Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Larry H. Parker, Famed Personal Injury Attorney, Dies at 75

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      In the Los Angeles area, Mr. Parker was a common sight on billboards and television commercials in which he promised to stand up to faceless insurance companies.Larry H. Parker, an accident and personal injury lawyer whose television commercials promised he’d “fight for you” and became staples in living rooms across Los Angeles, died on March 6 in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. He was 75.His death was confirmed by his son, Justin Parker, who did not cite the cause.Over the years, Angelenos became familiar with Mr. Parker’s personal brand of braggadocio and promise, as his face could be seen on billboards across the city and on television ads.“When it comes to the law, you want someone who carries a big stick,” a narrator says in one commercial that cuts from a hockey brawl to a shot of Mr. Parker in a suit and glasses, standing with both hands on a desk, ready for a courtroom showdown.“People sometimes ask me why I seem so angry in my television commercials,” Mr. Parker said in another ad. “Well the truth is I am angry. I’m angry when big insurance companies take advantage of little people.”His ads cultivated an image of a legal brawler whose menacing presence on the screen could be used in a plaintiff’s favor.It appeared that those who were injured were eager to engage the services of his firm, the Law Offices of Larry H. Parker. Since its founding 50 years ago, the firm has recovered more than $2 billion in verdicts and settlements, according to its website.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dorie Ladner, Unheralded Civil Rights Heroine, Dies at 81

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      She risked arrest and worse in pursuit of her goals of integration and voting rights from the time she was a teenager.Dorie Ann Ladner, a largely unsung heroine on the front lines of the 1960s civil rights movement in the South, a crusade that shamed the nation into abolishing some of the last vestiges of legal segregation, died on Monday in Washington. She was 81.She died in a hospital from complications of Covid-19, bronchial obstruction and colitis, said her older sister and fellow civil rights activist Joyce Ladner, who called her a lifelong defender of “the underdog and the dispossessed.”Born and raised in racially segregated Mississippi by a mother who taught her to take no guff, Ms. Ladner joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as a teenager; left college three times to organize voter-registration campaigns and promote integration; packed a gun on occasion, as some of her prominent colleagues were shot or blown up; befriended the movement’s most celebrated figures; and participated in virtually every major civil rights march of the decade.Ms. Ladner carried an American flag when she attended the funeral of the four girls killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963.Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos“The movement was something I wanted to do,” she told The Southern Quarterly in 2014. “It was pulling at me, pulling at me, so I followed my conscience.”“The line was drawn in the sand for Blacks and for whites,” she said in an interview for the PBS documentary series “American Experience” the same year. “And was I going to stay on the other side of the line forever? No. I decided to cross that line. I jumped over that line and started fighting.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Michael Culver, ‘Star Wars’ Actor and Victim of Darth Vader, Dies at 85

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      Mr. Culver, who was best known for his demise as Captain Needa in “The Empire Strikes Back,” was also a familiar actor on British TV and in theater.Michael Culver, the British actor best known for one of the memorable death scenes in the Star Wars franchise, died on February 27. He was 85.Mr. Culver’s death was confirmed by Alliance Agents, which posted a statement to social media on Tuesday, and his agent, Thomas Bowington. The agency did not give a cause of death, though Mr. Bowington said Mr. Culver had had cancer for several years.He had a long acting career onscreen and stage that spanned over 50 years and included roles in “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” on TV and the 1984 film “A Passage to India.”But his most lasting impact on popular culture came in 1980, with his brief role as Captain Needa in the second “Star Wars” film, “The Empire Strikes Back.” Needa, after losing track of Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, apologizes to Darth Vader, who promptly chokes him to death telepathically.“Apology accepted, Captain Needa,” Vader says, walking around the captain’s body and motioning for others to take him away.Mr. Culver also appeared in two “James Bond” films with the actor Sean Connery, “From Russia With Love” and “Thunderball.”Michael John Edward Culver was born on June 16, 1938, in London to Daphne Rye, a theater casting director, and Ronald Culver, an actor, according to Mr. Bowington.Mr. Culver performed in several Shakespeare plays and worked regularly with the British director Anthony Page, his agent said.Mr. Culver is survived by his second wife, Amanda Ward Culver, and his children, Roderic, Sue and Justin Culver.His son, Roderic Culver, also became an actor, Mr. Bowington said.Later in his life, Mr. Culver mostly gave up acting to focus on politics and would have likely pursued a political career had he not been an actor, Mr. Bowington said.He still visited Star Wars fan events, notably one in Chicago in 2019, his agency said in its statement.“He was lost for words,” it said, “when he saw his queue line with nearly 200 people waiting to see him.” More

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      Gerald M. Levin, Time Warner Chief in a Merger Debacle, Dies at 84

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      He was called a visionary in cable television, but his foray into the world of the internet, in a marriage with AOL, proved disastrous.Gerald M. Levin, a “visionary” media executive, as he was often described, who became C.E.O. of the world’s largest media company, Time Warner, and an architect of its merger with America Online, widely considered the worst corporate marriage in American history, died on Wednesday. He was 84.Jake Maia Arlow, a grandchild of Mr. Levin’s, confirmed the death, in a hospital, and said he lived in Long Beach, Calif. No other details were provided. Mr. Levin had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Levin was Time Warner’s chief executive when he and his counterpart at AOL at the time, Steve Case, devised what was then the largest business merger in U.S. history. When the deal was announced on Jan. 10, 2000, Time Warner was the world’s largest media company, and America Online was the largest internet company, with a combined market value of roughly $342 billion (the equivalent of about $600 billion today).The merger, creating AOL Time Warner, was heralded as a watershed moment — the union of old and new media, a storied 20th-century American company whose origins could be traced to the publishing baron Henry Luce and the Hollywood boss Jack Warner, hitching up with a Virginia tech company for a ride into the World Wide Web. Instead, it became shorthand for the excesses of the turn-of-the-century dot-com bubble and the era of so-called synergy.Richard Parsons, who succeeded Mr. Levin as chief executive of AOL Time Warner in 2002, said in a phone interview for this obituary in 2022 that Mr. Levin was “one of the smartest guys in the media and entertainment space,” a “visionary” who saw the digital wave coming and understood how the internet would transform Time Warner’s business.“He saw the merger with AOL as making Time Warner digital by injection,” Mr. Parsons said. “What AOL brought to the party was instant access and competence in terms of how to access the internet world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Malachy McCourt, Actor, Memoirist and Gadabout, Dies at 92

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      Playing the professional Irishman, he returned from Limerick to New York, where he tended bar, appeared in soap operas, wrote a best seller, and, with his family, scattered “Angela’s Ashes.”Malachy McCourt, who fled a melancholic childhood in Ireland for America, where he applied his blarney and brogue to become something of a professional Irishman as a thespian, a barkeep and a best-selling memoirist, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 92.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Diana McCourt.In 1952, when he was 20, the Brooklyn-born Mr. McCourt reunited with New York.He embarked from Ireland with a ticket paid for with $200 in savings sent by his older brother, Frank McCourt, who had emigrated earlier and was working as a public school English teacher. Frank would also become a late-blooming author, whose books included the Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical work “Angela’s Ashes” (1996).Malachy left school in Limerick when he was 13, two years after his heavy-drinking father deserted the family, leaving his mother, Angela, to raise the four of their surviving seven children. The family, Malachy would write, was “not poor, but poverty-stricken.”“Coming out of that life, the things that get you are the two evils of shame on one shoulder, the demon fear on the other,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “Shame says you came from nothing, you’re nobody, they’ll find you out for what you and your mother have done. Fear says what’s the use of bothering, drink as much as you can, dull the pain. As a result, shame takes care of the past, fear takes care of the future and there’s no living in the present.”In the mid-1980s, he gave up drinking and smoking.The barrel-chested, red-bearded Mr. McCourt appeared regularly on soap operas — notably “Ryan’s Hope,” on which he had a recurring role as a barkeep — and played bit parts in several films. In the 1950s, he opened what was considered Manhattan’s original singles bar: Malachy’s, on the Upper East Side.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      William Whitworth, Revered Writer and Editor, Is Dead at 87

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      After writing memorable character sketches and fine-tuning others’ copy at The New Yorker, he spent two decades as editor in chief of The Atlantic Monthly.William Whitworth, who wrote revealing profiles in The New Yorker giving voice to his idiomatic subjects and polished the prose of some of the nation’s celebrated writers as its associate editor before transplanting that magazine’s painstaking standards to The Atlantic, where he was editor in chief for 20 years, died on Friday in Conway, Ark., near Little Rock. He was 87.His daughter, Katherine Whitworth Stewart, announced the death. She said he was being treated after several falls and operations in a hospital.As a young college graduate, Mr. Whitworth forsook a promising career as a jazz trumpeter to do a different kind of improvisation as a journalist.He covered breaking news for The Arkansas Gazette and later for The New York Herald Tribune, where his colleagues eventually included some of the most exhilarating voices in American journalism, among them Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe.In 1966, William Shawn, The New Yorker’s decorous but dictatorial editor, wooed Mr. Whitworth to the venerated weekly. He took the job although he had already accepted one at The New York Times.At The New Yorker, he injected wit into pensive “Talk of the Town” vignettes. He also profiled the famous and the not so famous, including the jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus (accompanied by photos from his former Herald Tribune colleague Jill Krementz) and the foreign policy adviser Eugene V. Rostow. He expanded his profile of Mr. Rostow into a 1970 book, “Naïve Questions About War and Peace.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Petra Mathers, Author Whose Children’s Stories Soared, Dies at 78

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      Her winsome animal characters and their comic adventures expressed universal truths and feelings, rendered in a naïve and often surrealistic style.Petra Mathers, a German-born children’s book illustrator and author whose kindly, often bumbling animal characters were nonetheless quietly heroic and often risked much for love, died on Feb. 6 at her home in Astoria, Ore. She was 78.Patty Flynn, her executor, said that Ms. Mathers and her husband, Michael Mathers, a photographer, who was 79, took their own lives. There did not appear to be an obvious health concern that precipitated their act, though they had often told friends that they could not live without each other. They were a private, devoted couple, and the timing of their deaths remains a mystery.With spare, naïve images rendered in ink, pencil and watercolor, Ms. Mathers’s stories — whose subjects included a soulful museum guard (an alligator) who falls in love with the subject in a painting (another alligator) and a warmhearted chicken named Lottie and her best friend, Herbie, a duck — were just as sparely written, but imbued with sly humor and wit, captivating both her 8-and-under audience and their parents.The first book Ms. Mathers wrote, “Maria Theresa,” was the story of a dreamy fowl who has all sorts of adventures.HarperCollins“Here is the story of a chicken who flees the coop,” Carol Brightman wrote in 1985 in a New York Times review of Ms. Mathers’s first book, “Maria Theresa,” the tale of a dreamy fowl who has all sorts of adventures. “You know the type. No ordinary laying hen, this one sometimes stops ‘in mid-peck as if listening to faraway voices.’”Ms. Mathers’ prose and her “flat, old-fashioned cutout Surrealism” combined “an attention to both the commonplace and the arcane which marks the best of children’s literature,” Ms. Brightman wrote. “The book’s final tableau of circus folk (and fowl) dancing the Tango Argentine outside Miss Lola’s Airstream is a triumph of this vision. What else but a hopelessly romantic chicken, one that never forgets to lay the morning egg, could bring us such a show.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mark Dodson, Voice of ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Gremlins’ Characters, Dies at 64

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      He voiced Salacious B. Crumb, the monkey-lizard pet of Jabba the Hutt in “Return of the Jedi,” as well as Mogwai in both “Gremlins” films.Mark Dodson, who voiced strange puppet creatures in “Star Wars,” including Salacious B. Crumb, the cackling monkey-lizard pet of Jabba the Hutt, and “Gremlins” films, died on Saturday. He was 64.His death was confirmed in statements on social media by his agent, Peter DeLorme, and the Evansville Horror Con, the Indiana fan convention where he had been scheduled to appear over the weekend. No cause of death was given.Mr. Dodson’s career began in 1983 on “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi,” when he voiced Salacious B. Crumb, the court jester of Jabba the Hutt that was known for its maniacal laugh.In a 2020 interview, Mr. Dodson explained how he had gotten the role by accident.He was auditioning for Adm. Ackbar, a leader during the Clone Wars, but was so nervous that he asked for a break to compose himself, and was overheard using a deranged voice that the casting director thought was perfect for Crumb.That led to Mr. Dodson to voice several of the Mogwai in “Gremlins,” the 1984 comedy-horror film about a young man who accidentally unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous monsters on a small town on Christmas Eve.“Let’s say I did get Ackbar — I never would’ve gotten the ‘Gremlins,’” he said. “The ‘Gremlins’ came because the ‘Gremlins’ were made by the same guys who made Salacious. That’s why it came up, ‘They look a lot the same. Wouldn’t it be great for the Gremlins to have that same voice! Who is that guy?’”Mr. Dodson continued working in both franchises, voicing characters in the 1985 television movie “Ewoks: The Battle for Endor” and “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” in 1990.He voiced a scavenger in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015) and appeared as an uncredited zombie in George Romero’s “Day of the Dead” (1985).Mark Dodson was born on Feb. 1, 1960, in St. Louis, according to IMDb.He also voiced characters in several video games, including “Star Trek Online,” “Ghostrunner,” “Bendy and the Dark Revival,” and “Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga,” once again as Crumb. More