Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Mary McFadden, Celebrated Designer of Shimmering Dresses, Dies at 85

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      She took symbols from ancient cultures and translated them into intricate embroideries, beadings and paintings on clothes worn by the likes of Jacqueline Onassis.Mary McFadden, a fashion designer who was famous not just for her shimmering, pleated dresses, which cascaded freely to the floor, but also for her visage — stark white Kabuki-style makeup and bluntly cut ebony hair — died on Friday at her home in Southampton, N.Y. She was 85.Her brother John McFadden said the cause was myeloma dysplasia.Ms. McFadden took symbols from ancient cultures — the phoenix from China, shadow puppets from Indonesia — and translated them into intricate embroideries, beadings and paintings on her clothes.At Mary McFadden Inc., the company she ran from 1976 to 2002, she designed pleated dresses that she said she wanted to fall “like liquid gold” down a woman’s body. They were similar to those made by Mariano Fortuny and Henriette Negrin early in the 20th century, but they were made from a synthetic charmeuse that she sourced in Australia, dyed in Japan and machine-pressed in the United States — a fabric she patented in 1975 and called Marii.She designed dresses that resembled those worn by the women sculpted on the caryatids at the Acropolis in Greece, and her models imitated their poses for fashion shoots under the pediment of the New York Public Library. Jacqueline Onassis was among those who wore McFadden gowns.Ms. McFadden was the first female president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She served in that position from 1982 to 1983.The author, pianist and composer Christopher Mason said that he often ran into Ms. McFadden in the late 1980s and ’90s, and that he once found himself seated next to her at a dinner hosted by the Irish model Maxime de la Falaise for her daughter, Loulou.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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      Chad McQueen, ‘Karate Kid’ Actor, Dies at 63

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      Mr. McQueen, the son of Steve McQueen, is most widely recognized for his recurring role as Dutch in the 1980s cult classic franchise “The Karate Kid.”Chad McQueen, the actor best known for the role of “Dutch” in the “Karate Kid” movie franchise and son of the actor Steve McQueen, died on Wednesday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 63.His family announced his death in a post on social media, paired with a photo of him as a boy with his famous father. The cause was organ failure, his longtime attorney and friend, Arthur Barens, said.Chad McQueen was involved in more than 25 movies and television shows, as an actor, producer and other roles, but he is most widely recognized for his role as Dutch in the 1984 teen classic “The Karate Kid.”As Dutch, Mr. McQueen played a mean, troublemaking bully of the Cobra Kai dojo who ran with Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and his gang, showing no mercy and jumping up and down in excitement as they delivered a brutal beating to Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) on Halloween night.He reprised the role of Dutch in the sequel, “The Karate Kid Part II,” released in 1986.Mr. McQueen went on to appear in other films including “New York Cop,” a 1993 action film about a Japanese detective living illegally in the United States; and “Red Line,” a 1995 thriller about a car thief who is blackmailed.But Mr. McQueen did not stay in Hollywood for long after that, and he again followed in his father’s footsteps by switching to auto racing.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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      Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Champion of Latino Photography, Dies at 93

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      A New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, he helped start a collective that brought recognition to Hispanic photographers and illuminated life in the city’s barrios.To Charles Biasiny-Rivera, who worked as a street photographer in the barrios of New York City in the early 1970s, his craft was a matter of trust as much as eye.“You really do have to understand that when you enter a neighborhood, the neighborhood sees you as a stranger, because they know everybody, so you don’t want to become noticed,” he said in a 2022 video interview. “So you hang out a little bit,” he added, “smoke some cigarettes, say good morning, good afternoon to people.“If you created a rapport with them,” he said, “they wouldn’t be peering at you all the time. For those peeking from windows, “the shades would go up, the shades would go down.”A photograph by Mr. Biasiny-Rivera taken in 1974 at Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. (The school closed in 1982.) The image was shown in the 2021 exhibition “En Foco: The New York Puerto Rican Experience, 1973-1974,” at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan.Charles Biasiny-Rivera/Collection El Museo del Barrio, New York CityAs an aspiring photographer of Puerto Rican descent, Mr. Biasiny-Rivera saw street photography as one of the few paths open to him at a time when the handful of Latino photographers he knew were struggling to make a mark in the field. He spent the rest of his career working to change that.Mr. Biasiny-Rivera died at 93 on Aug. 10 at his home in Olivebridge, N.Y., a hamlet in the Catskill Mountains. His wife, Betty Wilde-Biasiny, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.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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      Alberto Fujimori, Ex-Leader of Peru Imprisoned for Rights Abuses, Dies at 86

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      During his decade in power, he revived the economy and crushed two violent leftist insurgencies. But he was forced out in a corruption scandal and later imprisoned for human rights abuses.Alberto Fujimori, who during his decade-long presidency in Peru rebuilt the nation’s economy and quelled two deadly leftist insurgencies, but who was forced out by a corruption scandal and was later imprisoned for human rights abuses, died Wednesday. He was 86.His daughter Keiko Fujimori confirmed his death in a post on X. Mr. Fujimori, who suffered from arrhythmia and other ailments, died of cancer at Ms. Fujimori’s home in Lima, the capital.A son of Japanese immigrants, Mr. Fujimori was an obscure agricultural engineer and political novice when he ran for the presidency in 1990, famously campaigning aboard a tractor. He stunned the nation by placing a close second in a crowded field and then defeating the establishment favorite, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, in a runoff.In office, Mr. Fujimori tamed hyperinflation, unemployment and mismanagement; lifted economic growth and standards of living; and cracked down on drug trafficking. But he also showed little regard for Peru’s laws and institutions. He temporarily shut down Congress, governing by fiat for months. He was lauded for subduing the two insurgencies, Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, but the brutality of his methods ultimately drew global criticism and landed him a lengthy prison sentence.Mr. Fujimori waved the flag of Peru as he and former hostages of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement arrived at a military hospital in Lima in 1997. The hostages had been held at the Japanese ambassador’s residence before being freed by troops.Luis Chiang/ReutersHis downfall seemed as improbable as his ascent. Toppled in 2000 after a television channel broadcast a videotape showing his intelligence chief trying to bribe a congressman, Mr. Fujimori fled to Japan, where he submitted his resignation by fax from a hotel in Tokyo. After five years in exile, he traveled to Chile to try making a political comeback; instead, he was extradited to Peru.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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      María Benítez, Dancer Who Championed Flamenco, Is Dead at 82

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      “People came from everywhere to see her shows,” an admirer said — including, on at least one occasion, the ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov.María Benítez, an American dancer and choreographer who, as the founder of a popular Spanish dance troupe, played a major role in making New Mexico a hotbed for flamenco, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Fe. She was 82.Her death was confirmed by her son, Francisco Benítez, who is her only immediate survivor and who did not specify a cause.Ms. Benítez was born in Minnesota, but she spent most of her childhood in Taos, N.M., where she began taking ballet classes at 10. At 18, she moved to Spain to study Spanish dance. There, in 1965, she met Cecilio Benítez, who was in charge of scenography and lighting at the Fontalba Theater in Madrid. They soon married, and she brought him back to her homeland, settling in New Mexico, where she started teaching and performing Spanish dance at El Nido, a bar in Santa Fe.The Benítezes formed a dance troupe, at first called the María Benítez Spanish Company and then later named the María Benítez Teatro Flamenco. In 1976, they moved to New York and began splitting their time between that city and Santa Fe. The company became the troupe in residence at the Lodge at Santa Fe and performed every summer in a cabaret theater that was modeled on the flamenco tablaos of Spain and was eventually named after her.“She helped make New Mexico a capital of flamenco, not just in the United States but on the global scale,” Nicolasa Chávez, who is the deputy state historian of New Mexico and the author of “The Spirit of Flamenco: From Spain to New Mexico” (2015), said in an interview. “People came from everywhere to see her shows” — including, Ms. Chávez recalled, the ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov.Ms. Benítez and Ángel Muñoz in performance at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan in 1995. Ms. Benítez’s company, the María Benítez Teatro Flamenco, performed regularly at the Joyce in the 1980s and ’90s. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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      Dan Morgenstern, Chronicler and Friend of Jazz, Dies at 94

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      He wrote prolifically about the music and played an important role in documenting its history, especially in his many years with the Institute of Jazz Studies.Dan Morgenstern, a revered jazz journalist, teacher and historian and one of the last jazz scholars to have known the giants of jazz he wrote about as both a friend and a chronicler, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 94.His son Josh said his death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure.Mr. Morgenstern was a jazz writer uniquely embraced by jazz musicians — a nonmusician who captured their sounds in unpretentious prose, amplified with sweeping and encyclopedic historical context.He was known for his low-key manner and humility, but his accomplishments as a jazz scholar were larger than life.He contributed thousands of articles to magazines, newspapers and journals, and he served the venerable Metronome magazine as its last editor in chief and Jazz magazine (later Jazz & Pop) as its first. He reviewed live jazz for The New York Post and records for The Chicago Sun-Times, as well as publishing 148 record reviews while an editor at DownBeat, including a stint from 1967 to 1973 as the magazine’s chief editor.His incisive liner-note essays won eight Grammy Awards. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2007 and received three Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music writing from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, two of them for his books “Jazz People” (1976) and “Living With Jazz” (2004). He was involved — as a writer, adviser, music consultant and occasional onscreen authority — in more than a dozen jazz documentaries. Most decisively, he served from 1976 to 2011 as the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, elevating the institute into the largest repository of jazz documents, recordings and memorabilia in the world.“I don’t like the word ‘critic’ very much,” Mr. Morgenstern often maintained. “I look at myself more as an advocate for the music than as a critic,” he wrote in “Living With Jazz.” “My most enthusiastic early readers were my musician friends, and one thing led to another. What has served me best, I hope, is that I learned about the music not from books but from the people who created it.”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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      Lloyd Ziff, Visionary Photographer and Art Director, Dies at 81

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      He designed some of the most visually exciting magazines of the 1970s and ’80s. But his real love, and eventually his focus, was photography.Lloyd Ziff was not yet a celebrated art director in 1968, when he photographed an art school classmate, Robert Mapplethorpe, and his girlfriend, Patti Smith, in their tiny Brooklyn apartment. “I found them very beautiful,” Mr. Ziff said years later.The black-and-white portraits he took are tender and moving, almost heartbreakingly so; as James Danziger, the gallerist who showed them in 2013, said recently: “Youth is moving. They capture a moment in time just before Patti and Robert were going to explode. They both carried an aura, and Lloyd was drawn to that. They wanted to be photographed just as much as he wanted to photograph them.”Mr. Ziff photographed Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith at their apartment in 1968. “I found them very beautiful,” he said.Lloyd ZiffMr. Ziff went on to serve as art director for some of the most influential and visually arresting magazines of the 1970s and ’80s, including Rolling Stone, House & Garden, Vanity Fair and Condé Nast Traveler. Mr. Mapplethorpe and Ms. Smith, of course, would find their own fame, and tragedy, when Mr. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989. When Ms. Smith wrote of their coming-of-age in her 2010 memoir, “Just Kids,” she included a few of Mr. Ziff’s portraits.“Although we weren’t particularly close,” Mr. Ziff said, “I believe we recognized in each other something we probably couldn’t put into words at the time.”Mr. Ziff died on Aug. 1 at his home in Orient Point, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 81.His husband, Stephen Kelemen, confirmed the death. He said that Mr. Ziff had been in declining health.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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      Virginia Ogilvy, Confidante to Queen Elizabeth II, Dies at 91

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      Born into New York wealth and married to a Scottish earl, she was the only American-born lady-in-waiting to the queen, serving for nearly 50 years.Virginia Ogilvy, the Countess of Airlie, who served Queen Elizabeth II for nearly 50 years as the only American-born member of the monarch’s inner circle of advisers, assistants and close friends known as the ladies-in-waiting, died on Aug. 16 at her estate in Cortachy, a village in Scotland. She was 91.Her daughter Lady Elizabeth Baring confirmed the death.Ladies-in-waiting, a position dating to the Middle Ages, carried out different tasks under different queens, including planning, correspondence and household administration.But in all cases the most important task was to serve as a sort of official best friend, requiring discretion, an ear for gossip and a careful eye on the queen’s needs and wants. By tradition and necessity, the role is usually held by a peer, in part because it comes without salary or benefits.Lady Ogilvy’s husband, David, the Earl of Airlie, had been friends with Queen Elizabeth since they were children, and the couple were long a part of her social circle. Both would join her household: Lady Ogilvy in 1973 and her husband in 1984, taking the role of Lord Chamberlain of the Household, overseeing the queen’s domestic affairs after a long career in banking.Lady Ogilvy was something of a first among equals in the ranks of the ladies-in-waiting, with the official title of Lady of the Bedchamber. She and the queen were by all accounts quite close; the queen even joined Lady Ogilvy at her 70th birthday party, at Annabel’s, a members-only nightclub in London, an event celebrated in the British news media as the only time the queen went clubbing.Lady Ogilvy with her husband, David Ogilvy, at a state banquet in 1992. In public she wore the pearl-and-diamond encrusted Airlie Tiara, a jewelry piece created for her husband’s grandmother.Terry Fincher/The Fincher Files/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesWe 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