Dead Celebrity Alert

Outback artist Pro Hart has died at his Broken Hill home after battling motor neurone disease.

The 77-year-old was diagnosed with the debilitating disease that causes muscle wastage late last year but his condition began to worsen last week.

His family decided to cease his medication on Friday and the legendary artist died at 2.45am today, Hart’s family said.

Pro Hart became a household name for his unconventional and diverse art works — which at one time featured in a popular carpet-cleaning advertisement.

He was “a truly remarkable Australian and one that will be sadly missed,” his family said. … Read full obituary

Gordon Parks, who captured the struggles and triumphs of black America as a photographer for Life magazine and then became Hollywood’s first major black director with “The Learning Tree” and the hit “Shaft,” died Tuesday, a family member said. He was 93.

Parks, who also wrote fiction and was an accomplished composer, died in New York, his nephew, Charles Parks, said in a telephone interview from Lawrence, Kan. …

He covered everything from fashion to politics to sports during his 20 years at Life, from 1948 to 1968.

But as a photographer, he was perhaps best known for his gritty photo essays on the grinding effects of poverty in the United States and abroad and on the spirit of the civil rights movement. … Read full obituary

Jamie Hodgson, the photographer whose haunting images of jazz musicians helped immortalise its greatest stars, has died at the age of 76.

The former fashion photographer, who died of cancer on Sunday, took his stark black and white pictures of musicians including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong during the 1950s and 1960s.

His pictures, which amounted to a hall of fame of American jazz greats from Dizzy Gillespie to Ray Charles, was all the more remarkable given that Hodgson took none of them in the United States. The shots were all taken by the photographer, a jazz fanatic, during live performances by the stars in London. …

He also set up the Kinnerton Street Studio in Knightsbridge where he made his living photographing models such as Jean Shrimpton, Tania Mallet and the wife of the former Conservative leader Michael Howard, then known as Sandra Paul. … Read full obituary

Al Hirschfeld, whose inimitable caricatures captured the vivid personalities of theater people and their performances for more than 75 years, died at his home in Manhattan yesterday. He was 99.

To be the subject of a Hirschfeld drawing endowed one with a special cachet. To find the word “Nina,” the name of his daughter, hidden several times in the lines of his caricatures, was a weekend pastime for millions of readers. Next to his signature he put the number of “Ninas” in his drawings, creating a sort of pleasurable Sunday game for his admirers.

In a career that spanned the 20th century, he probably saw more shows than anyone else. He drew a vast and imaginative portrait of the performing artists of his lifetime, particularly in the theater. He was a familiar figure at first nights and at rehearsals, where he had perfected the technique of making a sketch in the dark, using a system of shorthand notations that contributed to the finished product.

His art was compared by critics to that of Daumier and Toulouse-Lautrec but, ultimately, it was Hirschfeld, cannily perceptive, wittily amusing and benignly pointed. … Read full obituary

Obit to come.

Herb Ritts, the photographer whose glorifying images of the well known helped to further mythologize celebrity in the 1980’s and 90’s, died yesterday in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 50 and lived in Los Angeles.

The cause was complications from pneumonia, his friend Stephen Huvane, a Hollywood publicist, said.

A photographer whose subjects ranged from Madonna and Cindy Crawford to the Dalai Lama and Kofi Annan, Mr. Ritts, like George Platt Lynes, relied on clean, graphic compositions that often portrayed models and celebrities in the visual language of classical Greek sculpture.

“He shot exquisite, iconic photographs,” said Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, a magazine to which Mr. Ritts contributed dozens of cover images.

Born in Los Angeles in 1952, Mr. Ritts grew up in a prosperous family that owned a furniture business. … Read full obituary

Acclaimed outdoors photographer Galen Rowell and his wife, Barbara Rowell, were killed along with two others in a plane crash near the Bishop (Inyo County) airport over the weekend on their way home from a photo workshop class in the Arctic.

Known for his wilderness photography of the Bay Area, the Sierra and across all seven continents, the Berkeley-born Rowell was killed instantly in the crash Sunday morning as the plane approached the airport. He was 61.

Barbara Rowell, 54, who was an accomplished pilot, writer and frequent collaborator with her husband, was not flying the plane when it crashed at around 1:20 a.m., according to Inyo County undersheriff Jack Goodrich. …

Rowell’s death shocked many outdoors people who considered him to be one of the world’s pre-eminent photographers of natural settings and an avid outdoorsman who brought remote areas into the public realm. … Read full obituary

FLAGLER BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Ron Walotsky, a renowned science fiction artist whose work was featured on about 500 book covers, including “Queen of the Damned” by Anne Rice and “Carrie” by Stephen King, died Monday after a brief illness. He was 58.

His work, which often featured aliens and surreal landscapes in vivid colors, has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the U.S. Embassy in Paris. … Read full obituary

Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh, whose pictures of British politician Winston Churchill, scientist Albert Einstein and author Ernest Hemingway earned his widespread recognition around the world, died here today at 93, according to a local hospital official. …

In December 1941 he made a portrait of a defiant Churchill, which later became a symbol of Britain’s courage and fighting spirit during World War II and brought Karsh international recognition.

The photograph was taken on short notice, minutes after Churchill delivered a rousing address at the House of Commons.

Karsh asked the British leader to take his trademark cigar out of his mouth and, when he ignored the request, stepped forward and snatched it from Churchill’s mouth.

The picture captured an irate Churchill glowering at the photographer. … Read full obituary

Pop artist Niki de Saint Phalle, best known for her brightly coloured and voluptuous figures of women that gained her a reputation as a leading contemporary artist in France, has died. She was 71.

Saint Phalle died on Tuesday in San Diego, California, after a long illness, according to a statement issued by the city of Hanover, Germany, where the artist was an honorary citizen. It did not elaborate. …

Born in the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on November 29, 1930 as Catherine Marie-Agnes Fal de Saint Phalle, she moved with her parents to New York in 1937, where she grew up visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art. … Read full obituary

Frank Moore, a painter and AIDS activist who helped create the red ribbon design that became an international symbol for AIDS awareness, died of complications from AIDS on Sunday, April 21, at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 48 years old.

Moore was one of the first members of Visual AIDS, and he was instrumental in forming the group’s Red Ribbon Project in 1990, according to the New York Times. The project launched the overlapping red ribbon, which was worn on lapels and has become recognizable worldwide as a representation of the struggle against AIDS.

Moore’s paintings, several of which were featured in New York’s Whitney Biennial in 1995, reportedly mix art and politics, and many focus on themes of bioethics or environmental decay. … Read full obituary

Berry Berenson, aged 53, who was a passenger on the hijacked American Airlines flight 11 which crashed into the World Trade Centre, was a fashion photographer and accomplished Hollywood film actor. She was, however, known as much for her personal profile, having been married to Anthony Perkins for nearly 20 years until his death from Aids in 1992. A granddaughter of the fabled Italian couturier Elsa Schiaperelli, known for the promotion of shocking pink as a fashion shade, Berry showed she could lead a similarly colourful existence.

. . .

Through her better-known sister, the actress Marisa (Death In Venice, Cabaret and Barry Lyndon), she came to photograph a roll-call of Hollywood stars: Tuesday Weld, Ray Brock, Pilar Crespi, Candice Bergen and more. The sisters were raised as socialites who entertained, and were entertained by, both the cream and the froth of society.

. . .

In 1973, she married the actor Tony Perkins. She was three months pregnant, a condition that prompted her mother, the impressively titled Marquesa Gogo Berenson di Cacciapooti, to call her a “degenerate”. Despite Perkins’s homosexuality, Berry remained his wife, and cared for him in the last two years of his life.

During their marriage, she had carved out an alternative career path as an actor. …

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While Perkins summed up his personal tragedy, après Flaubert, with: “Face it gang, I am Norman Bates,” Berry Berenson has been given a very different memorial. In the wake of the horror of her death, her spokeswoman Susan Patricola commented: “She was one of the loveliest, greatest people on the earth, full of life.” At the time of her death, Berenson was returning home to Los Angeles after holidaying on Cape Cod. She is survived by her two sons by Anthony Perkins: Osgood, aged 27, and Elvis Perkins, aged 25.

Ronald Bergan writes: During therapy, for what he believed would “cure” his homosexuality, Anthony Perkins was asked what sort of woman attracted him. …

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Then, in 1990, Perkins was tested positive for HIV. …

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On September 2 1992, Perkins died with Berenson clutching her husband’s hand. “We had a very satisfying life together. It was a wonderful love affair. If anything else was happening, I certainly didn’t know about it, and I don’t think he intended to hurt me in any way.” … Read full obituary

At the home of Osgood Perkins in Los Angeles, a woman sobbed when a reporter called asking about Mr. Perkins’s mother, Berry Berenson Perkins, a photographer, who is the widow of the actor Anthony Perkins and the sister of the actress Marisa Berenson. Ms. Berenson Perkins was thought to have been on one of the flights. The woman said the family knew nothing and hung up. … Read full story

Also:

- David Angell, 54, executive producer of “Frasier”;

- Daniel Lewin, 31, co-founder and CTO of Akamai Technologies;

- Edmund Glazer, 41, CFO of MRV Communications;

- Garnet (Ace) Bailey, 53, and Mark Bavis, scouts for the Los Angeles Kings.