performance in “The African Queen.” Still, he made it clear that he set little store by such fanfare. Earlier he had established a mock award for the best performance in a film by an animal, making sure that the bit of satire received full notice in the press.

But despite this show of frivolity, he was fiercely proud of his profession. “I am a professional,” he said. “I have a respect for my profession. I worked hard at it.”

Attesting to this are a number of highly interesting characterizations in such films as “The Petrified Forest” (1936), “High Sierra” (1941), “Casablanca” (1942), “To Have and Have Not” (1944), “Key Largo” (1948), “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” (1948), “The African Queen” (1951), “Sabrina,” (1954), “The Caine Mutiny” (1954) and “The Desperate Hours” (1955). The actor’s last film, “The Harder They Fall,” was released last year.

Mr. Bogart’s sense of responsibility toward his profession may have stemmed from the fact that both his parents were successful professionals. His mother was Maud Humphrey, a noted illustrator and artist. His father was Belmont DeForest Bogart, a surgeon. Their son, born on Christmas Day in 1899, was reared in fashionable New York society.

Mr. Bogart worked for a time with World Films and then as a stage manager for an acting group. It was an easy step to his first roles in the early 1920’s. His rise to fame over the next 15 years, however, was a hard road, often lined with critical brickbats.

He appeared in “Swifty” and plugged on in drawing-room comedies, appearing in “Hell’s Bells, “The Cradle Snatchers,” “It’s a Wise Child” and many others in which he usually played a callow juvenile or a romantic second lead.

He accepted a contract with Fox in 1931, but roles in a few Westerns failed to improve matters, and soon he was back on Broadway, convinced that his hard-bitten face disqualified him for close-ups as a matinee idol.

But toward the end of 1934 he used his granite-like face to rebuild, with enormous success, a new dramatic career. Having heard that Robert E. Sherwood’s “The Petrified Forest” had a gangster role, he approached Mr. Sherwood for the part.

Mr. Bogart was asked to return in three days for a reading. When he reappeared he had a three-day growth of beard and was wearing shabby clothes. His reading and appearance brought him the supporting role of Duke Mantee, his most memorable Broadway role. Mr. Bogart later performed the same role for the movie to considerable critical acclaim.

This was the first of more than 50 pictures that Mr. Bogart made. A spate of crime dramas followed, including “Angels with Dirty Faces.” “The Roaring Twenties,” Bullets or Ballots,” “Dead End,” “San Quentin” and, finally, “High Sierra” in 1941.

Mr. Bogart then insisted on roles with more scope. They were forthcoming in such films as “Casablanca,” “To Have and Have Not” and “Key Largo,” wherein Mr. Bogart’s notorious screen hardness was offset by a latent idealism that showed itself in the end.

In “The Treasure of Sierra Madre,” as a prospector driven to evil by a lust for gold, the range of his characterization won him new followers.

A further range of his talents was displayed in “The African Queen,” wherein his portrayal of a tramp with a yen for gin and Katharine Hepburn won him an “Oscar.” Another distinguished portrait was that of the neurotic Captain Queeg in the movie version of “The Caine Mutiny.” His aptitude for romantic comedy became clear when he played the bitter businessman who softens under the charms of Audrey Hepburn in “Sabrina.” Mr. Bogart also appeared in “The Barefoot Contessa,” made in 1954.

The movie actor made no secret of his nightclubbing. He was also a yachting enthusiast. At one point in his career he reportedly made $200,000 a film, and he was for years among the top 10 box-office attractions.

CECIL B. DE MILLE

August 12, 1881–January 21, 1959

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—Cecil B. De Mille died of a heart ailment today in his home on De Mille Drive here. He was 77 years old.

At his bedside when he died were a daughter, Cecilia, and her husband, Joseph Harper. Mrs. De Mille, who is 85 and has been ailing for several years, was not informed until later in the morning. They had been married for 56 years.

Although confined to his home since last Saturday, Mr. De Mille was preparing to start filming “On My Honor,” a history of the Boy Scout movement and its founder, the late Lord Baden-Powell.

Cecil Blount De Mille was the Phineas T. Barnum of the movies—a showman extraordinary.

A pioneer in the industry, he used the broad medium of the screen to interpret in “colossal” and “stupendous” spectacles the story of the Bible, the splendor that was Egypt, the glory that was Rome. He dreamed in terms of millions, marble pillars, golden bathtubs and mass drama; spent enormous sums to produce the rich effects for which he became famous.

He produced more than 70 major films, noted for their weight and mass rather than for subtlety or finely shaded artistry.

In 1953 he won his first Academy Award, for “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Since then he had been showered with honors. France named him a Knight of the Legion of Honor, the Netherlands inducted him into the Order of Orange Nassau, and Thailand conferred on him the Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant.

The fact that his first Oscar did not come until 40 years after he had produced one of the earliest four-reel feature films, “The Squaw Man,” was brushed off with a characteristic De Millean gesture:

“I win my awards at the box office.”

This was true. His pageants and colossals awed the urban, suburban and backwoods audiences. By 1946 his personal fortune, despite his regal spending habits, was estimated at $8,000,000.

The producer basked in publicity’s intense glare in 1944–45 when he made a heroic issue of a demand by the union of which he was a member that he pay a $1 contribution to its political action fund. He had been in radio about a decade by that time, staging shows for a soap company at a reported salary of $5,000 a week.

Mr. De Mille carried the fight to the courts, was defeated, and then went on a one-man campaign against political assessments by unions. He later sought reinstatement in the union but failed to get it.

Mr. De Mille was born at De Mille Corners, a backwoods crossroads in Ashfield, Mass., on Aug. 12, 1881, while his parents were touring New England with a stock company. His father, Henry Churchill De Mille, was of French-Dutch ancestry; his mother, the former Matilda Beatrice Samuel, of English stock.

At 17 he went on the stage. In the cast of one play, “Hearts Are Trumps,” was Constance Adams, daughter of a New Jersey judge. They were married in 1902.

In 1908 Mr. De Mille threw in his lot with the ambitious Jesse Lasky and with a newcomer in the theater, Sam Goldwyn. All three reached the top rung in the movie world, though along separate paths.

The first product of their movie company was “The Squaw Man.” It was turned out in an abandoned stable in Los Angeles with crude equipment, but it bore Mr. De Mille’s mark.

He was credited with many motion picture innovations. Indoor lighting was first tried out on an actor in “The Squaw Man.” This picture, besides being the screen’s first epic, was also the first to publicize the names of its stars.

On his first day as head of the Lasky-Goldwyn-De Mille combine, Mr. De Mille signed three unknowns—a $5 cowpoke named Hal Roach, an oil-field hand named Bill (Hopalong Cassidy) Boyd and a thin-nosed teenager who called herself Gloria Swanson. This was the nucleus around which he built his galaxy of screen stars.

To Mr. De Mille was attributed the inspiration for doing different versions of a popular picture. The so-called “sneak preview”—showing a film to a test audience—was another contribution.

The first “Ten Commandments,” produced in 1923 at a cost of $1,400,000, made money. From that time on Mr. De Mille wallowed in extravagant props and super-gorgeous sets.

A second version, issued in 1956 and differing greatly from the first, grossed a reported $60,000,000 here and abroad.

Mr. De Mille, who gave the University of Southern California a theater in memory of his parents, was lavish with gifts to other institutions.

In June, 1958, he learned that plans to place translations of the hieroglyphics on the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park were being put aside for lack of funds. He offered to pay the cost of erecting four bronze plaques at the base of “Cleopatra’s Needle,” saying:

“As a boy, I used to look upon the hieroglyphics as so many wonderful pictures.”

Two weeks ago, the Department of Parks announced that Mr. De Mille had donated $3,760 for the project.

CLARK GABLE

February 1, 1901–November 16, 1960

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—Clark Gable, for 30 years “King” of Hollywood actors, died tonight of a heart ailment. He was 59 years old.

—The Associated Press

Mr. Gable was one of the world’s most popular actors. For many years he was among the 10 top box-office attractions. Theater marquees would announce simply, “This week: Clark Gable.”

To millions the tall, handsome man with the mustache, broad shoulders, brown hair and gray eyes was the symbol of masculinity, “naughty but nice.”

He did not think he was a great actor. “I can’t emote worth a damn,” he said. And when he was earning $7,500 a week, he hung in his dressing room reminders of the days when he was a struggling actor or piling lumber in Oregon for $3.20 a day. Across the mementos he wrote: “Just to remind you, Gable.”

There were many Gable legends. One was that in “It Happened One Night” (1934) he had sabotaged the undershirt industry overnight by peeling off his shirt in the picture and revealing nothing underneath.

“I didn’t know what I was doing to the undershirt people,” he recalled, adding, “I hadn’t worn an undershirt since I started to school.”

Early in his career he was turned down by one top studio. He quoted an executive as saying: “Gable won’t do. Look at his big ears.” The executive later hired him.

William Clark Gable (he dropped his first name after he entered the theater) was born in Cadiz, Ohio, on Feb. 1, 1901. His father was an oil contractor. His mother died before he was one year old.

At 15, after his father had remarried, the family moved to Ravenna, Ohio. His father quit oil drilling for farming. Young Gable forked hay, fed hogs and wanted to be a physician. But when he saw his first play, he decided to be an actor, and he got a job with a troupe that played everything from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “Her False Step.”

When the company closed in Montana, he took a freight train to Oregon, where he worked in a lumber company, sold neckties, and was a telephone company linesman.

In 1924 Mr. Gable joined a theater company in Portland. He made his first appearance on the screen in a silent film starring Pola Negri. He appeared in two Los Angeles stage productions and then headed for Broadway.

In three years, he portrayed mostly villains. Then he returned to Los Angeles, where he was a hit in the role of Killer Mears in “The Last Mile.”

This led to a movie role in “The Painted Desert” in 1930. The story is that Mr. Gable was interviewed and asked if he could ride a horse. He said he could, got the job, then went out and learned how to ride.

His effort won him a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He first became a leading man in “Dance, Fools, Dance,” with Joan Crawford. His first big hit was “A Free Soul,” in which he slapped Norma Shearer.

Women by the thousands wrote in that they, too, would like to be slapped by Mr. Gable. “For two years I pulled guns on people or hit women in the face,” he later recalled.

His pictures included “Hell Divers,” “Susan Lennox,” “Polly of the Circus” “Strange Interlude,” “Red Dust,” “No Man of Her Own,” “The White Sister,” “Hold Your Man,” “Night Flight,” and “Dancing Lady.” His roster of leading ladies included Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard and Helen Hayes.

In 1934, he was loaned to Columbia Pictures, which starred him in a comedy, “It Happened One Night.” Claudette Colbert played a runaway heiress and Mr. Gable a newspaperman, traveling by bus from Miami to New York. Both won Academy Awards for the best performances of the year.

The next year he played Fletcher Christian in “Mutiny on the Bounty,” which won an Academy Award as the best film of the year.

In the next seven years Mr. Gable appeared in more than 25 films, including “China Seas,” “San Francisco,” “Saratoga,” “Test Pilot,” “Idiot’s Delight,” “Gone with the Wind,” “Boom Town,” “They Met in Bombay” and “Somewhere I’ll Find You.”

From 1932 through 1943, he was listed among the first 10 money-making stars in the yearly surveys by The Motion Picture Herald. After time out for military duty, he regained that ranking in 1947, 1948, 1949 and 1955.

Observers believe that his films have grossed more than $100,000,000, including $50,000,000 for “Gone with the Wind.” He had roles in at least 60 pictures.

After his third wife, Miss Lombard, was killed in a plane crash during a bond tour in World War II in 1942, Mr. Gable enlisted in the Army Air Forces as a private. He was then 41. He rose to major, took part in bomber missions over Europe, filmed a combat movie and won the Distinguished Flying Cross.

After the war, he returned to Hollywood, and a Metro slogan, “Gable is back and Garson’s got him” spread across the country. He starred with Greer Garson in “Adventure.” Then followed such films as “The Hucksters,” “Mogambo,” “The King and Four Queens,” “The Tall Men,” “Soldier of Fortune,” “Teacher’s Pet,” “Run Silent, Run Deep,” and “But Not for Me.”

“It Started in Naples,” a comedy with Mr. Gable and Sophia Loren, opened in New York in September, 1960. In July, 1960, Mr. Gable had begun work with Marilyn Monroe on “The Misfits.”

Mr. Gable married five times. His fifth wife was Mrs. Kay Williams Spreckels, a former model and actress, whom he married in 1955. Last Sept. 30, Mr. Gable announced that she was to have a child in the spring, making Mr. Gable a father for the first time.

GARY COOPER

May 7, 1901–May 13, 1961

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—Gary Cooper died today of cancer at his home in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 60 years old last Sunday.

The tall, lean actor, whose cowboy roles had made him a world symbol of the courageous, laconic pioneer of the American West, had been critically ill for several weeks.

The seriousness of his illness was revealed on April 17 when the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences was bestowing its Oscars on artists and technicians. A special statuette was ready for Mr. Cooper for his contributions during his long career. He had previously won two Oscars for acting—in the title role of “Sergeant York” in 1941 and as the courageous sheriff in “High Noon” in 1953.

However, James Stewart, the actor, accepted the honor for his close friend and gave a short, emotional tribute. Reporters, who had accepted the explanation that Mr. Cooper was unable to attend the ceremony because of a pinched nerve in his back, later learned that he was critically ill with cancer.

To millions of Americans, Gary Cooper represented the All-American Man.

He was an American frontier hero in “The Plainsman,” an O.S.S. hero in “Cloak and Dagger,” a Naval hero in “Task Force,” a homespun millionaire hero in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” a common-man political hero in “Meet John Doe,” a baseball hero in “The Pride of the Yankees,” a medical hero in “The Story of Dr. Wassell” and a national hero in “Sergeant York.”

He was the strong, silent man not only of the great outdoors, where he was one of its slowest-talking and fastest-drawing citizens, but also of powerful dramas and sophisticated comedies.

“Ungainly, ungrammatical, head-scratching, ineloquent men draw comfort and renewed assurance from Gary Cooper,” a writer once said.

Long, lean and broad of shoulder, Mr. Cooper walked gingerly, off screen as well as on. His eyes were of chilly blue. He was handy with a shotgun or rifle.

One writer said that in only two major respects did Mr. Cooper differ markedly from his screen self: he didn’t go around wearing a horse and he didn’t say “They went that-a-way.” Mr. Cooper reportedly would say, “Thet way.”

The men who directed his pictures said he had an instinctive sense of timing, a quick intelligence, the wit to think a role through and get to the heart of a character.

“I recognize my limitations,” he once said. “For instance, I never tried Shakespeare.” He paused and grinned slowly. “That’s because I’d look funny in tights.”

Mr. Cooper was once asked to give the reasons for his success. He replied: “I don’t really know but maybe it’s because once in a while I find a good picture, the happy combination of director and actors, which gives me a fresh start. Mostly I think it’s because I look like the guy down the street.”

Mr. Cooper was born May 7, 1901, in Helena, Mont., and christened Frank James Cooper. His father, Charles Henry Cooper, was a British lawyer who had gone to Helena, married a Montana girl, managed a ranch while practicing law and became a justice of the Montana Supreme Court.

The family went to England when young Cooper was nine and returned to Montana four years later. He worked on the family ranch.

“Getting up at 5 o’clock in the dead of winter to feed 450 head of cattle and shoveling manure at 40 below ain’t romantic,” he once recalled.

After two years at Grinnell College in Iowa, he headed for Los Angeles in 1924. His first job there was door-to-door solicitation for a photography studio. One day he met two friends from Helena who told him the Fox Western Studios were looking for riders. He got a job—at $10 a day.

Then he heard that Tom Mix, the cowboy star, was making $15,000 a week. Mr. Cooper decided to devote a year to make good in the movies.

A friend from Indiana suggested that he change his name because there already were several Frank Coopers in pictures, and Gary was a city whose name always sounded poetic to her.

Mr. Cooper got several bit parts, and just before the year ran out, got his first big role, opposite Vilma Banky in the 1926 film “The Winning of Barbara Worth.” Eventually he equaled, if not surpassed, Tom Mix’s $15,000 a week, although he was generally paid by the picture—reportedly around $300,000 in recent years.

In April, 1960, he underwent prostate-gland surgery in Boston. A major intestinal operation was performed five weeks later in Hollywood.

After his recovery, the actor went to England to make his last film, “The Naked Edge,” in which he portrayed a murderer opposite Deborah Kerr.

In 1933, Mr. Cooper married the socially prominent Veronica Balfe, who had a brief screen career as Sandra Shaw. The couple had one daughter, Maria.

In 1959, Mr. Cooper became a member of the Roman Catholic Church, of which his wife and daughter already were members.

Also surviving Mr. Cooper is his 85-year-old mother, Mrs. Alice Bracia Cooper of Los Angeles.

MARILYN MONROE

June 1, 1926–August 5, 1962

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—Marilyn Monroe, one of the most famous stars in Hollywood’s history, was found dead early today in the bedroom of her home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. She was 36 years old.

Beside the bed was an empty bottle that had contained sleeping pills. Fourteen other bottles of medicines and tablets were on the nightstand.

The impact of Miss Monroe’s death was international. Her fame was greater than her contributions as an actress. Her marriages to and divorces from Joe DiMaggio, the former Yankee baseball star, and Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, were accepted by millions as the prerogatives of this contemporary Venus.

The events leading to her death were in tragic contrast to the comic talent and zest for life that had helped to make “The Seven Year Itch” and “Some Like It Hot” smash hits. Other of her notable films included “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “Bus Stop” and “How to Marry a Millionaire.”

During the last few years Miss Monroe had suffered severe setbacks. Her last two films, “Let’s Make Love” and “The Misfits,” were box-office disappointments. After completion of “The Misfits,” written by Mr. Miller, she was divorced from him.

The last person to see her alive was her housekeeper, Mrs. Eunice Murray, who had lived with her. Mrs. Murray told the police that Miss Monroe retired to her bedroom about 8 P.M. yesterday.

About 3:25 A.M. today, the housekeeper noticed a light under Miss Monroe’s door. She called to the actress but received no answer. She tried the bedroom door, but it was locked.

The housekeeper telephoned Miss Monroe’s psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph R. Greenson. When he arrived at her two-bedroom bungalow, he broke a pane of the French window and opened it. Determining that the star was dead, he phoned Miss Monroe’s physician. After his arrival, the police were called.

In the last two years Miss Monroe had become the subject of considerable controversy in Hollywood. Some persons gibed at her aspirations as a serious actress and considered it ridiculous that she should have gone to New York to study under Lee Strasberg. Miss Monroe’s defenders, however, asserted that her talents had been underestimated by those who thought her appeal to audiences was solely sexual.

The life of Marilyn Monroe, the golden girl of the movies, ended as it began, in misery and tragedy. Her death closed an incredibly glamorous career and capped a series of somber events that began with her birth as an unwanted, illegitimate baby and was illuminated during the last dozen years by the lightning of fame.

The first man to see her on the screen, the man who made her screen test, felt the almost universal reaction as he ran the wordless scene, in which she walked, sat down and lit a cigarette.

“I got a cold chill,” he said. “This girl had something I hadn’t seen since silent pictures. This is the first girl who looked like one of those lush stars of the silent era. Every frame of the test radiated sex.”

Billy Wilder, the director, called it “flesh impact,” adding, “Flesh impact is rare. Three I remember who had it were Clara Bow, Jean Harlow and Rita Hayworth. Such girls have flesh which photographs like flesh. You feel you can reach out and touch it.”

Fans paid $200,000,000 to see her project this quality. No sex symbol of the era other than Brigitte Bardot could match her popularity. Toward the end, she also convinced critics and the public that she could act.

During the years of her greatest success, she saw two of her marriages end in divorce. She suffered at least two miscarriages. Her emotional insecurity deepened, and her many illnesses came upon her more frequently.

In 1961, she was twice admitted to hospitals in New York for psychiatric observation and rest. On June 8 she was dismissed by Twentieth Century Fox after being absent all but five days during seven weeks of shooting “Something’s Got to Give,” in which she starred.

“It’s something that Marilyn no longer can control,” one of her studio chiefs confided. “Sure she’s sick. She believes she’s sick. She may even have a fever, but it’s a sickness of the mind.”

In her last interview, published in the Aug. 3 issue of Life magazine, she said: “I was never used to being happy, so that wasn’t something I ever took for granted.”

Miss Monroe was born in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926. The name on the birth record is Norma Jean Mortenson, the surname of the man who fathered her, then abandoned her mother. She later took her mother’s last name, Baker.

Both her maternal grandparents and her mother were committed to mental institutions. Her uncle killed himself. Her father died in a motorcycle accident three years after her birth.

During her mother’s stays in asylums, she was farmed out to 12 sets of foster parents. One family gave her empty whisky bottles to play with instead of dolls. She also spent two years in a Los Angeles orphanage.

Her dream since childhood had been to be a movie star, and the conviction of her mother’s best friend was borne out; day after day she had told the child: “You’re going to be a beautiful girl when you get big. You’re going to be a movie star. Oh, I feel it in my bones.”

Miss Monroe’s dimensions—37-23-37—were voluptuous but not extraordinary. She had soft blonde hair and wide, dreamy gray-blue eyes. She spoke in a baby voice that was little more than a breathless whisper.

Fans wrote her 5,000 letters a week, at least a dozen of them proposing marriage. Her second husband, Mr. DiMaggio, and her third, Mr. Miller, were American male idols.

She was 16 when she married for the first time. The bridegroom was James Dougherty, an aircraft worker. They were divorced four years later, in 1946. Her two subsequent divorces came in 1954, when she split with Mr. DiMaggio after only nine months, and in 1960, after a four-year marriage to Mr. Miller.

Miss Monroe became famous with her first featured role of any prominence, in “The Asphalt Jungle,” in 1950. Her appearance was brief but unforgettable. From the instant she moved onto the screen with that extraordinary walk of hers, people asked themselves, “Who’s that blonde?”

In 1952 it was revealed that Miss Monroe had been the subject of a nude calendar photograph that was shot while she was an unsuccessful starlet. The news created a scandal, but it was her reaction to the scandal that was remembered. She told interviewers that she had needed the money to pay her rent.

She also revealed her sense of humor. When asked by a woman journalist, “You mean you didn’t have anything on?” she replied breathlessly: “Oh, yes, I had the radio on.”

One of Miss Monroe’s most exasperating quirks was her tardiness. During the years of her fame, she was up to 24 hours late for appointments.

“True, she’s not punctual,” said Jerry Wald, head of her studio, “but I’m not sad about it. I can get a dozen beautiful blondes who will show up promptly in makeup at 4 A.M. each morning, but they are not Marilyn Monroe.”

Speaking of her career and her fame, Miss Monroe once said wistfully: “It might be kind of a relief to be finished. It’s sort of like I don’t know what kind of a yard dash you’re running, but then you’re at the finish line and you sort of sigh—you’ve made it! But you never have—you have to start all over again.”

WALT DISNEY

December 5, 1901–December 15, 1966

LOS ANGELES—Walt Disney, who built his whimsical cartoon world of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs into a $100-million-a-year entertainment empire, died in St. Joseph’s Hospital here this morning. He was 65 years old.

He had undergone surgery for the removal of a lung tumor that was discovered after he entered the hospital for treatment of an old neck injury received in a polo match.

Just before his last illness, Mr. Disney was supervising the construction of a new Disneyland in Florida, a ski resort in Sequoia National Forest and the renovation of the 10-year-old Disneyland at Anaheim. His motion-picture studio was turning out six new productions and several television shows.

Although Mr. Disney held no formal title at Walt Disney Productions, he was in direct charge. Indeed, with the recent decision of Jack L. Warner to sell his interest in the Warner Brothers studio, Mr. Disney was the last of Hollywood’s veteran moviemakers who remained in personal control of a major studio.

He is survived by his wife, Lillian, two daughters and his brother Roy, who is president and chairman of Walt Disney Productions.

From his fertile imagination and industrious factory of drawing boards, Walt Elias Disney fashioned the most popular movie stars ever to come from Hollywood and created one of the most fantastic entertainment empires in history.

In return for the happiness he supplied, the world lavished wealth and tributes upon him. He was probably the only man in Hollywood to have been praised by both the American Legion and the Soviet Union.

Where any other Hollywood producer would have been happy to get one Academy Award, Mr. Disney smashed all records by accumulating 29 Oscars.

“We’re selling corn,” Mr. Disney once told a reporter, “and I like corn.”

Mr. Disney went from seven-minute animated cartoons to become the first man to mix animation with live action, and he pioneered in making feature-length cartoons. His nature films were almost as popular as his cartoons, and eventually he expanded into feature-length movies using only live actors.

From a small garage-studio, the Disney enterprise grew into one of the most modern movie studios in the world, with four sound stages on 51 acres. Mr. Disney acquired a 420-acre ranch that was used for shooting exterior shots for his movies and television productions. Among the lucrative by-products of his output were many comic scripts and enormous royalties paid to him by toy-makers.

Mr. Disney’s restless mind created one of the nation’s greatest tourist attractions, Disneyland, a 300-acre tract of amusement rides, fantasy spectacles and re-created Americana that cost $50.1 million.

By last year, when Disneyland observed its 10th birthday, it had been visited by some 50 million people. Its international fame was emphasized in 1959 by the then Soviet Premier, Nikita S. Khrushchev, who protested that he had been unable to see Disneyland. Security arrangements could not be made in time.

Even after Disneyland had proven itself, Mr. Disney declined to consider suggestions to leave well enough alone: “Disneyland will never be completed as long as there is imagination left in the world.”

Repeatedly, as Mr. Disney came up with new ideas, he encountered skepticism. For Mickey Mouse, the foundation of his realm, Mr. Disney had to pawn and sell almost everything because most exhibitors looked upon it as just another cartoon. But when the public had a chance to speak, the noble-hearted mouse with the high-pitched voice, red pants, yellow shoes and white gloves became the most beloved of Hollywood stars.

When Mr. Disney decided to make the first feature-length cartoon, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Hollywood experts scoffed that no audience would sit through such a long animation. It became one of the biggest money-makers in movie history.

Mr. Disney was thought a fool when he became the first important movie producer to make films for television. His detractors, once again, were proven wrong.

He was, however, the only major movie producer who refused to release his movies to television. He contended, with a good deal of profitable evidence, that each seven years there would be another generation that would flock to the movie theaters to see his old films.

Mickey Mouse would have been fame enough for most men, but not for Walt Disney. He created Donald Duck, Pluto and Goofy. He dug into books for Dumbo, Bambi, Peter Pan, The Three Little Pigs, Ferdinand the Bull, Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty, Brer Rabbit, Pinocchio. In “Fantasia,” he blended cartoon stories with classical music.

Though Mr. Disney’s cartoon characters differed markedly, they were all alike in two respects: they were lovable and unsophisticated. Most popular were big-eared Mickey of the piping voice; choleric Donald Duck of the unintelligible quacking; Pluto, that most amiable of clumsy dogs, and the seven dwarfs, who stole the show from Snow White: Dopey, Grumpy, Bashful, Sneezy, Happy, Sleepy and Doc.

Mr. Disney seemed to have had an almost superstitious fear of considering his movies as art, though an exhibition of some of his leading cartoon characters was once held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “I’ve never called this art,” he said. “It’s show business.”

From Harvard and Yale, this stocky, industrious man who had never graduated from high school received honorary degrees. By the end of his career, the list of 700 awards and honors that Mr. Disney received from many nations filled 29 typewritten pages, and included 29 Oscars, four Emmys and the Presidential Freedom Medal.

Toys in the shape of Disney characters sold by the many millions. One of the most astounding exhibitions of popular devotion came in the wake of Mr. Disney’s films about Davy Crockett. In a matter of months, youngsters all over the country who would balk at wearing a hat in winter were adorned in ’coonskin caps in midsummer.

In some ways Mr. Disney resembled the movie pioneers of a generation before him. Like them, he insisted on absolute authority and was savage in rebuking a subordinate. An associate of many years said the boss “could make you feel one-inch tall, but he wouldn’t let anybody else do it. That was his privilege.”

He was not afraid of risk. One day, when all the world thought of him as a fabulous success, he told an acquaintance, “I’m in great shape; I now owe the bank only eight million.”

Mr. Disney had no trouble borrowing money in his later years. Bankers, in fact, sought him out. Last year Walt Disney Productions grossed $110 million. His family owns 38 percent of this publicly held corporation, and all of Retlaw, a company that controls the use of Mr. Disney’s name.

Mr. Disney’s contract with Walt Disney Productions gave him a basic salary of $182,000 a year and a deferred salary of $2,500 a week, with options to buy up to 25 percent interest in each of his live-action features. It is understood that he began exercising these options in 1961, but only up to 10 percent. These interests alone would have made him a multimillionaire.

Once in a bargaining dispute with a union of artists, a strike at the Disney studios went on for two months and was settled only after Government mediation.

This attitude by Mr. Disney was one reason some artists disparaged him. Another was that he did none of the drawings of his most famous cartoons. Mickey Mouse, for instance, was drawn by Ubbe Iwerks, who was with Mr. Disney almost from the beginning.

Mr. Iwerks insisted that Mr. Disney could have done the drawings but was too busy. Mr. Disney did, however, furnish Mickey’s voice for all cartoons. He also sat in on all story conferences.

Although Mr. Disney’s power and wealth multiplied with his achievements, his manner remained that of some prosperous, Midwestern storekeeper. Except when imbued with some new Disneyland project or movie idea, he was inclined to be phlegmatic. His nasal speech, delivered slowly, was rarely accompanied by gestures.

Walt Disney was born in Chicago on Dec. 5, 1901. His family moved to Marceline, Mo., when he was a child and he spent most of his boyhood on a farm, where he enjoyed sketching animals. Later, when his family moved back to Chicago, he went to high school and studied cartoon drawing at night at the Academy of Fine Arts. He did illustrations for the school paper.

When the United States entered World War I he was turned down by the Army and Navy because he was too young. So he went to France as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross. He decorated the sides of his ambulance with cartoons and had his work published in Stars and Stripes.

After the war, he worked as a cartoonist for advertising agencies. When he got a job doing cartoons for advertisements that were shown in theaters between movies, he was determined that that was to be his future. In 1920 he organized his own company to make cartoons about fairy tales. At times he had no money for food and lived with Mr. Iwerks.

In 1923 Mr. Disney left Kansas City for Hollywood, where he formed a small company and did a series of film cartoons. After several years of stops and starts, Mr. Disney, his wife, his brother and Mr. Iwerks decided on a mouse for a new series. Mrs. Disney named it Mickey.

One day, when Mr. Disney was approaching 60, he was asked to reduce his success to a formula. His brown eyes became alternately intense and dreamy. “I guess I’m an optimist,” he said. “I’m not in business to make unhappy pictures. I love comedy too much. I’ve always loved comedy. Another thing. Maybe it’s because I can still be amazed at the wonders of the world.”

JOHN FORD

February 1, 1894–August 31, 1973

By Albin Krebs

John Ford, one of the greatest directors the American motion-picture industry has produced, died of cancer yesterday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 78 years old.

Imaginative, daring, sensitive, courageous, tough and, above all, durable, Mr. Ford was the only person to win Academy Awards for four feature films, of which he directed more than 130 in a four-decade career. He also won an Oscar for his direction of a documentary during World War II.

With his classic “The Informer,” released in 1935, less than a decade after the movies had learned to talk, Mr. Ford almost single-handedly made the sound motion picture come of age.

Most of Mr. Ford’s films had merit, but particularly excellent were those for which he won the director’s award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—“The Informer,” plus “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940), “How Green Was My Valley” (1941) and “The Quiet Man” (1952). He was also the only director to be cited four times by the New York Film Critics.

Other Ford movies that have won positions on lists of important films worldwide were “Stagecoach,” “The Lost Patrol,” “Young Mr. Lincoln,” “The Fugitive” and “Arrowsmith.”

Last April, Mr. Ford was honored with the American Film Institute’s first Life Achievement Award at lavish ceremonies in Beverly Hills attended by colleagues and by one of his biggest fans—President [Richard M.] Nixon.

“I’ve seen virtually all of the 140 Ford movies,” Mr. Nixon proclaimed before presenting him with the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

The director was a nervous, twitchy man given to biting handkerchiefs. A six-footer, in recent years he appeared quite thin, almost frail. His once sandy hair had grayed and become wispy, but his still jaunty, arm-swinging gait belied his years. He always had a cup—often filled with a brew stronger than coffee or tea—and a cigar near while he worked.

John Ford was born Sean Aloysius O’Fearna on Feb. 1, 1894, in Cape Elizabeth, Me. His father, Sean, a seaman, and his mother, the former Barbara Curran, were immigrants from Galway, Ireland, who in time went along with the way their neighbors pronounced their last name and had it changed legally to O’Feeney. (Sean O’Feeney remained Mr. Ford’s legal name.)

In 1914, having failed to win an appointment to Annapolis, he went to Hollywood “to sponge off my older brother, Francis.” Under the stage name of Francis Ford, his brother had become a successful director and star of silent serials. He put Sean, who soon became known as Jack Ford, to work as a property man, stuntman, assistant cameraman and grip.

All the while, he was carefully studying filmmaking techniques. He learned to be his own cameraman and editor, often functioning as such throughout his career. He mastered what became a new technique for directors—“cutting” or editing the film “in the camera.”

“The Tornado,” released in 1917, was the first Ford-directed movie. The two-reeler, which he wrote and starred in and for which he did his own stunt work, was about a cowboy who rescues the banker’s daughter from outlaws and uses the reward money to bring his dear old Irish mother to America.

Between 1917 and 1920 Mr. Ford ground out some two dozen cheapjack movies. “The Iron Horse,” in 1924, brought him renown and is still considered a classic of filmed Americana.

In 1930, “Men Without Women,” a vividly photographed drama about 14 men trapped in a submarine, was released. It marked the beginning of his long, and mutually profitable, association with the scenarist Dudley Nichols.

Internationally acclaimed to this day, “The Informer,” made in 1935, holds down its place on every major list of “the greatest films of all time.” Mr. Ford called it “the easiest picture I ever directed,” adding:

“No wonder. I had been dreaming of it for five years.”

It took only three weeks to shoot, on a budget of $218,000, roughly the cost of one of today’s half-hour television shows.

Supposedly a “B” picture that Mr. Ford sneaked over the studio bosses’ heads (“I told ’em vaguely it was about gangsters and stool-pigeons”), “The Informer” won the first New York Film Critics Award as best picture, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences singled it out for several Oscars, including one for Mr. Nichols.

The Ford-Nichols chemistry also produced what most critics call the greatest Western ever made, “Stagecoach,” in 1939. Starring John Wayne, Claire Trevor and Thomas Mitchell, the film, about an odd assortment of characters thrown together in 1884 during a journey by stagecoach through Apache-inhabited New Mexico Territory, was notable for its deft character studies, splendid photography and slam-bang action scenes.

The following year, Mr. Ford competed with himself for a director’s Academy Award. Both “The Grapes of Wrath,” a trenchant film of social realism based on John Steinbeck’s novel detailing the Okie migrations, and “The Long Voyage Home,” based on four one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill, were released in 1940. “The Grapes of Wrath” won Mr. Ford his second Oscar.

During World War II Mr. Ford, as a commander, was in charge of the Navy’s film documentary unit. He was at Midway Island in June, 1942, when the Japanese attacked the important naval base there. His “The Battle of Midway,” a 20-minute documentary released a month after the fighting stopped, won an Oscar as the best short subject of 1942. Mr. Ford’s souvenir of the battle was a machine-gun slug wound in his left arm, which he sustained while filming an aerial attack.

Among the director’s postwar movies were his trilogy on the United States Cavalry: “Fort Apache,” “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon” and “Rio Grande.” Other notable Ford films were “Wagonmaster,” “The Fugitive,” “Mogambo,” “The Searchers,” “Mister Roberts,” “The Last Hurrah” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

Although all of his Oscars were won for non-Westerns, Mr. Ford was perhaps best known for his outdoor pictures. He was, indeed, a master of the big scene who possessed an almost uncanny ability to depict the drama of human masses in a large landscape. His films abounded with magnificent pictures, yet they were not mere pictures, mere decorations, but instruments for telling the story.

His action sequences, like the chase in “Stagecoach,” were famous for their vigor and their unrivaled ability to build and sustain tension. Contrastingly, he could slow the pace of a scene to a near-standstill to make the fullest use of pauses and silences. In “My Darling Clementine,” a young boy stands motionless, watching his older brothers ride off to a gunfight. Their horses are moving, but straight away from the camera, and so the viewer gets the overall impression of looking at a still picture.

Mr. Ford’s curmudgeonly personality came out in infrequent interviews, which he hated and which he used to contradict earlier interviews. When it was once pointed out that several of his films, such as “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Long Voyage Home,” were serious “message” pictures, he replied testily:

“Bull! I made those pictures because they had a great story to tell. I’m thoroughly apolitical and nonideological. I don’t think I ever even voted in a Presidential election.”

The director was a quiet family man who disliked nightclubs and parties attended by people he did not know well. He and his wife, the former Mary McBryde Smith, whom he married in 1920, had two children.

He was, according to one of his cronies, “a great shambles of a man,” who on the set wore “mangy old khaki pants, tennis shoes with holes at the toes, a sloppy old campaign jacket, a beat-up fedora and a dirty scarf around the neck.”

Throughout his life, Mr. Ford suffered poor eyesight and had to wear thick, shaded glasses. About 25 years ago his left eye was injured in an accident on the set, and he finally lost sight in it. In recent years he wore a black eye patch.

Although he was the first to admit that he had more than one bad movie behind him, he seldom talked about his fame as a director. But Carroll Baker, the actress who starred for him in “Cheyenne Autumn” in 1964, told an interviewer that one day, while they were on location in Monument Valley, she mentioned the films of Ingmar Bergman to Mr. Ford.

“Ingrid Bergman?” Mr. Ford asked.

Miss Baker said no, “Ingmar Bergman—you know, the great Swedish director.”

“Oh, Ingmar Bergman,” Mr. Ford said. “He’s the fella that called me the greatest director in the world.”

SAMUEL GOLDWYN

August 17, 1879–January 31, 1974

By Albin Krebs

Samuel Goldwyn, one of the last of the pioneer Hollywood producers, died yesterday at his Los Angeles home at the age of 91. He had been in frail health since 1968.

In a career that spanned a half-century, Mr. Goldwyn became a Hollywood legend, a motion picture producer whose films, always created on a grand scale, were notable for those most elusive of traits—taste and quality.

One of the last tycoons—he even looked the part—Mr. Goldwyn was a driving perfectionist, a man with a titanic temperament whose great gift was the ability to bring together, for each production, the very best writers, directors, cinematographers and other craftsmen.

He would dominate their work and their lives like a benign tyrant, praising them, goading them, encouraging them, browbeating them, as he supervised even the tiniest details.

This quest for the excellent often enraged Mr. Goldwyn’s employes, but more often than not it gave his productions that sheen of quality and good taste that became known in the motion picture industry as “the Goldwyn touch.”

Among the more than 70 movies to which he imparted that touch were “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Wuthering Heights,” “The Pride of the Yankees,” “Arrowsmith,” “Dodsworth,” “Stella Dallas,” “Dead End,” “The Westerner,” “The Little Foxes,” “Street Scene,” “Hans Christian Andersen,” “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “Guys and Dolls” and “Porgy and Bess.”

Although he was one of the flashiest and most controversial of the independent producers, he was probably best known for his “Goldwynisms,” the malapropisms, mixed metaphors, grammatical blunders and word manglings that included the now classic “Include me out” and “I’ll tell you in two words—im-possible!”

In recent years Mr. Goldwyn insisted that he was not the originator of half the Goldwynisms attributed to him. Whether genuine or apocryphal, they became part of the legend. Among the more famous:

“An oral agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

“A man who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined.”

“This atom bomb is dynamite.”

Another one supposedly evolved from a director’s complaint that a film script in which Mr. Goldwyn was interested was “too caustic,” to which the producer replied:

“Never mind the cost. If it’s a good picture, we’ll make it.”

He used his Goldwynisms to gain publicity for himself and his pictures.

“People say that whenever I have a picture coming out I always start a controversy about something that gets into the papers,” he said. “Well, in all sincerity, I want to assure you that, as a general proposition, there’s not a single word of untruth in that.”

Among the controversies that swirled about Mr. Goldwyn’s bald head were his campaign against double features and his efforts to persuade fellow producers to make fewer but better pictures. He once said that Hollywood was grinding out 600 pictures a year when “there are not brains enough in Hollywood to produce more than 200 good ones.”

Mr. Goldwyn was born Aug. 27, 1882, in Warsaw. Little was known of his family background, but he was the son of poor parents who died when he was young. At the age of 11, he left Poland. After two years in England, he migrated to Gloversville, N.Y., where he took a job sweeping floors in a glove factory. By the time he was 17 he was the foreman of 100 workers, and six years later he became a partner in the company.

In 1910 he married Blanche Lasky, whose brother, Jesse, was a vaudeville producer. Mr. Lasky, at the urging of a lawyer, Arthur S. Friend, toyed with the idea of filmmaking and tried to entice his brother-in-law. Mr. Goldwyn, who had moved to New York, was cool to the idea until one cold day in 1913, when he stepped into a Herald Square movie house to warm up and saw a Western starring Broncho Billy Anderson. He was impressed not only with the movie but also with all the dimes the management was raking in.

Mr. Goldwyn took up the idea of forming a film company. He and Mr. Lasky each put up $10,000, and Mrs. Goldwyn and Mr. Friend pledged the rest of the $26,500 capitalization.

The company, with Mr. Goldwyn doing most of the work, set out to produce long films that told romantic stories. Most “flickers” at the time were two-reelers, lasting about 20 minutes.

The company’s first movie, “The Squaw Man,” was a five-reeler, the first feature-length movie, and one of the first to be made in Hollywood. It was directed by a young stage manager and unsuccessful playwright named Cecil B. De Mille, who had never worked on a movie before.

Halfway through the filming, the money ran out. “I felt like we were on the brink of the abscess,” said Mr. Goldwyn, uttering what was probably the first recorded Goldwynism. He raised additional money by selling theater owners the exhibition rights of “The Squaw Man” and 11 future pictures.

The movie was a tremendous success and resulted in a sudden intense interest from Mr. Goldwyn’s partners, exactly what he didn’t want. Shortly after the company merged with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Company, Mr. Goldwyn sold out his shares for nearly a million dollars.

In 1917 he joined with Edgar and Arch Selwyn, who as Broadway producers had built up a library of plays that might make good films.

Mr. Goldwyn’s name was still Goldfish, the nearest equivalent to his Polish name that immigration officials could think of when he came to this country. Goldwyn Pictures Corporation took its name from the “Gold” in Goldfish and the “wyn” in Selwyn.

Mr. Goldwyn liked the name so much that he had his own name legally changed. When the bankrupt Goldwyn company was merged with Metro Pictures, out of which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer grew, Mr. Goldwyn withdrew with a substantial financial settlement.

In 1922, Mr. Goldwyn became an independent producer, convinced that he would never be able to get along with partners or boards of directors. In 1926 he became a member of United Artists, a cooperative formed by independent producers to distribute their pictures. In 1939 he had a falling-out with Mary Pickford, one of the other members, and in 1941, after a bitter court fight, he sold his stock to the corporation at a reported loss of $500,000.

Mr. Goldwyn coddled actors, writers and directors, but when he felt they were not producing what he had expected of them, he heaped invective upon them. Ben Hecht, who worked on the script of “Wuthering Heights,” compared Mr. Goldwyn’s treatment of writers to “an irritated man shaking a slot machine.”

Mr. Goldwyn always believed that the story was the thing that made good movies, and he spent lavishly on scripts by writers such as Moss Hart, Lillian Hellman and Robert E. Sherwood.

One of several great directors with whom Mr. Goldwyn did not get along was William Wyler, yet Mr. Wyler made some of his best films, including “The Best Years of Our Lives,” under the Goldwyn banner.

Among the stars Mr. Goldwyn discovered were Tallulah Bankhead, Robert Montgomery and Gary Cooper.

Perhaps his worst talent-finding gaffe was his import of the Polish actress Anna Sten, upon whom he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build up as a star. Miss Sten, he felt, had an enigmatic beauty, or, as he put it, “the face of a spink.” She failed to pass muster with the public, and he was forced to admit, “She’s colossal in a small way.”

But his judgment was much better with Miss Bankhead, whom he discovered in a beauty contest and starred in “Thirty a Week” long before she won Broadway fame, and with several of the “Goldwyn girls”—the leggy chorines, among them Betty Grable, he chose to decorate his musicals.

When Sam Goldwyn made a picture, he spent only his own money, and he kept his hand in every aspect of his productions.

“I am the producer,” he said. “I do not shove the money under the door and go home.” He spent freely, often on inefficient yes men. “I’ll take 50 percent efficiency,” he explained, “to get 100 percent loyalty.”

When he wasn’t haunting his sound stages, Mr. Goldwyn was out selling his pictures. “I’ve got a great slogan for the company,” he once said—giving birth to another Goldwynism—“‘Goldwyn pictures griddle the earth.’”

They surely girdled the earth. In a 20-year period, more than 200 million people paid to see Goldwyn productions. Many were nominated for Academy Awards, but Mr. Goldwyn did not receive an Oscar for best picture until 1947, when “The Best Years of Our Lives” won all the major awards. He was also presented, at that time, with the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award for his contributions to the film industry.

Mr. Goldwyn’s films won dozens of Oscars in several categories—direction, writing, scenic design, music, color and acting. Five were winners for set design; he was the first producer to use realistic, three-dimensional sets rather than painted flats.

Mr. Goldwyn was divorced in 1915 from Blanche Lasky, by whom he had a daughter, Ruth. In 1925 he married the actress Frances Howard. They had a son, Samuel Jr., who is a movie producer.

Mrs. Goldwyn gradually became her husband’s unofficial second-in-command at the studio. She also was splendid at keeping her husband’s personal life in order. Whenever the couple went out, she paid for everything because Mr. Goldwyn never carried change or a wallet. He was an extremely careful dresser and believed that his conservatively tailored suits would look lumpy if he put anything in his pockets.

He came out of semiretirement in 1959 to make his last film, “Porgy and Bess.” Although he was 78, he held his chesty six-foot-tall body erect, and his swinging walk seemed as always to be jet-propelled as he strode through his studio streets. His eyes, deep-set in his rather plain face, could still flash with anger, and his Polish-accented voice had lost little of its deep vibrancy.

In recent years, Mr. Goldwyn rented his studio to independent film and television productions, but he was not pleased with much of the product that emanated from there and other parts of Hollywood. He believed movies and TV had become trashy.

Summing up his career, Mr. Goldwyn said, “I was a rebel, a lone wolf. My pictures were my own. I financed them myself and answered solely to myself. My mistakes and my successes were my own. My one rule was to please myself, and if I did that, there was a good chance I would please others.”

PAUL ROBESON

April 9, 1898–January 23, 1976

By Alden Whitman

Paul Robeson, the singer, actor and black activist, died yesterday at the age of 77 in Philadelphia. He had suffered a stroke on Dec. 28.

Mr. Robeson, who had been an all-America football star at Rutgers, where he also won letters in baseball, basketball and track and a Phi Beta Kappa key, was known internationally for decades as a concert artist, singing such songs as “Ol’ Man River,” and as a stage actor, perhaps best remembered in the role of Othello.

One of the most influential performers and political figures to emerge from black America, Mr. Robeson was under a cloud in his native land during the cold war as a political dissenter and an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union. These circumstances combined to close many minds to his merits as a singer and actor.

However, in his 75th year, Mr. Robeson was the subject of high praise by Clayton Riley, the American cultural historian, who described him as “one of the nation’s greatest men, an individual whose time on earth has been spent in the pursuit of justice for all human beings and toward the enlightenment of men and women the world over.”

Although Mr. Robeson denied under oath that he was a Communist Party member, affiliation with it was generally imputed to him because he proudly performed for so many trade unions and organizations deemed “subversive” and for so many causes promoted in left-wing periodicals. This activity caused such agitation that one of his concerts in Peekskill, N.Y., was disrupted by vigilantes; professional concert halls were refused him, and commercial bookings grew scarce. His income dropped from $100,000 in 1947 to $6,000 in 1952.

Another result of Mr. Robeson’s overt alliance between his art and his politics was the State Department’s cancellation, in 1950, of his passport on the grounds that he had refused to sign the then-required non-Communist oath. He took the department to court, and in 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that passports could not be withheld because of applicants’ “beliefs and association.”

Mr. Robeson was given a passport. He toured Europe and Australia as a singer, and in 1959 he appeared as the Moor, one of his most celebrated stage roles, in “Othello” at Stratford-on-Avon.

On his 60th birthday, in 1958, celebrations were held in a number of countries. The same birthday was also an occasion for his first New York recital in 11 years, a sold-out house at Carnegie Hall.

“When Mr. Robeson made his appearance,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The Times, “he was greeted with a long standing ovation,” adding that the performer was “a burly, imposing figure with tremendous dignity.”

In a concert in London later that year, he brought the house down with “Ol’ Man River,” the Oscar Hammerstein 2nd–Jerome Kern song with which Mr. Robeson had been identified since the late 1920’s. Two other songs closely identified with Mr. Robeson were “Ballad for Americans” and “Joe Hill,” a song about a union organizer executed for an alleged murder.

Standing 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighing 240 pounds in his prime, he was a man of commanding presence. He spoke slowly and deliberately. His bass baritone, in his best years, was vibrant and evocative.

Once asked why he did not live in the Soviet Union, which he visited frequently, he retorted, “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you.”

Born in Princeton, N.J., on April 9, 1898, Paul Robeson was the youngest child of the Rev. W. D. Robeson, a North Carolina plantation slave until he ran away in 1860. His mother, who died when Paul was nine, was a teacher.

A bright student, he won a scholarship to Rutgers in 1915, where he was the third black to attend the then-private college. He starred in football, baseball, basketball and track, winning a dozen varsity letters. Walter Camp, the college football arbiter who twice selected Mr. Robeson as an all-America, called him “the greatest defensive end that ever trod the gridiron.”

After graduation in 1919 he received a degree from Columbia Law School but never practiced because Eslanda Cardozo Goode, a brilliant Columbia chemistry student whom he married in 1921, directed his career toward the theater and was his manager until her death in 1965.

She helped persuade him to take a role in “Simon the Cyrenian” at the Young Men’s Christian Association in 1920. He repeated his performance at the Lafayette Theater in 1921, and the following year he appeared as Jim in “Taboo” at the Sam H. Harris Theater on Broadway. He joined the Provincetown Players, a Greenwich Village group that included Eugene O’Neill, in whose “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” he starred as Jim Harris.

This led to his appearance as Brutus Jones in “The Emperor Jones.” The critic George Jean Nathan described him as “one of the most thoroughly eloquent, impressive and convincing actors” he had ever come upon.

Mr. Robeson repeated his triumph in “The Emperor Jones” in London, returned to New York to play Crown in “Porgy” and went back to London in 1928 to play Joe in “Show Boat.”

He lived mostly abroad until 1939, primarily in London. One of his spectacular successes there came in 1930, when he played the lead in “Othello,” appearing with Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike and Maurice Brown.

Afterward he toured the chief European cities as a recitalist, and played in “Plant in the Sun,” “The Hairy Ape,” “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” “Stevedore,” “Black Boy” and “John Henry.” He also ventured seriously into the movies, starring in “Sanders of the River,” “King Solomon’s Mines,” “Big Fella,” “Proud Valley,” “The Emperor Jones” and “Show Boat.” In all, he made 11 pictures.

In 1934, passing through Germany on his first of many visits to the Soviet Union, he was the object of racial epithets from Hitler’s storm troopers, and he was angered. Arriving in Moscow, where he was feted, he was impressed, he said, by the absence of racial prejudice among Soviet citizens. Later, he often publicly expressed “my belief in the principles of scientific Socialism, my deep conviction that for all mankind a Socialist society represents an advance to a higher stage of life.”

In the late 1930’s Mr. Robeson went to Spain to sing for the Republican troops and for members of the International Brigades who were battling the Franco revolt, which was backed by Hitler and Mussolini.

The climate of opinion in the United States was fairly congenial to Mr. Robeson in those years, and reviews became ecstatic when, on Oct. 19, 1943, he became the first black to play the role of Othello with a white supporting cast (Jose Ferrer and Uta Hagen) on Broadway in the Theater Guild production.

Meanwhile, Mr. Robeson stepped up his political activity. He became a founder and chairman of the Progressive Party, which nominated former Vice President Henry A. Wallace in the 1948 Presidential race.

Some of Mr. Robeson’s troubles during the cold war were traceable to a remark he made at a World Peace Congress in Paris in 1949. “It is unthinkable,” he declared, “that American Negroes will go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.”

His words were widely turned against him in the United States, and one consequence was an attack by veterans’ groups and right-wing extremists on crowds arriving for an outdoor concert near Peekskill, N.Y., in August, 1949. The concert was canceled.

Mr. Robeson, who is survived by his sister and a son, was questioned several times by Congressional committees, starting in 1948. He was usually asked if he were a member of the Communist Party, a query he uniformly declined to answer under his Fifth Amendment rights.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN

April 16, 1889–December 25, 1977

By Bosley Crowther

Charlie Chaplin, the poignant little tramp with the cane and comic walk who almost single-handedly elevated the novelty entertainment medium of motion pictures into art, died yesterday at his home in Switzerland. He was 88 years old.

His wife, Oona, and seven of their children were at his bedside. A daughter, the actress Geraldine Chaplin, was in Madrid but left to join her family at the Chaplin’s villa at Corsiersur-Vevey, a village near Lake of Geneva.

Sir Charles—he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1975—had been in failing health for years. He was confined to a wheelchair and his speech, hearing and sight were impaired.

No motion picture actor so captured and enthralled the world as did Charles Spencer Chaplin, a London ragamuffin who became an immortal artist for his humanization of man’s tragicomic conflicts with fate. In more than 80 movies from 1914 to 1967, he portrayed or elaborated (he was a writer and director as well as an actor) the theme of the little fellow capriciously knocked about by life, but not so battered that he did not pick himself up in the hope that the next encounter would turn out better.

His Everyman was the Little Tramp, part clown, part social outcast, part philosopher. He might stumble, but he always maintained his dignity and self-respect.

The essence of Chaplin’s humor was satire, sometimes subtle as in “The Kid” and “The Gold Rush,” sometimes acerbic as in “The Great Dictator” and “Monsieur Verdoux.”

In ridiculing man’s follies, Chaplin displayed a basic affection for the human race. He was simultaneously serious and funny, and this blend of attitudes elevated his comedy beyond film slapstick into the realm of artistry.

A serious theme in “The Gold Rush,” for example, is man’s inhumanity to man. The comedy arises from the hero’s adversity, illustrated by his boiling and eating his shoe with the éclat of a gourmet. The element of contrast exemplified by that scene was at the root of Chaplin’s comedy. This sense of comedy tickled the fancy of millions of Americans for half a century.

The Little Tramp, the comedy character that lifted its creator to enduring fame, was neatly accoutered in baggy trousers, outsize shoes, an undersize derby, a frayed short cutaway and a bamboo cane. A black mustache completed the costume, which became Chaplin’s symbol for a lifetime.

Chaplin studied the structure of comedy meticulously.

“All my pictures are built around the idea of getting me into trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman,” he wrote. “That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat, and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.”

In his early days in Hollywood Chaplin had little to say about how his movies were made. Later, he achieved artistic control, and took infinite pains in perfecting each scene, often shooting hundreds of feet of film for a few minutes of final screen action.

Entering motion pictures before the advent of feature-length films and of course sound, Chaplin had to rely on situational comedy and pantomime, the use of gestures and facial expressions to convey emotion. This form of body language permitted the actor to be readily understood by people everywhere.

After only two years on the screen, Theodore Huff wrote in “The Language of Cinema,” Chaplin “was unquestionably the top figure in the motion picture industry.” Audience demand for his pictures was phenomenal. His popularity at the box office won him a $1 million contract—a stupendous sum in 1917—for eight pictures over 18 months.

Few men in this century in any field attained his stature with the public. “Charlie,” “Charlot”—his first name in any language bespoke affection amounting to idolatry.

One explanation for Chaplin’s extraordinary success was that after 1917 his command of pictures was complete. He was the author, star, producer, director and chief cutter.

Born April 16, 1889, in south London, Charles Spencer Chaplin was the son of a vaudevillian and a music hall soubrette whose stage name was Lily Harley.

The elder Chaplin was a heavy drinker. The couple separated shortly after the son was born, and Mrs. Chaplin’s voice lost its quality. “It was owing to her vocal condition,” the son recalled, “that at the age of five I made my first appearance on the stage.”

“I remember standing in the wings when mother’s voice cracked and went into a whisper,” he continued. The audience began to laugh, and his mother was obliged to walk off the stage. When she came into the wings, “the stage manager said something about letting me go on in her place.”

The lad was greeted by cheers and applause.

The family passed through a series of workhouses, Mrs. Chaplin was committed briefly as insane, and there followed for Charles months of catch-as-catch-can existence.

“I (was) newsvender, printer, toymaker, doctor’s boy, etc., but during these occupational digressions, I never lost sight of my ultimate aim to become an actor,” Chaplin recalled. “So, between jobs I would polish my shoes, brush my clothes, put on a clean collar and make periodic calls at a theatrical agency.”

At 12 he received a small stage part, then toured the provinces and performed in London in “Sherlock Holmes.” Later came a run in “Casey’s Court Circus,” in which he impersonated a patent-medicine faker.

In this engagement Chaplin decided to become a comedian. He also learned the unimportance of the spoken word. “Once, while playing in the Channel Islands,” Mr. Huff wrote, “he found that his jokes were not getting over because the natives knew little English. He resorted to pantomime and got the desired laughs.”

His success landed him a job with the Fred Karno Company, and in 1913 Mack Sennett, then the producer of short film comedies, signed the actor for $150 a week. Chaplin made his debut in “Making a Living,” a one-reeler that appeared in 1914. In those early Sennett comedies there was no scenario. “We get an idea, then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads up to a chase, which is the essence of our comedy,” Sennett explained.

Chaplin changed that by adopting an identifiable character—the Little Tramp—which allowed the public to single him out from other comedians.

In his year with Sennett, Chaplin played in 35 films, including “Tillie’s Punctured Romance,” the screen’s first feature-length comedy.

These films were shown around the world, and the renown they brought to Chaplin enabled him to shift to the Essanay Company, for which he made 14 films in 1915, including “The Tramp,” his first generally recognized classic.

In the picture, Chaplin, a tramp, saves a farmer’s daughter from a robber gang, for which he is rewarded with a job on the farm. Routing the gang again, he is shot in the leg and nursed by the daughter. The tramp’s happiness is unbounded until the girl’s sweetheart arrives. Realizing his fate, the tramp scribbles a farewell and departs.

In the fadeout, Chaplin’s back is to the camera. He walks dejectedly down a long road. Then he pauses, shrugs his shoulders, flips his heels and continues jauntily toward the horizon.

Chaplin then went to the Mutual Company for $670,000 a year. He was 26, three years out of vaudeville and perhaps the world’s highest-paid performer.

His dozen Mutual films were two-reelers and included “The Floorwalker,” “The Fireman,” “The Vagabond” and “Easy Street.”

Chaplin then went to First National for $1 million for eight pictures. For the first time he was his own producer in his own studio. His work for First National included some of his greatest achievements—“A Dog’s Life,” “Shoulder Arms” and “The Kid.”

During the preparation of “The Kid,” Chaplin was embroiled in the first of several marital and extra-marital episodes that were to plague him. Good-looking and attractive to women, he was involved in a score or more of alliances, many with glamorous actresses, but these were usually discreetly handled. Not so with his first two marriages.

In 1918, when the actor was 29, he married 16-year-old Mildred Harris. They were divorced two years later. Four years afterward he married Lolita McMurry, also 16, whose stage name was Lita Grey. The union ended in 1927 after a sensational divorce case.

The actor’s third wife was a chorus girl whose film name was Paulette Goddard. They met in 1931, when Miss Goddard was 20, and were married in 1936 and divorced in 1942.

Meantime, in 1941, the actor met Joan Berry, a 21-year-old aspiring actress known as Joan Barry. She later charged that he was the father of her daughter, and filed a paternity suit, in which blood tests demonstrated that Chaplin was not her child’s father. Nonetheless, a jury found against him and he was ordered to support the infant.

In 1943, Chaplin, then 54, married 18-year-old Oona O’Neill, the daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill.

Chaplin’s later films were made for United Artists, a company he founded in 1919 with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and David Wark Griffith. Chaplin’s initial picture for this concern was “A Woman of Paris,” a comedy of manners that he produced and directed without starring in it.

Considered a milestone in screen history for its influence on movie style, it was based in part on the life of Peggy Hopkins Joyce, briefly Chaplin’s mistress.

“The Gold Rush”—“the picture I want to be remembered by,” Chaplin said—came out in 1925 and it once again confirmed his hold on the public.

Starting work on “City Lights” in 1928, the actor faced a crisis in the advent of talkies. He feared that spoken dialogue would impair the character of the Tramp. “City Lights” was produced as a silent picture with a musical score.

The tragicomic story of the blind flower girl, played by Virginia Cherrill, was an enormous triumph when it opened in 1931. Many critics rank “City Lights” as among Chaplin’s greatest creations.

He then embarked upon “Modern Times,” a satire on mass production, which at the time gave the actor a reputation as a radical.

With “The Great Dictator,” a ferocious ridicule of Hitler and Mussolini, Chaplin joined the sound-picture ranks.

Despite “The Great Dictator,” the nineteen-forties were difficult years for Chaplin. Representative John E. Rankin, a right-wing legislator from Mississippi, demanded his deportation, asserting that Chaplin’s life “is detrimental to the moral fabric of America.”

In 1952, when the actor, a British subject, was sailing to Britain on vacation, the Attorney General announced that he could not re-enter the country unless he could prove his “moral worth.” Chaplin spent the rest of his life in Europe.

In 1972, Chaplin visited the United States to receive a special Oscar from the Motion Picture Academy. By this time the actor could do little more than bow and smile in response to expressions of affection for him and his art.

JOHN WAYNE

May 26, 1907–June 11, 1979

LOS ANGELES—John Wayne, the veteran Hollywood actor, died today at 5:23 P.M., Pacific daylight time, at U.C.L.A. Medical Center, a hospital spokesman said. The cause of death was given as complications from cancer.

Mr. Wayne, 72 years old, had been hospitalized since May 2, when he was admitted for his second cancer operation of the year. His lower intestine was partly removed in the operation.

—The Associated Press

By Richard F. Shepard

In more than 200 films made over 50 years, John Wayne saddled up to become the greatest figure of one of America’s greatest native art forms, the western.

The movies he starred in rode the range from out-of-the-money sagebrush quickies to such classics as “Stagecoach” and “Red River.” He won an Oscar as best actor for another western, “True Grit,” in 1969. Yet some of the best films he made told stories far from the wilds of the West, such as “The Quiet Man” and “The Long Voyage Home.”

In the last decades of his career, Mr. Wayne became something of an American folk figure, hero to some, villain to others, for his outspoken views. He was politically a conservative and, although he scorned politics as a way of life for himself, he enthusiastically supported Richard M. Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Spiro T. Agnew, Ronald Reagan and others who, he felt, fought for his concept of Americanism and anti-Communism.

But it was for millions of moviegoers who saw him only on the big screen that John Wayne really existed. He had not created the western with its clear-cut conflict between good and bad, right and wrong, but it was impossible to mention the word “western” without thinking of “the Duke,” as he was called.

By the early 1960’s, 161 of his films had grossed $350 million, and he had been paid as much as $666,000 to make a movie—although in his early days on screen, his salary ran to no more than two or three figures a week.

It was rarely a simple matter to find a unanimous opinion on Mr. Wayne, whether it had to do with his acting or his politics. Film critics were lavish in praise of him in some roles and shrugged wearily as they candled his less notable efforts.

He was co-director and star of “The Green Berets,” a 1968 film that supported the United States action in Vietnam. The movie was assailed by many critics on all grounds, political and esthetic, but the public apparently did not mind; in only six months, it had earned $1 million above its production cost of $7 million.

Mr. Wayne was a symbolic male figure, a man of impregnable virility and the embodiment of simplistic, laconic virtues, packaged in a well-built 6-foot-4-inch, 225-pound frame.

He had a handsome and hearty face, with crinkles around eyes that were too lidded to express much emotion but gave the impression of a man of action, an outdoor man who chafed at a settled life. When he shambled into view, one could sense the arrival of coiled vigor awaiting only provocation to be sprung. This screen presence emerged particularly under the ministrations of John Ford and Howard Hawks, the directors.

Appearances were not altogether deceiving. Mr. Wayne loved adventure and the outdoors. He did believe that things were either right or wrong, and he came back against great odds. In 1964, a malignant tumor was removed from his chest and left lung, and within several months he was on location making another movie.

Mr. Wayne made his last public appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony in April, where he drew an emotional standing ovation when he strode out on stage to present the Oscar for best picture.

He was recently presented with a special Congressional medal of the kind given to such national figures as the Wright Brothers.

Between his first starring role in “The Big Trail” in 1930, and his last one, as a celebrated gunslinger dying of cancer in “The Shootist,” in 1976, Mr. Wayne changed little in style or personality. He had consciously adapted his posture for that first movie and retained it.

“When I started, I knew I was no actor and I went to work on this Wayne thing,” he once recalled. “It was as deliberate a projection as you’ll ever see. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I dreamed up the drawl, the squint and a way of moving meant to suggest that I wasn’t looking for trouble but would just as soon throw a bottle at your head as not. I practiced in front of a mirror.”

His entrance into films was as fortuitous as any made by a young fellow who grew up near the Hollywood badlands. But the Wayne saga actually started much farther east, in the small town of Winterset, Iowa, where he was born May 26, 1907, and was named Marion Michael Morrison.

His father, Clyde L. Morrison, a druggist, moved the family to Southern California when Marion was 6. There the young boy saw movies being made at the Triangle Studios, where they often shot outdoor scenes. Along the way he acquired the nickname “Duke.” It came from an Airedale terrier he had had, he used to say as he debunked press releases that tried to explain the moniker as some sort of rubbed-off nobility.

He worked as truck driver, fruit picker, soda jerk and ice hauler and was an honor student and a member of an outstanding high school football team. He got a job, as other football players did, as a scenery mover at Fox Films. John Ford was attracted to the youth’s hulking physique and made him a “fourth-assistant prop boy.” When Mr. Ford was making a submarine film on location in the channel off Catalina Island, the regular stuntmen refused to go into the water because of rough seas. Mr. Ford asked the prop boy if he would. He did, immediately, and became part of the Ford team.

In an early film, Republic Pictures gave him a screen credit as Michael Burn and, in another, as Duke Morrison. When Raoul Walsh cast him as the star of “The Big Trail,” his expensive $2 million western, the director thought that Marion was too sissified a name for a western hero, and “John Wayne” was born.

That movie was a flop, and between 1933 and 1939 Mr. Wayne made more than 40 Grade B or C westerns—short-order horse operas. Then, like a good guy riding in to relieve the oppressed, his old benefactor, Mr. Ford, came along to cast Mr. Wayne as the Ringo Kid in the Oscar-winning “Stagecoach,” the 1939 movie that took westerns from the Saturday afternoon for-kids-only category and attracted the attention of more intellectual film critics. It was a turning point also for Mr. Wayne.

His next major role found him in a milieu far from the cactus sets. He played a simple Swedish lad in the crew of a freighter in “The Long Voyage Home,” Mr. Ford’s 1940 film based on the sea plays of Eugene O’Neill.

Later came “Fort Apache” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” In 1952, Mr. Wayne showed off to best effect as the young Irish-American returned to Ireland in Mr. Ford’s “The Quiet Man.”

Mr. Wayne invested $1.2 million in 1960 to make “The Alamo,” about the fight between the Americans—the good guys—and the Mexicans—the bad guys. He played Davy Crockett. He was bitterly disappointed when the film failed.

In 1969, however, he was almost universally hailed when he played Rooster Cogburn, a disreputable one-eyed, drunken, fat old Federal Marshal, in “True Grit.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him an Oscar for his portrayal.

His anti-Communist sentiments led Mr. Wayne to help found the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944, and he was its president for two terms.

The organization, which eventually disbanded, was accused of giving the names of suspected Communists in the film industry to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, although Mr. Wayne said later that he had never been party to any such thing.

Once interviewed about civil rights, he said: “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.”

Mr. Wayne lived with his third wife, Pilar Pallette Wayne, in an 11-room, seven-bathroom, $175,000 house in Newport Beach, Calif., where he had a 135-foot yacht. His first two marriages, to Josephine Saenz and Esperanzo Bauer, ended in divorces. He had seven children from his marriages, and more than 15 grandchildren.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

August 13, 1899–April 29, 1980

By Peter B. Flint

Alfred Hitchcock, whose mastery of suspense and of directing technique made him one of the most popular and celebrated of filmmakers, died yesterday at the age of 80 at his home in Los Angeles. Mr. Hitchcock, ailing with arthritis and kidney failures, had been in declining health for a year.

In a characteristically incisive remark, Mr. Hitchcock once summed up his approach to moviemaking: “Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake.” The director of scores of psychological thrillers for more than half a century was the master manipulator of menace and the macabre, and the leading specialist in suspense and shock.

His best movies were meticulously orchestrated nightmares of peril and pursuit relieved by unexpected comic ironies, absurdities and anomalies. Films made by the portly, cherubic director invariably progressed from deceptively commonplace trifles of life to shattering revelations, and with elegant style and structure he pervaded mundane events and scenes with a haunting mood of mounting anxiety.

In delicately balancing the commonplace and the bizarre, he was the most noted juggler of emotions in the longest major directorial career in film history. His distinctive style was vigorously visual, always stressing imagery over dialogue and often using silence to increase apprehension. Among his most stunning montages were a harrowing attack by a bullet-firing crop-dusting plane on Cary Grant at a deserted crossroad amid barren cornfields in “North by Northwest,” a brutal shower-slaying in “Psycho” and an avian assault on a sleepy village in “The Birds.”

Hitch, as he was called by his friends and colleagues, doubtlessly frightened more audiences than any other director in movie history, and he was one of the few filmmakers who was a household name for many decades. A trademark was the fleeting, nonspeaking appearances he made in his films.

As the leading British director of the 30’s, he set the standard for international intrigue and espionage with such classic thrillers as “The 39 Steps” and “The Lady Vanishes.”

After moving to Hollywood in 1939, he made such taut melodramas as “Rebecca,” “Foreign Correspondent,” “Suspicion,” “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Lifeboat,” “Spellbound,” “Notorious,” “Strangers on a Train,” “Rear Window” and “Vertigo.” His later shockers mirrored his increasingly pessimistic view of most people and mounting evil in the world.

Reflecting his motif of a world in disorder, Mr. Hitchcock placed endangered protagonists in settings epitomizing order—citadels of civilization, the Statue of Liberty, United Nations headquarters, Mount Rushmore and Britain’s Parliament.

Reviewers acclaimed his virtuosity in creating a rhythm of anticipation with understated, sinister overtones, innovative pictorial nuance and montage, brilliant use of parallel editing of simultaneous action, menacingly oblique camera angles and revealing cross-cutting of objective shots with subjective views of a scene from an actor’s perspective.

Detractors accused Mr. Hitchcock of relying on slick tricks, illogical story lines and wild coincidences. Spinning his sophisticated yarns to create maximum tension, Mr. Hitchcock was not concerned with plausibility, which he regarded as no more important than the “MacGuffin,” the term he used for the device about which his suspense revolved, whether it be the secret or documents or whatever the villains were seeking or trying to protect.

A favorite Hitchcock theme centered on “the wrong man” who was unjustly accused of a crime and hunted by both the villains and the police because of mistaken identity or incriminating information he inadvertently acquired.

His films were spiced with unusual peripheral characters and often shot on location in exotic settings. His heroines were usually “cool” classic beauties who “don’t drip sex,” he said. “You discover sex in them.”

In Mr. Hitchcock’s world, people may or may not be what they appear to be, but the audience sees and knows more than the protagonists. He invariably alerted viewers to imminent dangers such as a ticking time bomb, withholding the knowledge from imperiled characters, and identified the villains early on, eschewing the “whodunit” as “a sort of intellectual puzzle” that is “void of emotion.”

His films had such consistent mass appeal that reviewers were sometimes condescending to them. But in the ’50s, a group of young French filmmakers and critics associated with the film journal Cahiers du Cinema newly extolled his achievements.

François Truffaut, a leading director of France’s New Wave, lauded Mr. Hitchcock as a leading “artist of anxiety” with a “purely visual” style.

“Hitchcock is almost unique in being able to film directly, that is, without resorting to explanatory dialogue, such intimate emotions as suspicion, jealousy, desire and envy,” he commented.

Detractors faulted his films for lacking substance, for moral opportunism and for being cynical, superficial and glib in their views of human nature. Admirers vehemently disagreed, terming him a compulsive storyteller who showed human nature as it is and not as it should be, and describing the psychological probing of much of his later work as profound in its foresight of an irrational and disordered world.

Resembling a pixieish gargoyle, the rotund director had a pudgy, basset-hound face with heavy jowls and pouting lips. He was a witty raconteur who became somewhat of a national institution in shaping a public image as a genially ghoulish cynic noted for barbed pronouncements about life and commercials in two popular weekly television series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and the “Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” which he supervised and was host of in the late 50’s and early 60’s.

Regarded as a shrewd businessmen, he became a multimillionaire and gained more control over his productions than any Hollywood director.

Mr. Hitchcock, who also produced many of his later films, was showered with laurels. He won the 1967 Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and “Rebecca,” his first American movie, won an Oscar as the best film of 1940. He was nominated for directorial Oscars five times, for “Rebecca,” “Lifeboat,” in 1944, “Spellbound” in 1945, “Rear Window” in 1954 and “Psycho” in 1960.

Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in London on Aug. 13, 1899, to a poultry dealer, greengrocer and fruit importer and the former Emma Whelan. He graduated from St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit school in London, where he studied engineering, and took art courses at the University of London.

In childhood incidents, he developed a lifelong fear of the police and punishment, major influences on his movies. At about the age of five, he was sent by his father with a note to a local police chief, who locked him in a cell for five minutes. In releasing him, the officer said, “That’s what we do to naughty boys.” Mr. Hitchcock later said he could never forget “the sound and the solidity of that closing cell door and the bolt.”

Mr. Hitchcock attributed his fear of punishment to ritual beatings of the hands with a hard rubber strop, administered for infractions at St. Ignatius, that he recalled “was like going to the gallows.”

In his teens, he was determined to break into filmmaking, and won a job in 1920 writing and illustrating title cards for silent pictures. He rose quickly, to scriptwriter, art director and assistant director.

By 1925, Mr. Hitchcock had become a director, making a melodrama called “The Pleasure Garden” on a shoestring budget in Munich, Germany. He began shaping his genre with “The Lodger,” about Jack the Ripper. Early influences, he said, were German Expressionistic and American films.

In 1926, he married Alma Reville, his assistant, who collaborated on many of his movies as a writer, adviser and general assistant. Their daughter, Patricia, acted in a number of his movies and television thrillers.

The pictorial and technical innovations of Mr. Hitchcock’s early melodramas garnered him increasing praise. In 1929, he directed “Blackmail,” Britain’s first widely successful talking feature. In the 30’s, he won international acclaim for his pacesetting spy thrillers, including “The Man Who Knew Too Much”; “The 39 Steps”; “Secret Agent”; “Sabotage,” called “The Woman Alone” in the United States; and “The Lady Vanishes.”

David O. Selznick lured Mr. Hitchcock to Hollywood. In his early years there, he created a stir when he quipped that “all actors are children” and “should be treated like cattle.” He later showed particular disdain for Method school actors. But Mr. Hitchcock never raised his voice on a set. A number of stars later described him as a vividly persuasive man who knew exactly what he wanted in a picture—and got it.

The director had a measured, courtly manner. He was a gourmet and wine connoisseur, and, with a 5-foot-8-inch frame, his weight once soared to 290 pounds, though he tried to keep it down by dieting to about 220 pounds. He avoided exercise and fiction, and voraciously read contemporary biographies, travel books and true-crime accounts. Mr. Hitchcock was a noted practical joker whose favorite prank was telling a tantalizing story in a loud voice to a companion in an elevator, perfectly timing his exit just before the punch line and then bowing politely to the intrigued but frustrated passengers.

ORSON WELLES

May 6, 1915–October 10, 1985

Orson Welles, the Hollywood “boy wonder” who created the film classic “Citizen Kane,” scared tens of thousands of Americans with a realistic radio report of a Martian invasion of New Jersey, and changed the face of film and theater with his daring new ideas, died yesterday in Los Angeles, apparently of a heart attack. He was 70 years old and lived in Las Vegas, Nev.

Despite the feeling of many that his career was one of largely unfulfilled promise, Welles eventually won the respect of his colleagues. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Film Institute in 1975, and the Directors Guild of America gave him its highest honor, the D. W. Griffith Award.

His unorthodox casting and staging for the theater gave new meaning to the classics and to contemporary works. As the “Wonder Boy” of Broadway in the 1930’s, he set the stage on its ear with a “Julius Caesar” set in Fascist Italy, an all-black “Macbeth” and his presentation of Marc Blitzstein’s “Cradle Will Rock.” His Mercury Theater of the Air set new standards for radio drama, and in one performance panicked thousands across the nation.

In film, his innovations in deep-focus technology and his use of long takes without close-ups created a new vocabulary for the cinema.

By age 24, he was already being described as a has-been. But at that very moment Welles was creating “Citizen Kane,” generally considered one of the best movies ever made. His second film, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” is also regarded as a classic.

For his failure to realize his dreams, Welles blamed his critics and the financiers of Hollywood. Others blamed what they described as his erratic, egotistical, self-indulgent and self-destructive temperament. But in the end, few denied his genius.

He was a Falstaffian figure, 6 feet 2 inches tall, weighing well over 200 pounds, with a huge appetite for good food and drink. He was by turns loud, brash, amusing and insufferable.

George Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wis., on May 6, 1915, the son of Richard Head Welles, an inventor and manufacturer, and the former Beatrice Ives. His mother was dedicated to the theater, and Welles said he made his debut at two as the child of “Madame Butterfly” in an opera performance.

According to “Orson Welles,” an authorized biography by Barbara Leaming, Welles’s genius was discovered when he was only 18 months old by his doctor, who, pronouncing the child a prodigy, began to furnish him with a violin, painting supplies, a magic kit, theatrical makeup kits and a conductor’s baton.

His parents were divorced; Mrs. Welles died when he was 6. At 10, he entered the Todd School in Woodstock, Ill. His five years there were his only formal education.

Under the guidance of Roger Hill, the headmaster, young Orson steeped himself in student theater, staging and acting in a series of Shakespeare productions.

Shortly after his graduation, he sailed for Ireland. There, smoking a cigar to disguise the fact that he was only 16, he convinced the Gate Theater in Dublin that he was a Theater Guild actor on a holiday. He went on as the Duke in “Jew Suss” and even achieved a role at the eminent Abbey Theater.

Through Thornton Wilder and Alexander Woollcott, Welles was introduced to Katharine Cornell. When she opened “Romeo and Juliet” on Broadway in 1934, Welles, then 19, played Tybalt.

Welles’s acting was a subject of controversy. Critics accused him of hamming and hogging the limelight, but many found his presence electrifying. “He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child,” said Jean Cocteau, “a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.”

Early in his Broadway career, Welles picked up extra income as a radio actor. He became familiar to millions as the sepulchral voice of “The Shadow,” a wizard who turned virtually invisible to foil criminals.

To combat unemployment, the Roosevelt Administration had set up the Works Progress Administration, whose projects included the Federal Theater. With John Houseman as manager and Welles as director, it mounted striking productions, including a black “Macbeth,” that excited the theater world.

The Federal Theater also stirred conservative wrath. The last straw came when a troupe featuring Howard da Silva and Will Geer prepared to stage “The Cradle Will Rock,” a leftist musical by Marc Blitzstein, in 1937.

The authorities banned the production and locked the company out of the theater on opening night. Welles joined the cast and an audience of 2,000 in a march up Sixth Avenue to a rented theater, where the actors sang from seats in the auditorium.

Welles and Mr. Houseman went on to found the Mercury Theater, whose first production in 1937, a “Julius Caesar” in modern dress with overtones of Fascist Italy, was a hit. The Mercury also took in the banned production of “The Cradle Will Rock.”

Chiefly to provide its actors with steady income, the company signed up with CBS Radio as the Mercury Theater of the Air. Its acting, dramatic tension and inventive use of sound effects set new highs in radio theater.

On Oct. 30, 1938, the Mercury Theater of the Air presented a dramatization of H. G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds,” in the form of news bulletins and field reporting from the scene of a supposed Martian invasion of New Jersey.

Many thousands of listeners tuned in after the introduction, heard the bulletins and panicked. Some armed themselves and prepared to fight the invaders; many more seized a few belongings and fled for the hills. Police switchboards around the country were flooded with calls.

Welles was already famous; a few weeks earlier, at age 23, he had appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the theater’s “Wonder Boy.” Now he was suddenly a household word, the target of indignation but also of amused admiration.

The Mercury Theater on Broadway was nevertheless a financial failure, and ended its theatrical existence in early 1939. The following season the company went to Hollywood under a contract with R.K.O. that granted Welles total artistic freedom.

The movie community was not entranced by the unconventional young interloper, and a Saturday Evening Post profile in 1940 reflected this view. “Orson was an old war horse in the infant prodigy line by the time he was 10,” it said. “He had already seen eight years’ service as a child genius. Some see the 24-year-old boy of today as a mere shadow of the 2-year-old man they used to know.”

Welles was then directing “Citizen Kane,” based on a scenario by Herman J. Mankiewicz, with himself in the title role. An impressionistic biography of a newspaper publisher strongly suggestive of William Randolph Hearst, it is now fabled for its use of flashback, deep-focus photography, striking camera angles and imaginative sound and cutting.

Kenneth Tynan has written, “Nobody who saw ‘Citizen Kane’ at an impressionable age will ever forget the experience; overnight, the American cinema had acquired an adult vocabulary, a dictionary instead of a phrase book for illiterates.” Stanley Kauffmann called it “the best serious picture ever made in this country.”

The making of “Kane” has been the subject of fierce polemics. Pauline Kael, in a New Yorker article in 1971, called it a “shallow masterpiece” and “comic-strip tragic,” and accused Welles of trying to deny credit to Mr. Mankiewicz, Mr. Houseman and the cameraman, Gregg Toland. This has been rebutted in part by Mr. Houseman and by many Welles admirers.

It turned out that Miss Kael had not sought to question Welles. His defenders concede that he had thrown violent tantrums, leading to the departure of Mr. Houseman, but say he was frequently generous in praise of his collaborators.

More seriously, the Hearst newspaper chain was accused of seeking to block the showing of “Kane” and it long barred mention of Welles and his film in its publications.

“Kane” drew a mixed reception when it opened in 1941, and it was years before it turned into a profit maker. Welles won an Academy Award for writing the film, and was nominated for directing and acting awards.

Meanwhile, Welles was making Mercury’s second movie, “The Magnificent Ambersons.” An impatient R.K.O. did the final cutting of the film, asserting that Welles was unreliable on costs and completion dates. Welles retorted that his budgets were always low and that his shooting schedules were sometimes extraordinarily tight.

Welles returned to Broadway in 1941 to direct a dramatization of Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” produced and acted in the movie thriller “Journey into Fear” and starred as Mr. Rochester in the highly popular “Jane Eyre” in 1943.

He took part as a magician in a tour of the European Theater of Operations, in which his act was sawing Marlene Dietrich in half. After the war he adapted and staged a Cole Porter musical version of “Around the World in 80 Days” and produced, directed and co-starred with Rita Hayworth in “The Lady from Shanghai.”

He and Miss Hayworth were married in 1943 and divorced in 1948. His first marriage, to Virginia Nicholson, also ended in divorce. In 1955, he married the Italian actress Paola Mori.

His acting talents enhanced such films—made by other directors—as “The Third Man,” “Compulsion,” “A Man for All Seasons” and “Catch-22.”

He put together and starred in “Othello” and “Macbeth.” The latter film, shot in three weeks, has been violently criticized. Beginning in 1955, he filmed the not yet completed “Don Quixote.” He also wrote, directed and acted in “The Trial,” based on the Kafka novel.

In 1970, he began a major project, “The Other Side of the Wind,” which remains unfinished. His last directorial effort to be released was “The Immortal Story” in 1968; he also performed in it.

In 1958, Welles returned briefly to Hollywood to act with Charlton Heston in “Touch of Evil.” Welles was also enlisted as director. Some admirers consider it one of his best films.

He refused to appear on Broadway after an unfortunate appearance in “King Lear,” during which, having broken an ankle, he acted in a wheelchair. He vowed that he would never return to the New York stage while Walter Kerr was still a critic there. Writing for The New York Herald Tribune, Mr. Kerr had described Welles as “an international joke.”

Welles’s film “Falstaff” had been hailed in Europe under the title “Chimes at Midnight.” When it appeared here in 1967, some critics panned it, one saying he made Falstaff “a sort of Jackie Gleason.”

More recently, the Times’s Vincent Canby wrote that the picture “may be the greatest Shakespearean film ever made.”

Welles, who is survived by his wife and three children, inspired harsh criticism. Yet there were no dissenters when, at the dedication of a Theater Hall of Fame in New York in 1972, his name was among the first to be chosen.

JAMES CAGNEY

July 17, 1899–March 30, 1986

By Peter B. Flint

James Cagney, the cocky and pugnacious film star who set the standard for gangster roles in “The Public Enemy” and won an Academy Award for his portrayal of George M. Cohan in “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” died yesterday at his Dutchess County farm in upstate New York. He was 86 years old.

Mr. Cagney had an explosive energy and a two-fisted vitality that made him one of the great film personalities of Hollywood’s golden age.

An actor who could evoke pathos or humor, he invested scores of roles with a hungry intensity, punctuated by breathless slang, curling lips and spontaneous humor.

A former vaudevillian and, in his youth, a formidable street fighter, the 5-foot-8 1/2-inch, chunky, red-haired actor intuitively choreographed his motions with a body language that projected the image of an eager, bouncy terrier. His walk was jaunty and his manner defiant.

But along with his belligerence he displayed a comic zest in inventive, sometimes outrageous actions. He could play a hoofer as adeptly as a gangster, and whether brutish or impish, he molded a character that personified an urban Irish-American of irrepressible spirit.

Mr. Cagney’s streetwise mannerisms were a favored subject for caricature by stand-up comedians. But the actor’s self-image was essentially that of a song-and-dance man.

He became the screen’s top mobster in 1931 in “The Public Enemy,” which included a bench-mark scene. Angered by his girlfriend’s yearnings for respectability, he suddenly squashed half a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s incredulous face. Audiences were at first stunned, then intrigued by his brash performance, and he won instant stardom.

He followed “The Public Enemy” with a popular series of gangster movies interspersed with musicals, and, in 62 films over three decades, he went on to prove his versatility in a wide range of roles, later mostly within the law and including many military men. Some of the movies were inferior, but he was consistently praised by reviewers, who often described a movie as “all” or “essentially” Cagney.

His favorite role was in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (1942), a patriotic wartime tribute to George M. Cohan, the showman, actor and songwriter. The performance won Mr. Cagney an Academy Award. Four years earlier, the New York Film Critics Circle voted him best actor for his portrayal of an eventually repentant killer in “Angels With Dirty Faces.”

Will Rogers remarked of Mr. Cagney, “Every time I see him work, it looks to me like a bunch of firecrackers going off all at once.”

The actor’s “irresistible charm” was cited by the author Kenneth Tynan, who wrote in 1952 that “Cagney, even with a submachine gun hot in hand and corpses piling at his ankles, can still persuade many people that it was not his fault.”

Exhibitors voted the actor one of the top 10 box-office moneymakers in the late 1930’s and early 40’s. After a series of disputes with Warner Brothers in which he charged he was overworked and underpaid, he became the studio’s highest-paid star in 1938, earning $234,000. The next year he was listed as one of the 10 biggest-salaried Americans, with, the Treasury Department said, an income of $368,333.

Cagney the screen hoodlum contrasted sharply with Cagney the man. Offscreen, he was amiable, self-effacing and reflective, a confirmed family man. He did not smoke and rarely drank liquor.

He was much admired by colleagues, from directors to stagehands. In 1974, he became the first actor to receive the Life Achievement Award of the American Film Institute. Among his other honors was the Medal of Freedom, the Government’s highest civilian award, in 1984.

The actor was self-taught and a keen observer who varied his roles with mannerisms and eccentricities of men he had known. He did all his own fight scenes, learned judo and occasionally used Yiddish humor he had learned in his youth. He was not impressed by adulation, believing, “One shouldn’t aspire to stardom—one should aspire to doing the job well.”

He dismissed Method acting with disdain. “You don’t psych yourself up for these things, you do them,” he said. “I’m acting for the audience, not for myself, and I do it as directly as I can.” He made these observations in his 1976 autobiography, “Cagney by Cagney.” He said he wrote it because of errors in unauthorized biographies.

His early characterizations included a dynamic vaudeville director speeding his cast from theater to theater and singing and tap-dancing with Ruby Keeler as Shanghai Lil in “Footlight Parade” (1933), the comic Bottom in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935), a wharf-rat turned gang leader in “Frisco Kid” (1935), a blinded boxer in “City for Conquest” (1940) and a naive dentist in “The Strawberry Blonde” (1941).

Other roles included a newsman turned counterspy in “Blood on the Sun” (1945), a psychopathic murderer with a mother fixation in “White Heat” (1949), a political demagogue in “A Lion Is in the Streets” (1953), a quirky Navy captain in “Mister Roberts” (1955) and Lon Chaney, the long-suffering silent-film star, in “Man of a Thousand Faces” (1957).

In 1961, Mr. Cagney starred in Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three,” a razor-sharp satire of East-West relations. Then, though at the top of his talent, he announced his retirement from the screen.

The actor was born and raised in Manhattan, but he was smitten with country living while on a childhood visit to the then pastoral Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Accordingly, he retired with his wife to their farm near Millbrook in Dutchess County, N.Y., and raised Morgan horses. In 1936 he had also bought a farm in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where the Cagneys spent as much time as possible between films.

For two decades, the actor received many offers to return to the movies, including many from major directors, but he steadfastly refused them.

However, in 1981 Mr. Cagney ended his retirement. He had been increasingly troubled by several ailments, and his doctors advised him to be more active.

The director Milos Forman persuaded him to play a cameo role in the movie “Ragtime,” based on the best-selling novel by E. L. Doctorow. The actor played a combative turn-of-the-century New York City police chief, prompting Vincent Canby of The Times to write that the Cagney “manner and the humor are undiminished.” The actor, the critic said, “does a lot with very little.”

James Francis Cagney Jr. was born July 17, 1899, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and grew up there and in the Yorkville section. His father was of Irish descent, a bartender and, briefly, a saloon owner who died in a flu epidemic in 1918. His mother, the former Carolyn Nelson, who was of Norwegian stock, was the mainstay of the family of five children.

Yorkville was then a street-brawling neighborhood, and Jimmy became a champion battler. As a catcher for a Yorkville amateur baseball team, he played a game in 1919 at Sing Sing prison, where five former schoolmates were serving terms. Eight years later, one was executed in the electric chair.

The Cagneys were poor, and from the age of 14 Jimmy worked simultaneously as an office boy for The New York Sun, stacking books at a library and doing odd jobs at the Lenox Hill Settlement House. On Sundays, he sold tickets for the Hudson River Day Line.

He graduated from Stuyvesant High School. Needing money, he soon drifted into vaudeville as a dancer at 19. He had to fake it at first, studying professionals, stealing their steps and modifying them to mold his own style. Unexpectedly, the street tough’s first role was a “chorus girl” in a female-impersonation act.

In 1920 Mr. Cagney started in the chorus of a Broadway musical, “Pitter Patter,” and graduated to specialty dancer. A co-player was Frances Willard (Willie) Vernon, whom he married in 1922. Two decades later they adopted two children, James Jr., who died in 1984, and Cathleen.

The actor toured in vaudeville with his wife and occasionally performed in short-lived Broadway shows. Through the 1920’s, often out of work and money, he attended every cast call he could, occasionally being dismissed, he recalled, “because I had exaggerated my abilities.”

But in 1930 he played a cowardly killer in a melodrama, “Penny Arcade,” with Joan Blondell. Warner Brothers took the two to Hollywood to film the play as “Sinners’ Holiday.” They both won contracts and co-starred together in half a dozen movies.

After playing supporting roles in three movies, Mr. Cagney got the second lead in “The Public Enemy.” However the keen-eyed director, William Wellman, insisted that the actor switch roles with the scheduled lead, Edward Woods, because Mr. Cagney could project what Mr. Wellman termed the “direct gutter quality” of the tougher of the two street chums who turn to crime. The picture was a commercial blockbuster that opened an era of realistic gangster movies.

Many of the actor’s other early movies for Warner were made cheaply and quickly, within a few weeks, with the crews sometimes working 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.

“Talent was not nurtured, it was consumed,” Mr. Cagney observed. “We did our job. If anyone was practicing art, I never saw it.” Many of his directors, he wrote, were “pedestrian workmen, mechanics,” some of whom “couldn’t direct you to a cheap delicatessen.”

But the young performers, led by Mr. Cagney, varied the formula scripts with clever improvisations. The actor’s affectionate jabs on actresses’ chins were gestures his father had used. In “The St. Louis Kid,” weary of punching, he slammed antagonists with his forehead. In “Angels with Dirty Faces” he imitated a hoodlum neighbor in Yorkville, hitching up his trousers, twisting his neck, snapping his fingers and bringing his hands together in a soft smack.

Politically, the actor was a longtime New Deal Democrat who, in later years, became a conservative because of what he perceived as a moral confusion threatening Americans’ values.

In 1940 he was accused of Communist sympathies by a Los Angeles politician before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He appeared before the committee, which exonerated him. The issue arose from contributions he had made and his fund-raising activities, including providing food for striking California farm workers and an ambulance for the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War.

In retirement, Mr. Cagney read widely, wrote verse, painted, played classical guitar, satisfied his longtime zest for sailing and farming and limbered up by dancing a chorus or two to ragtime music.

“Absorption in things other than self,” he observed, “is the secret of a happy life.”

FRED ASTAIRE

May 10, 1899–June 22, 1987

By Richard F. Shepard

Fred Astaire, whose flashing feet and limber legs made him America’s most popular dancer and set standards for motion picture musical comedies that have rarely been met and never exceeded, died of pneumonia yesterday at Century City Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 88 years old.

Mr. Astaire blithely danced his way into the heart of an America tormented by the Depression and edging toward World War II. His deceptively easy-looking light-footedness, warm smile, top hat, cane, charm and talent helped people to forget the world that nagged at them outside the movie house.

The Astaire legend, which spanned more than six performing decades on stage, screen and television, began before he was 10 years old when his mother paired him as a dancer with his sister, Adele, the partner with whom he first found success. Mr. Astaire starred in more than 30 film musicals between 1933 and 1968, 11 of which co-starred Ginger Rogers, his most durable dancing partner. The music they danced to was written by the cream of the popular-music world, including Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and George and Ira Gershwin. There were other famous dancers, but few could match the sophistication and inventiveness of Mr. Astaire in such films as “Flying Down to Rio,” “The Gay Divorcee,” “Top Hat,” “Swing Time,” “Follow the Fleet,” “Blue Skies” and “Easter Parade. For all the lushness of his films, often in settings of splendor and champagne, Mr. Astaire projected a down-to-earth personality, that of a good-hearted fellow whose effortless steps, even at their most dazzling, matched his casual demeanor.

His dance numbers gave the illusion of being boundless, without regard for the laws of gravity or the limitations of a set. He danced atop a wedding cake (“You’ll Never Get Rich”), on roller skates (“Shall We Dance?”), while hitting golf balls (“Carefree”) and up walls and on the ceiling (“Royal Wedding”). He danced while airborne, aboard ships and in countless ballrooms.

He was popular and beloved, a thin, sandy-haired man who fretted and sweated off-camera and offstage to make his dance come across with a spontaneity few could equal. During a long career in which he went from vaudeville to Broadway to Hollywood to television—his 1957 special, “An Evening with Fred Astaire,” won nine Emmy Awards—he never failed to delight audiences.

He was also a paragon among his professional peers. George Balanchine, the artistic director of the New York City Ballet, called him simply “the greatest dancer in the world.”

Irving Berlin, in whose musical “Top Hat” Mr. Astaire wore the topper and tails that became the dancer’s working hallmark, said: “He’s not just a great dancer; he’s a great singer of songs. He’s as good as any of them—as good as Jolson or Crosby or Sinatra.”

The Astaire seen in performance was a different Astaire from the one who lived out of the spotlight. He detested formal dress, and frequently told interviewers he regarded top hat and tails as no more than working dress.

The easygoing air that surrounded his own performance was developed by a dancer who was serious and painstaking about his work.

“Dancing is a sweat job,” he once said. “You can’t just sit down and do it, you have to get up on your feet. When you’re experimenting you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, that you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion. This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn’t want to be tracked.”

He added: “It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable. There must be a certain amount of polish to it.… I always try to get to know my routine so well that I don’t have to think, ‘What comes next?’ Everything should fall right into line, and then I know I’ve got control of the bloody floor.”

Mr. Astaire stopped dancing professionally about 1970, when he was already over 70 years old.

“I don’t want to be a professional octogenarian,” he said nearly a decade later, adding. “I don’t want to look like a little old man dancing out there.”

The Astaire dance story began not long after his birth, in Omaha on May 10, 1899. His name was Frederick Austerlitz, the same as his father’s, a brewery worker and an emigrant from Austria who during World War I Anglicized the family name to Astaire.

As a boy he toddled along with his mother to pick up his sister, who was 18 months older than Fred, at dancing school. She was outstanding as a dancer at the age of 6, and their mother, Ann Geilus Austerlitz, soon had Fred studying ballet there, too, at the age of 4.

A few years later, Mrs. Austerlitz took the children to New York, where they were enrolled in the performing-arts school run by Ned Wayburn, a pioneer in modern tap dancing. By the time Fred was seven, they had an act called Juvenile Artists Presenting an Electric Musical Toe-Dancing Novelty.

When Fred was 10, he and Adele, who would become one of the country’s best-known dance teams, made their first professional appearance, in vaudeville, in a Keyport, N.J., theater. The teen-age brother and sister hoofed their way through the Middle West but climbed to the first rung of success in a Shubert Broadway revue, “Over the Top,” in 1917. The Astaires were a hit, and they were immediately booked into “The Passing Show of 1918,” in which a critic called Fred “an agile youth, and apparently boneless.”

There followed more theater engagements and stardom in 1922 in “For Goodness’ Sake,” which had several songs by George and Ira Gershwin. In the New York production, the Astaires had sixth billing, but they stole the show.

The Astaires danced their way to Broadway triumphs in the 1920’s, starring in 11 musicals, among them “Funny Face,” “Lady, Be Good!” and “The Band Wagon,” their last big hit together in 1931. Adele married Lord Cavendish in 1932, retired from the stage and died in 1981.

Mr. Astaire found a new partner, Claire Luce, and in 1932 they starred in Cole Porter’s “Gay Divorce,” later filmed as “The Gay Divorcee,” in which he introduced the song “Night and Day.” In that year he took a screen test and was approved by David O. Selznick of RKO Pictures, who found that the dancer’s charm was tremendous, even though he had “enormous ears and a bad chin line.” His first movie was “Dancing Lady” (1933), with Joan Crawford and Clark Gable. This was followed by “Flying Down to Rio,” in which he appeared with Ginger Rogers. The hit of the movie was their performance of Vincent Youmans’s “Carioca,” and they danced off with the laurels.

From that point on, they were the uncontestable stars of their films. Their string of successes at RKO included such hits as “Top Hat,” “Roberta” and “Swing Time,” ending in 1939 with “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.”

From 1940 on, Mr. Astaire made movies with many dancing partners, among them Miss Hayworth (“You Were Never Lovelier”), Judy Garland and Ann Miller (“Easter Parade”), Cyd Charisse (“The Band Wagon” and “Silk Stockings”) and Audrey Hepburn (“Funny Face”).

Mr. Astaire’s first wife, Phyllis Livingston Potter, died in 1954. In 1980, at 81, he married Robyn Smith, who survives him, as do three children.

In later years, his daily routine was little changed from the life he had always led: He woke up at 5 A.M. and breakfasted on a single boiled egg that kept his weight at a perpetual 134 pounds.

LUCILLE BALL

August 6, 1911–April 26, 1989

By Peter B. Flint

Lucille Ball, the irrepressible queen of television comedy for nearly a quarter-century, died yesterday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles a week after undergoing heart surgery there. She was 77 years old.

Miss Ball, noted for impeccable timing, deft pantomime and an endearing talent for making the outrageous believable, was a Hollywood legend: a contract player at RKO in the 1930’s and 40’s who later bought the studio with Desi Arnaz, her first husband.

The elastic-faced, husky-voiced comedian was a national institution from 1951 to 1974 in three series and many specials on television that centered on her “Lucy” character. The first series, “I Love Lucy,” was for six years the most successful comedy series on television. The series, on CBS, chronicled the life of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, a Cuban band leader played by Mr. Arnaz, who was Miss Ball’s husband on and off screen for nearly 20 years.

It was a major national event when, on Jan. 19, 1953, Lucy Ricardo gave birth to Little Ricky on the air the same night Lucille Ball gave birth to her second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha 4th. The audience for the episode was estimated at 44 million, a record at the time, and CBS said 1 million viewers responded with congratulatory telephone calls, telegrams, letters or gifts. (Miss Ball’s first child, Lucie Desiree Arnaz, was born July 17, 1951, three months before the show went on the air.)

The Ricardos were the best-known, best-loved couple in America, and the first “Lucy” series is still in syndication in more than 80 countries.

Miss Ball was an astute business executive. From 1962 to 1967, she headed Desilu Productions, one of the biggest and most successful television production companies. Also, starting in 1968, she and her second husband, Gary Morton, a former nightclub comic, headed Lucille Ball Productions.

She bought Mr. Arnaz’s share of Desilu Productions in 1962 with a $3 million bank loan, and she sold the company to Gulf and Western Industries in 1967 for $17 million. Her share totaled $10 million.

Before entering television, Miss Ball appeared in more than 50 films, beginning in 1933 as an unbilled chorus girl in an Eddie Cantor musical farce, “Roman Scandals.” Her other films included “Having Wonderful Time” (1938), “Room Service” (1938), “The Big Street” (1942), “Best Foot Forward” (1943), the title role in “Du Barry Was a Lady” (1943), “Without Love” (1945), “Sorrowful Jones” (1949) and “Fancy Pants” (1950).

In 1960 she also starred in a Broadway musical, “Wildcat.”

In 1964 there was a Lucy Day at the New York World’s Fair, and in 1971 she became the first woman to receive the International Radio and Television Society’s Gold Medal. Her other awards included four Emmys, induction into the Television Hall of Fame and a citation for lifetime achievement from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Lucille Desiree Ball was born on Aug. 6, 1911 in Celoron, outside Jamestown, N.Y. She was the daughter of the former Desiree Hunt, a pianist, and Henry Dunnell Ball, a telephone lineman, who died when she was three. As a girl she spent a great deal of time with her maternal grandparents.

She embarked on a show-business career at 15 by going to Manhattan and enrolling in John Murray Anderson’s dramatic school. From the first, she was told she had no talent and should go home. She tried and failed to get into four Broadway chorus lines.

She worked variously as a waitress and as a soda jerk in a Broadway drugstore. She then became a hat model and modeled for commercial photographers. She won national attention as the Chesterfield Cigarette Girl in 1933. This got her to Hollywood as a Goldwyn chorus girl in “Roman Scandals.”

Over two years, she played unbilled and bit roles in two dozen movies and made two-reel comedies with Leon Errol and the Three Stooges. She then spent seven years at RKO Radio Pictures, getting many leading roles in low-budget movies.

She was typed and mostly wasted in films, but several roles suggested her talents: a cynical young actress in “Stage Door” (1937), a temperamental movie star in “The Affairs of Annabel” (1938), a rejected lover in the 1939 melodrama “Five Came Back,” a gold-digging stripper in “Dance, Girl, Dance” (1940), a handicapped egotist in “The Big Street” (1942) and a tough-talking secretary in “The Dark Corner” (1946).

“I never cared about the movies,” she said later, “because they cast me wrong.”

In radio, Miss Ball did regular stints on comedy-variety shows in the late 30’s and 40’s and, from 1947 to 1951, she played the precursor to Lucy: the hare-brained wife of a Midwestern banker in the CBS radio comedy “My Favorite Husband.”

In 1950, she and Mr. Arnaz tried to sell the “I Love Lucy” television show to CBS. Network executives balked, saying the public would not accept the team of an American redhead and a Cuban bandleader with a heavy accent. To prove their case, the couple went on a nationwide vaudeville tour with a 20-minute act that included a “Cuban Pete–Sally Sweet” medley. They produced a 30-minute film pilot with $5,000 of their own money. The broadcast officials were won over.

“I Love Lucy” had its premiere on Oct. 15, 1951, and within a few months millions of Americans tuned in every Monday evening to watch the antics of the Ricardos and their best friends, Fred and Ethel Mertz (William Frawley and Vivian Vance).

“I Love Lucy” was one of the first shows to be filmed rather than performed live, making it possible to have a high-quality print of each episode for rebroadcast, compared with the poor quality of live-show kinescopes. The change eventually led to a shift of television production from New York to Hollywood. The series, the first to be filmed before an audience, won more than 200 awards, including five Emmys.

“The extraordinary discipline and intuitive understanding of farce gives ‘I Love Lucy’ its engaging lilt and lift,” Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote.

Mr. Arnaz made a fortune for the couple by obtaining rerun rights. He later sold the rights to CBS, allowing the couple’s production company, Desilu, to buy a studio, the former RKO lot where Miss Ball’s film career had languished and where they had met in 1940 while appearing together in “Too Many Girls.”

Despite the continuing popularity of “I Love Lucy,” the couple sought a less demanding schedule and ended the series in 1957 after making 179 episodes. The format persisted, however, for three more years through a series of around-the-world specials called “The Luci-Desi Comedy Hour.” Their collaboration ended with their divorce in 1960. Mr. Arnaz died in 1986.

Two years after their divorce, Miss Ball revived “Lucy,” playing a widow in “The Lucy Show” for 156 episodes until 1968, then did “Here’s Lucy” for 144 episodes from 1968 to 1974.

In later movies, she co-starred with Bob Hope in two comedies, “The Facts of Life” (1961) and “Critic’s Choice” (1963), and appeared with Henry Fonda in “Yours, Mine and Ours,” a 1968 farce about a couple with nearly a score of children. In 1974 she starred in a film version of the stage hit “Mame.”

Miss Ball also appeared in television specials and played a bag lady in a 1985 television movie, “Stone Pillow.” John J. O’Connor of The Times said she was “as wily and irresistible as ever.” In 1986, she returned to weekly television as a grandmother in a sitcom series called “Life with Lucy,” but it failed to gain an audience.

Perhaps her style had become passe. Still, as CBS Chairman William S. Paley said in tribute, “Lucy’s extraordinary ability to light up the screen and brighten our lives is a legacy that will last forever.”