A few of the lives lost to the world in 2020
At their essence, obituaries are about making connectionswith strangers. Even celebrities, seemingly well-known, are mysteries to most of us, their humanity lost beneath their public persona and behind the publicity hype.
The craft of the obituary involves excavating another person’s humanity, so that we might better understand a life perhaps far different from our own. These obituaries, a sampling of the thousands that appeared last year in The Washington Post, offer portraits of a small number of the inconceivable number of lives lost in 2020, and an opportunity to remember those who have shaped our shared humanity.
Terry Jones
January 21, aged 77 – The British writer and actor injected a surreal silliness into pop culture as a charter member of the Monty Python comedy juggernaut, playing roles as varied as a revoltingly obese gourmand and the annoyed mother of an accidental messiah named Brian.
Kobe Bryant
January 26, aged 41 – The five-time NBA champion’s tirelessness and competitive drive were as notable as his versatility and ambition. Known late in his career by the nickname ‘‘Black Mamba’’, Bryant was one of the smoothest and most dangerous shooters in the league.
Kirk Douglas
February 5, aged 103 – With a distinctive cleft chin, raspy voice and highly charged dramatic energy, he became one of Hollywood’s foremost leading men and enduring stars. He also produced and directed films; helped put an end to the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s; wrote memoirs, novels and children’s books; and with his secondwife, Anne Douglas, ran a project to improve school playgrounds in underprivileged neighbourhoods.
Katherine Johnson
February 24, aged 101 – Labouring in obscurity formuch of her life, she developed equations that helped the NACA and its successor, Nasa, send astronauts into orbit and, later, to the Moon. In 26 signed reports for the space agency, and in many more papers that bore others’ signatures on her work, she codified mathematical principles that remain at the core of human space travel.
Max von Sydow
March 8, aged 90 – The brooding Swedish star was amainstay of Ingmar Bergman’s movie masterpieces, but in a career spanning seven decades and more than 150 films, the breadth and lucidity of his performances – in roles that were commanding, stoic, tormented and, at times, broadly comic – elevated him to the highest echelon of international cinema.
BettyWilliams
March 18, aged 76 – After witnessing a stray bullet striking a toddler, she abandoned her anonymous life as a Belfast mother for one of full-time advocacy, and received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to end the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Kenny Rogers
March 20, aged 81 – The country-pop crooner specialised in narrative-driven ballads such as Lucille and The Gambler, the second ofwhich sent its life-as-a-cardgame refrain echoing through popular culture.
Joseph Lowery
March 27, aged 98 – The civil rights leader was among the prominentministers who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the Rev Martin Luther King Jr. He served as the group’s president for 20 years.
BillWithers
March 30, aged 81 – The Grammy winner wrote and sang a string of soulful hits in the 1970s that remain cultural staples, including Lean On Me, Lovely Day and Ain’t No Sunshine.
Ellis Marsalis
April 1, aged 85 – Hewas a leading jazz pianist in New Orleans for decades, and the father of four sons who became acclaimed musicians, including Branford and Wynton Marsalis.
Honor Blackman
April 5, aged 94 – The British actress gained stardom as a leather-clad, judochopping spy on the hit TV show The Avengers, and then as henchwoman and living double-entendre Pussy Galore in the James Bond film Goldfinger.
John Prine
April 7, aged 73 – A raspy-voiced heartland troubadour, he wrote and performed songs about faded hopes, failing marriages, flies in the kitchen and the desperation of people just getting by. He was, as one of his songs put it, the bard of ‘‘broken hearts and dirtywindows’’.
Little Richard
May 9, age 87 – In rock’s infancy, Little Richard was the unstoppable pacesetter, the pompadoured wild man whose flamboyant showmanship and incendiary spirit of abandon – ‘‘a-wop-bop-a-loo-mopa-wop-bam-boom’’ – would drive the music for generations.
Jerry Stiller
May 11, aged 92 – The Brooklyn-born entertainer formed a popular comedy act in the 1960s with his wife, Anne Meara, before playing crotchety, kvetching fathers on network sitcoms – most notably the hypertensive Frank Costanza on Seinfeld.
Christo
May 31, aged 84 – An audacious environmental artist known for his monumental works, hewrapped the Reichstag in Berlin in silvery fabric, dressed several islands near Miami in flamingo-pink skirts, ran a 24-mile fence through northern California and installed 7500 goalpost-like gates in New York’s Central Park. His installations, which in some cases attracted millions of visitors, expanded the definition of contemporary art.
Vera Lynn
June 18, aged 103 – The British singer’s girl-next-door persona and wistful interpretation of popular songs made her a favourite among Allied troops during World War II. She rose to stardom in the late 1930s and early 1940s with hits including (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover, There’ll Always Be an England, Yours and We’llMeet Again, and reached broad audienceswith her BBC radio programme Sincerely Yours.
Ian Holm
June 19, aged 88 – The British actor’s roles demonstrated remarkable dramatic range, from Shakespeare dramas to a
Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings trilogy to an Oscar-nominated performance as a track coach in Chariots of Fire.
Carl Reiner
June 29, aged 98 – The gifted comic improviser created the enduring 1960s sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show and Mel Brooks’ 2000-Year-Old Man character, a cranky Jewish rascal who claimed to have dated Joan of Arc (‘‘what a cutie’’) and have 42,000 children (‘‘and not one comes to visitme’’). He also directed movies that launched Steve Martin’s film career in the 1970s and 1980s.
Ennio Morricone
July 6, age 91 – The Italian composer’s wildly inventive soundtracks – from the electric guitar, whistle, whip crack and coyote howl of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to the dramatic choral and orchestral score of The Mission – made him a revered figure in international cinema.
John Lewis
July 17, aged 80 – The civil rights leader preached non-violencewhile enduring beatings and jailings during seminal frontline confrontations of the 1960s and later spent more than three decades in Congress defending the crucial gains he had helped achieve for people of colour.
Olivia de Havilland
July 26, aged 104 – The Hollywood actress was the last surviving star of Gone With the Wind, won two Academy Awards and risked her career to push for complex roles and challenge punitive filmindustry labour laws. She was one of the last links to the old studio system whose treatment of actors she did much to transform.
Herman Cain
July 30, aged 74 – The Godfather’s pizza chain chief executive and tax-fighting conservative sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 before his candidacy ran aground amid charges of sexual harassment. He remained a prominent Black ally of President Trump and a fixture of right-wing news outlets.
Chadwick Boseman
August 28, aged 43 – The charismatic African American actor starred in earnest biopics of Jackie Robinson, James Brown and Thurgood Marshall before his commercial breakthrough in the 2018 superhero blockbuster Black Panther.
Diana Rigg
September 10, aged 82 – The classically trained English actress vaulted to fame as a leather-clad private eye on the 1960s British TV series The Avengers, which became a cult hit. Late in her career, she appeared in Game of Thrones.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
September 18, aged 87 – The US Supreme Court justice, the secondwoman to join its ranks, was a legal pioneer for gender equality whose fierce high court opinions made her a hero to the left. She earned a reputation as the legal embodiment of the women’s liberationmovement and was a widely admired role model for generations of female lawyers.
Juliette Greco
September 23, aged 93 – The acclaimed French chanteuse’s sensual stage mystique and doleful voice bewitched audiences for more than six decades and made her an international recording and concert star.
Helen Reddy
September 29, aged 78 – The Australianborn performer’s rousing songI Am Woman was a galvanising force in the women’s movement of the early 1970s and made her one of the most popular singing stars of the decade.
Eddie Van Halen
October 6, aged 65 – The guitar virtuoso’s pyrotechnic riffs and solos expanded the vocabulary of hard rock, inspired legions of headbanging imitators and propelled his band Van Halen to four turbulent decades of stadium-rock stardom.
Sean Connery
October 31, aged 90 – The Scottish-born actor was film’s first – and for many viewers, the only – ‘‘Bond, James Bond’’, and his charismatic swagger enlivened dozens of othermovies, including his Oscar-winning performance in The Untouchables.
Lucille Bridges
November 10, aged 86 – Once a sharecropper, she was determined to obtain for her daughter the proper education that she as a Black girl had been denied. Her child Ruby became one of the first African American pupils to integrate an elementary school in the South.
JanMorris
November 20, aged 94 – An author and renowned travel writer of extraordinary range and productivity, shewas one of the world’s first well-known transgender public figures. She wrote of her transition in the book Conundrum (1974).
Diego Maradona
November 25, aged 60 – A mesmerising Argentine football star and coachwhom many consider the best player of all time. He led his country to victory in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, and to the final four years later, as well as playing for Barcelona, Napoli and others.
Chuck Yeager
December 7, aged 97 – The American military test pilot was the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound and live to tell about it, launching America into the supersonic age. His abundant confidence and innate understanding of engineering mechanics – what an airplane could do under any form of stress – made him a jet and space-age exemplar of what Tom Wolfe called ‘‘the right stuff’’.
John le Carre
December 12, aged 89 – The British author drew on his experiences as a ColdWarera spy to write powerful novels about a bleak, morally compromised world in which international intrigue and personal betrayalwent hand in hand. His best-known books, including The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), sold in the millions and were made into acclaimed film and television adaptations.
Pierre Cardin
December 29, aged 98 – The French fashion designer helped to lead haute couture away from stuffy exclusivity into more youthful ready-to-wear designs. His success enabled him to create a global brand of designer goods, magazines, hotels and restaurants, even sardines and chocolates.