AP Features, July 30th, 2007
Ingmar Bergman
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) _ Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, an iconoclastic filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, has died, the president of his foundation said. He was 89.
Bergman died Monday at his home in Faro, Sweden, Swedish news agency TT said, citing his daughter Eva Bergman. A cause of death was not immediately available.
Through more than 50 films, Bergman's vision encompassed all the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, the gentle merriment of glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the island where he spent his last years.
Bergman first gained international attention with 1955's "Smiles of a Summer Night," a romantic comedy that inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical "A Little Night Music."
"The Seventh Seal," released in 1957, riveted critics and audiences. An allegorical tale of the medieval Black Plague years, it contains one of cinema's most famous scenes _ a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death.
Though best known internationally for his films, Bergman also was a prominent stage director. He worked at several playhouses in Sweden from the mid-1940s, including the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, which he headed from 1963 to 1966. He staged many plays by the Swedish author August Strindberg.
The influence of Strindberg's grueling and precise psychological dissections could be seen in the production that brought Bergman an even-wider audience: 1973's "Scenes From a Marriage." First produced as a six-part series for television, then released in a theater version, it is an intense detailing of the disintegration of a marriage.
Bergman showed his lighter side in the following year's "The Magic Flute." It is a fairly straight production of the Mozart opera, enlivened by touches such as repeatedly showing the face of a young girl watching the opera and comically clumsy props and costumes.
Bergman remained active later in life with stage productions and occasional TV shows. He said he still felt a need to direct, although he had no plans to make another feature film.
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Odile Crick
SAN DIEGO (AP) _ Painter Odile Crick, whose most famous drawing was a graceful sketch of the double-helix structure of DNA, has died. She was 86.
Crick, who had cancer, died July 5 at her home in La Jolla, said her stepson, Michael Crick.
Crick's illustration of the double helix appeared in a seminal paper by her husband, Francis Crick, and James Watson in an April 1953 issue of the journal Nature.
The men, along with Maurice Wilkins, were credited with the first explanation of DNA and its structure. They shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work on deoxyribonucleic acid.
Born in King's Lynn in Norfolk, England, Odile Crick's interest in art took her to Vienna in the 1930s and would have led her to the Sorbonne had World War II not broken out.
She joined the British Admiralty, where she listened to German radio broadcasts and translated captured torpedo manuals. She met her husband in the same office, where he was studying circuits in German acoustic torpedoes.
Crick mostly painted nudes. Among her subjects were her husband's secretaries and au pairs hired to look after the couple's children. She was initially reluctant to abandon her paintings to take on the job of illustrating her husband's work.
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Jim David
ALLEN PARK, Mich. (AP) _ Jim David, a six-time Pro Bowl defensive back who won three NFL championships with the Detroit Lions, has died. He was 79.
He died Sunday at his home after a long illness, the team said.
Chosen in the 22nd round of the 1952 NFL draft, David was a starter at left cornerback during seven of his eight seasons. The Lions won NFL championships in 1952, '53 and '57, with David as a starter. He was selected to the Pro Bowl after each of his last six seasons, while playing in a backfield that featured Hall of Famers Jack Christiansen and Yale Lary.
He ranks fifth on the Lions' career interceptions list with 36, and David's six Pro Bowl trips are good for eighth on the team's all-time list.
David went into coaching after retiring and returned to Detroit in 1967 as defensive coordinator after stints with the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco. He left coaching after the 1972 season.
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Dilip Ganguly
NEW DELHI (AP) _ Dilip Ganguly, whose 21-year career at The Associated Press saw him report from Baghdad during the Gulf War, on the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and on stories across South Asia, has died. He was 57.
Ganguly, in a coma since a brain hemorrhage July 14, died Sunday in Calcutta, the eastern Indian city where he was based, said his son, Shonal Ganguly.
Among Ganguly's high-profile assignments _ and the one he was most proud of _ was covering Baghdad at the start of the 1991 Gulf War.
Ganguly was born in 1949 in Ranchi, in eastern India. After graduating from Ranchi University, he worked at newspapers, magazines and news agencies before joining the AP in New Delhi in 1986. AP assignments took him from the Himalayan mountains to the jungles of northeastern India and, soon enough, to Iraq.
In Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's government tapped his telephone. When Ganguly called his wife in India and started speaking Bengali, the line was cut because the government didn't have Bengali translators.
Ganguly returned to Iraq after the war. He later covered the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the war in Bosnia.
In 1997, Ganguly was named correspondent in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In April, he moved to Calcutta to bolster AP's coverage of India's emergence as a global power.
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John Graham
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) _ John Graham, a children's book author and longtime University of Virginia professor, has died. He was 80.
Graham died July 16 of natural causes at his Charlottesville home, the university said.
Graham penned two best-selling children's books _ "A Crowd of Cows" in 1968 and "I Love You, Mouse" in 1976. His late wife, novelist Alexandra Ripley, was best known for writing "Scarlett," the sequel to Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind."
Graham worked at the University of Virginia from 1958 to 2003, teaching courses in speech and English, specializing in 18th-century literature, romanticism, aesthetics, comedy, satire, rhetoric and children's literature.
John R. Graham said his father had been preparing for a new printing of "A Crowd of Cows" when he died.
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Howard Judd
SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) _ Dr. Howard Judd, a researcher who oversaw a groundbreaking national study of the medical problems of older women, has died. He was 71.
He died July 19 of congestive heart failure, said his wife, Susan Judd.
Judd was a principal investigator of the Women's Health Initiative, a sweeping federal study launched in the 1990s, until he retired from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2005.
In 2002, the study's clinical trial on hormone-replacement therapy appeared to put women at increased risk for heart attack and stroke, and it was called off three years early. Nearly five years later, researchers concluded that estrogen is beneficial to many, a position that Judd had always maintained.
One of Judd's early achievements was devising a way to assess the severity of hot flashes, a common effect of menopause. They are marked by a sharp rise in a woman's skin temperature and pulse rate. The equipment he developed to objectively measure hot flashes helped him complete "tremendous studies related to estrogen therapy," said Dr. Gautam Chaudhuri, executive chairman of the obstetrics department at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine.
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Bill Robinson
LAS VEGAS (AP) _ Bill Robinson, who played on Pittsburgh's 1979 World Series championship team and was working as the Los Angeles Dodgers' minor league hitting coordinator, has died. He was 64.
Robinson was in Las Vegas to visit the Dodgers' minor league team and was supposed to meet De Jon Watson, Dodger director of player development, to drive to the ballpark together.
But Robinson failed to show up at the appointed time and he was found dead in his hotel room on Sunday, Dodgers spokesman Josh Rawitch said. The official cause of death was pending, he said.
Robinson was in his second season with the Dodgers after spending four years on the Florida Marlins' coaching staff, where he served as hitting coach for the 2003 world champions.
He was hitting coach for the New York Mets from 1984-89, including their 1986 World Series title.
Robinson played in the majors from 1966-83, with 1,127 hits, 166 home runs and 641 RBI as an outfielder for Atlanta, the New York Yankees, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He batted .264 with 24 homers and 75 RBIs for the Pirates in '79.
Robinson also served as a minor league hitting coach for the Yankees and was a minor league coach and manager in Philadelphia's farm system. He managed in the Venezuelan League and was an analyst for ESPN's "Baseball Tonight" in 1990-91.
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Michel Serrault
PARIS (AP) _ French actor Michel Serrault, whose hit performance as a transvestite in the film and stage versions of "La cage aux folles" (The Birdcage) catapulted him to international stardom, has died. He was 79.
Serrault died Sunday of cancer in his home in Honfleur, said his priest, the Rev. Alain Maillard de La Morandais.
Serrault appeared in more than 130 films during a career that spanned half a century. After debuting as a comic actor, Serrault became one of France's most versatile stars, playing a serial killer, a grizzled farmer, a crooked banker and accused rapist.
Born on Jan. 24, 1928, in Brunoy, Serrault initially set his sights on the priesthood, briefly entering a seminary. He dropped out, he later explained, because of the vow of chastity.
After studying acting in Paris, Serrault began as his stage career playing in cabarets.
He made his silver screen debut in 1954 in Jean Loubignac's "Ah! les belles bacchantes" (Oh, the lovely bacchantes), which was released as "Peek-a-boo" in the United States. His first big break came in 1972, with a leading role in Pierre Tchernia's "Le Viager" (The Life Annuity.)
It was his role as flamboyant gay nightclub owner Albin Mougeotte, also known as Zaza Napoli, in the theater and film versions of the mega-hit "La cage aux folles" (The Birdcage) that catapulted him to fame worldwide. His performance in director Edouard Molinaro's 1978 movie won him the first of three Cesar awards _ the French version of the Oscar.
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Marvin Zindler
HOUSTON (AP) _ Marvin Zindler, the flamboyant television consumer reporter whose crusade against a rural brothel inspired the play and movie "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," has died. He was 85.
Zindler died Sunday of complications from pancreatic cancer, said officials at KTRK-TV, the station he worked for.
Zindler landed at KTRK in 1973, soon after being fired at age 51 from the Harris County Sheriff's Department, where he had fought consumer fraud.
State Attorney General John Hill had seen reports from the Texas Department of Public Safety about how local law enforcers allowed the Chicken Ranch brothel to operate, Zindler said.
Hill enlisted Zindler's help and gave him the investigative reports. Zindler followed through with reports exposing the Chicken Ranch and the law enforcement conspiracy.
He showed the evidence to Gov. Dolph Briscoe on a Monday, and the brothel was closed by Thursday.
The TV reports made Zindler a household name statewide. His fame grew when a Playboy Magazine story followed. "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" became a Broadway smash and propelled Zindler to national renown.
He liked the play but hated the Burt Reynolds-Dolly Parton movie of the same name, in which Dom DeLuise played him over the top.
