Obituaries
This page lists the obituaries of people who made news during their lifetimes. Obituaries of historians can be found here.
SOURCE: NYT(3-27-12)
Priscilla L. Buckley, a journalist who was the longtime managing editor of National Review, the conservative magazine founded by her brother William F. Buckley Jr., died on Sunday at her home in Sharon, Conn. She was 90.
Her death, at Great Elm, the 30-room Georgian mansion in which Miss Buckley and her siblings were reared, was of kidney failure, said her nephew Christopher Buckley, a writer and Mr. Buckley’s son. Miss Buckley had lived for many years in one of the several condominiums into which Great Elm was partitioned in the 1980s.
Miss Buckley, who was associated with National Review for more than four decades, was its managing editor from 1959 to 1985. In that role, she oversaw the day-to-day operations of the magazine, riding herd — by all accounts without raising her voice so much as a decibel — on a staff of occasionally bibulous, sometimes fractious and constitutionally dilatory writers....
SOURCE: NYT(3-27-12)
Henry S. Ruth Jr., who helped lead the criminal prosecution of Nixon administration officials involved in covering up the Watergate break-in and kept it on track when President Richard M. Nixon fired the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, died on March 16 in Tucson. He was 80.
The cause was a stroke, his wife, Deborah Mathieu, said.
Mr. Ruth had broad experience in criminal law when he became Mr. Cox’s chief deputy shortly after Mr. Cox’s appointment as special prosecutor in May 1973. Five months later, on Oct. 20, President Nixon ordered Mr. Cox’s dismissal after he refused to drop his plan to subpoena tapes of the president’s conversations in the Oval Office. The firing prompted the two top Justice Department officials, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, to quit in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre....
SOURCE: NYT(3-5-12)
Ralph McQuarrie, the artist who transformed George Lucas’s rudimentary concepts and earliest scripts into lush, vivid images of intergalactic expanse and light-saber combat that became the visual core of the “Star Wars” saga, died on Saturday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 82.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Stan Stice, a friend and co-author of the 2007 book “The Art of Ralph McQuarrie.”
Mr. McQuarrie had a hand in some of the most successful science-fiction and adventure films of the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s. He created the original drawings for the mother ship in Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) and the spaceship for Mr. Spielberg’s “ET” (1982). He also did conceptual art for “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), “Star Trek IV” (1986), “Batteries Not Included” (1987) and “Jurassic Park” (1993), as well as for the original “Battlestar Galactica” TV series....
Mr. McQuarrie was best known as the concept artist for the first three of the six “Star Wars” films: “Star Wars” (1977), “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “Return of the Jedi” (1983). Mr. Lucas’s tale of cosmic civil war against the evil regime of Emperor Palpatine had been rejected by both United Artists and Universal when Mr. McQuarrie was brought on board. After Mr. Lucas placed before him illustrations from comic books and several pages from an early script for the first “Star Wars” film, Mr. McQuarrie came back with a dozen full-color renditions of Mr. Lucas’s imaginings....
