RIP

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by mustangjeano

I am speachless--will the hating ever stop?

Both People and TMZ are reporting Cory Monteith was privately cremated Tuesday in Canada.

Sometimes hatred is perpetuated based on inaccuracies and the subsequent reactions to them.

Sometimes, we need to take a step back, breathe, wait for the facts to sort themselves out.

[*Anya*]

Originally Posted by mustangjeano

I am speachless--will the hating ever stop?

Originally Posted by Kobi

Both People and TMZ are reporting Cory Monteith was privately cremated Tuesday in Canada.

Sometimes hatred is perpetuated based on inaccuracies and the subsequent reactions to them.

Sometimes, we need to take a step back, breathe, wait for the facts to sort themselves out.

"“PRAISE GOD ALMIGHTY for killing Cory Monteith — a wicked f**-enabling sinner! Westboro Baptist Church to picket his funeral,” the church wrote to Chris Colfer, who plays gay chorus member Kurt Hummel, as well as several other cast members."

http://legalpronews.findlaw.com/article/08081dCdlj1jA

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3598346.html


Yes it is hard to believe, but true.

Multiple legitimate sources, including GLADD, have documented Westboro's tweets.

I am glad to read that the family averted anything of the sort from occurring by cremation (which may have been his expressed preference previously).

[Words]

On a side note...

I just took a look - my first - at the Westboro Baptist Church website.

I literally feel sick.

Words

[CherylNYC]

From the New York Times:

Laurie Frink,Trumpeter and Brass Instructor to Many, Dies at 61
By NATE CHINEN
Published: July 17, 2013

Laurie Frink, an accomplished trumpeter who became a brass instructor of widespread influence and high regard, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 61.

The cause was cancer of the bile duct, said the classical violist Lois Martin, her partner of 25 years.

Ms. Frink built her trumpet career as a section player, starting when few women were accepted in those ranks. She worked extensively on Broadway and with the Benny Goodman Orchestra, the Mel Lewis Orchestra and Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band, often playing lead...



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/ar...dayspaper&_r=0

[Greyson]

Pioneering journalist Helen Thomas dies at 92

By CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press
Published: Saturday, Jul. 20, 2013 - 7:47 am

Thomas was at the forefront of women's achievements in journalism. She was one of the first female reporters to break out of the White House "women's beat" — the soft stories about presidents' kids, wives, their teas and their hairdos — and cover the hard news on an equal footing with men.

She became the first female White House bureau chief for a wire service when UPI named her to the position in 1974. She was also the first female officer at the National Press Club, where women had once been barred as members and she had to fight for admission into the 1959 luncheon speech where Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev warned: "We will bury you."

The belligerent Khrushchev was an unlikely ally in one sense. He had refused to speak at any Washington venue that excluded women, she said.

Thomas fought, too, for a more open presidency, resisting all moves by a succession of administrations to restrict press access.

"People will never know how hard it is to get information," Thomas told an interviewer, "especially if it's locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they'd stamp TOP SECRET on the color of the walls."

Born in Winchester, Ky., to Lebanese immigrants, Thomas was the seventh of nine children. It was in high school, after working on the student newspaper, that she decided she wanted to become a reporter.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/20/558...#storylink=cpy

[Kobi]

I grew up watching Helen Thomas. She was a unique character and well respected by her peers and the politicians she covered. I had a deep respect for her diplomacy, honesty, and way with words when asking leading questions.

She was a pioneer and role model for women of my era.

[Kobi]

LONDON (Reuters) - British comedian Mel Smith, who became a household name for a series of television sketch shows in the 1970s and 80s which colleagues said had inspired a generation of comics, has died of a heart attack, his agent said on Saturday.

Smith, who died on Friday aged 60, found fame starring in hugely popular shows "Not The Nine O'clock News" and "Alas Smith and Jones" and went on to direct the films "Bean" and "The Tall Guy".

"I still can't believe this has happened," said Griff Rhys Jones, his comedy partner in his best-known TV shows. "To everybody who ever met him, Mel was a force for life. He was a gentleman and a scholar, a gambler and a wit."

Together, they formed Talkback, a highly successful independent TV production house that spawned many hit British comedies including the "Ali G" series, which gave Sacha Baron Cohen his first big television break.

Talkback was sold to Pearson TV in 2000 for 62 million pounds ($95 million).

"Mel Smith's contribution to British comedy cannot be overstated," said Tony Hall, the Director General of the BBC.

"On screen he helped to define a new style of comedy from the late 1970s that continues to influence people to this day."

He played The Albino in The Princess Bride.

[Kobi]

NEW YORK (AP) — Dennis Farina, a onetime Chicago cop who as a popular actor played a cop on "Law & Order," has died.

Farina died Monday morning in a Scottsdale, Ariz., hospital after suffering a blood clot in his lung, according to his publicist, Lori De Waal. He was 69.

For three decades, Farina was a character actor who displayed remarkable dexterity, charm and, when called for, toughness, making effective use of his craggy face, steel-gray hair, ivory smile and ample mustache.

Farina appeared in films including "Get Shorty," ''Saving Private Ryan," ''Midnight Run" and "Out Of Sight."

Among his many TV portrayals was Detective Joe Fontana on "Law & Order" during the 2004-06 seasons. He starred in the 1980s cult favorite "Crime Story" and was a regular in the 2011-12 HBO drama "Luck."

He recently completed shooting a comedy, "Lucky Stiff."

A veteran of the Chicago theater, Farina appeared in Joseph Mantegna's "Bleacher Bums" and "Streamers," directed by Terry Kinney, among other productions.

Born Feb. 29, 1944, in Chicago, he was a city detective before he found his way into the acting profession as he neared his forties.

His first film was the 1981 action drama "Thief," directed by Michael Mann, whom he had met through a mutual friend while still working for the Chicago Police Department.

"I remember going to the set that day and being intrigued by the whole thing," Farina recalled in a 2004 interview with The Associated Press. "I liked it. And everybody was extremely nice to me. If the people were rude and didn't treat me right, things could have gone the other way."

http://news.yahoo.com/dennis-farina-...172640962.html

[Kobi]

Virginia Johnson, part of the husband-wife research team that transformed the study of sex in the 1960s and wrote two best-selling books on sexuality, has died in St. Louis. She was 88.

Johnson, who grew up in rural Missouri near the small town of Golden City, was a twice-divorced mother in her 30s when she went job-hunting at Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1950s. She was trying to support her young family while she pursued a college degree.

She soon became an assistant to obstetrician-gynecologist William Masters, and later his lover and co-collaborator on a large-scale human sexuality experiments.

Johnson recruited graduate students, nurses, faculty wives and other participants for what was described as the "biggest sex experiment in U.S. histor y." The after-hours research, first on the medical school campus at Washington University and later at a nearby building, shattered basic perceptions about female sexuality, including Freud's concept that vaginal - rather than clitoral - orgasm was the more mature sexual response for women. She took the case studies - and asked the uncomfortable questions.

Hundreds of couples, not all of them married, would participate in the observed research, later discussed in their 1966 book, "Human Sexual Response." That book and their second, 1970's "Human Sexual Inadequacy," were both best-sellers.

For the next 20 years, Masters and Johnson were celebrities, the topic of late-night talk show hosts and on the cover of news magazines. "The family feeling was they changed the study of sex with the landmark publishing of their books," Scott Johnson said.

Masters and Johnson married in 1971 and divorced after 20 years. The Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis closed in 1994. Masters died in 2001.

[Kobi]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lindy Boggs, who took over her husband's congressional seat to become a crusader for women's equality and civil rights, died Saturday at 97. Her death was confirmed by ABC News, where Boggs' daughter, Cokie Roberts, is a journalist.

The matriarch of a powerful Washington family, Boggs served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Louisiana Democrat for 18 years, beginning in 1973, when she become the first woman elected to Congress from her state.

She was a permanent chairwoman of the 1976 Democratic National Convention and also served as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican from 1997 to 2001.

The Boggs children came to prominence in politics, law and the media. In addition to Roberts, an author and journalist at National Public Radio as well as ABC TV, Boggs' son Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. is an influential Washington lawyer. Another daughter, Barbara Boggs Sigmund, died of cancer in 1990 while she was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey.

Boggs won a special election to Congress six months after the death of her husband, House Majority Leader Thomas Hale Boggs. He was presumed to have died in a plane crash in a remote part of Alaska, although his body was never found.

In Congress, Mrs. Boggs was elected to her first full term in 1974 and re-elected seven times after that, always by wide margins, and four times unopposed in a district that after the 1980 census was redrawn to include an African American majority.

Born Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne in Brunswick Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Boggs attended Sophie Newcomb College at Tulane University, a premier institution of higher education for young Louisiana women.

With a political family pedigree that stretched back to George Washington's day and included governors of Louisiana and Mississippi, Boggs came to Washington at 24 with her newly elected husband to exert behind-the-scenes influence until she herself was elected to office.

In her 1994 memoir, "Washington Through a Purple Veil," Boggs described her attempt to enter the 1941 House of Representatives to hear her husband deliver a speech. She was so simply dressed that the guard kept her out until she returned, draped in a purple veil. She recalled that a friend had told her that "the most sophisticated and becoming thing a woman could wear was a purple veil."

She worked for the Civil Rights Acts of 1965 and 1968, Head Start and other programs to help minorities, the poor and women.

Boggs used her seat on the House Appropriations Committee to steer money to New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana, and on the House Banking and Currency Committee managed to include women in the Equal Credit and Opportunity Act of 1974.

A strong Southern "steel magnolia" before that term entered the vernacular, Boggs recalled how she managed to include women in the credit act by writing in that the law should help people regardless of "sex and marital status" on the bill and making a copy for all of the committee's members.

"Knowing the members composing this committee as well as I do, I'm sure it was just an oversight that we didn't have 'sex' or 'marital status' included," she said she told her congressional colleagues. "I've taken care of that, and I trust it meets with the committee's approval."

After her political and ambassadorial service, Boggs returned to New Orleans, where her Bourbon Street home was damaged in Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She later moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland

[Kobi]

Eileen Brennan, who went from musical comedy on Broadway to wringing laughs out of memorable movie characters, died Sunday in Burbank, Calif. She was 80.

Brennan got her first big role on the New York stage in Little Mary Sunshine, a musical comedy that won her the 1960 Obie award for best actress. Along with her "excellent singing voice," her performance was "radiant and comic," said a New York Times review.

She went on to win fans for her sharp-tongued roles on television and in movies, including gruff Army Capt. Doreen Lewis in 1980's Private Benjamin, aloof Mrs. Peacock in 1985's Clue, and mean orphanage superintendent Miss Bannister in 1988's The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking.

Private Benjamin brought her a Best Supporting Actress nomination for an Oscar. She won an Emmy for repeating her Private Benjamin role in the TV version, and was nominated six other times for guest roles on such shows as Newhart, thirtysomething, Taxi and Will & Grace.

[Soft*Silver]

Actor Adam Sandler is reported to have died shortly after a snowboard accident earlier today - August 9, 2013.

The actor & novice snowboarder was vacationing at the Zermatt ski resort in Zermatt, Switzerland with family and friends. Witnesses indicate that Adam Sandler lost control of his snowboard and struck a tree at a high rate of speed.

Adam Sandler was air lifted by ski patrol teams to a local hospital, however, it is believed that the actor died instantly from the impact of the crash. The actor was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident and drugs and alcohol do not appear to have played any part in his death.

[Parker]

The Adam Sandler snow boarding thing is actually a hoax. There are "reports" of it dating back into early 2012. It is unfounded and he is not dead.

Same goes for Mickey Roarke, George Clooney, and Jim Carey.

Please see:
Snopes.com: Snowboard Death Hoax

Adam Sandler is NOT Dead - 98FM Article

Adam Sandler Fake Snowboarding Death Story Returns, Actor Not Dead - LaLateNews Article

[Kobi]

Karen Black, the prolific actress who appeared in more than 100 movies and was featured in such counterculture favorites as "Easy Rider," ''Five Easy Pieces" and "Nashville," has died. She was 74.

Known for her full lips and thick, wavy hair that seemed to change color from film to film, Black often portrayed women who were quirky, troubled or threatened. She was a prostitute who takes LSD with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in 1969's "Easy Rider," a breakthrough that helped get her the role as a waitress who dates an upper-class dropout played by Jack Nicholson in 1970's "Five Easy Pieces." Black won an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award for that performance.

Cited by The New York Times as a "pathetically appealing vulgarian," Black's performance won her an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award. She would recall that playing Rayette really was acting: The well-read, cerebral Black, raised in a comfortable Chicago suburb, had little in common with her relatively simple-minded character.

"If you look through the eyes of Rayette, it looks nice, really beautiful, light, not heavy, not serious. A very affectionate woman who would look upon things with love, and longing," Black told Venice Magazine in 2007. "A completely uncritical person, and in that sense, a beautiful person. When (director) Bob Rafelson called me to his office to discuss the part he said, 'Karen, I'm worried you can't play this role because you're too smart.' I said 'Bob, when you call "action," I will stop thinking,' because that's how Rayette is.'"

In 1971, Black starred with Nicholson again in "Drive, He Said," which Nicholson also directed. Over the next few years, she worked with such top actors and directors as Richard Benjamin ("Portnoy's Complaint"), Robert Redford and Mia Farrow ("The Great Gatsby") and Charlton Heston ("Airport 1975"). She was nominated for a Grammy Award after writing and performing songs for "Nashville," in which she played a country singer in Robert Altman's 1975 ensemble epic. Black also starred as a jewel thief in Alfred Hitchcock's last movie, "Family Plot," released in 1976.

"We used to read each other poems and limericks and tried to catch me on my vocabulary," she later said of Hitchcock. "He once said, 'You seem very perspicacious today, Miss Black.' I said, 'Oh, you mean "keenly perceptive?" 'Yes.' So I got him this huge, gold-embossed dictionary that said 'Diction-Harry,' at the end of the shoot."

The actress would claim that her career as an A-list actress was ruined by "The Day of the Locust," a troubled 1975 production of the Nathanael West novel that brought her a Golden Globe nomination but left Black struggling to find quality roles. By the end of the '70s, she was appearing in television and in low-budget productions. Black received strong reviews in 1982 as a transsexual in Altman's "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean." But despite working constantly over the next 30 years, she was more a cult idol than a major Hollywood star. Her credits included guest appearances on such TV series as "Law & Order" and "Party of Five" and enough horror movies, notably "Trilogy of Terror," that a punk band named itself "The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black."

Black was also a screenwriter and a playwright whose credits included the musical "Missouri Waltz" and "A View of the Heart," a one-woman show in which she starred.

[Soft*Silver]

oh man...I verified it with two seperate articles before I posted this. Hahahah..they got me! But I am SO glad he is alive!!!

Originally Posted by Parker

The Adam Sandler snow boarding thing is actually a hoax. There are "reports" of it dating back into early 2012. It is unfounded and he is not dead.

Same goes for Mickey Roarke, George Clooney, and Jim Carey.

Please see:
Snopes.com: Snowboard Death Hoax

Adam Sandler is NOT Dead - 98FM Article

Adam Sandler Fake Snowboarding Death Story Returns, Actor Not Dead - LaLateNews Article

[Kobi]

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Eydie Gorme, a popular nightclub and television singer as a solo act and as a team with her husband, Steve Lawrence, has died. She was 84.

Gorme, who also had a huge solo hit in 1963 with "Blame it on the Bossa Nova," died Saturday. Gorme was a successful band singer and nightclub entertainer when she was invited to join the cast of Steve Allen's local New York television show in 1953.

She sang solos and also did duets and comedy skits with Lawrence, a rising young singer who had joined the show a year earlier. When the program became NBC's "Tonight Show" in 1954, the young couple went with it.

They married in Las Vegas in 1957 and later performed for audiences there.

"Eydie has been my partner on stage and in life for more than 55 years," Lawrence said in a statement. "I fell in love with her the moment I saw her and even more the first time I heard her sing. While my personal loss is unimaginable, the world has lost one of the greatest pop vocalists of all time."

Although usually recognized for her musical partnership with Lawrence, Gorme broke through on her own with the Grammy-nominated "Blame it on the Bossa Nova." The bouncy tune about a dance craze of the time was written by the Tin Pan Alley songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Her husband had had an equally huge solo hit in 1962 with "Go Away Little Girl," written by the songwriting team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King.

Gorme would score another solo hit in 1964, but this time for a Spanish-language recording. Gorme, who was born in New York City to Sephardic Jewish parents, grew up speaking both English and Spanish.

When she and her husband were at the height of their career as a team in 1964, Columbia Records President Goddard Lieberson suggested she put that Spanish to use in the recording studio. The result was "Amor," recorded with the Mexican combo Trio Los Panchos.

The song became a hit throughout Latin America, which resulted in more recordings for the Latino market, and Lawrence and Gorme performed as a duo throughout Latin America. "Our Spanish stuff outsells our English recordings," Lawrence said in 2004. "She's like a diva to the Spanish world."

Gorme and Lawrence, meanwhile, had an impressive, long-lasting career in English-language music as well, encompassing recordings and appearances on TV, in nightclubs and in concert halls.

Throughout it, they stuck for the most part with the music of classic composers like Berlin, Kern, Gershwin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and other giants of Broadway and Hollywood musicals. They eschewed rock 'n' roll and made no apologies for it.

Soon after their marriage, the pair had landed their own TV program, "The Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme Show," which was a summer replacement for Allen.

Not long after that, however, Lawrence entered the Army, and Gorme went on the nightclub circuit as a soloist until his return to civilian life two years later.

After his discharge, Lawrence and Gorme quickly reteamed, and their careers took off. They appeared at leading nightclubs in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Las Vegas, combining music with the comedy bits they had learned during their apprenticeship on Allen's show. With nightclubs dwindling in popularity in the 1980s, they moved their act to large theaters and auditoriums, drawing not only older audiences but also the Baby Boomers who had grown up on rock 'n' roll.

Gorme, who was born Aug. 16, 1928, began to seriously consider a music career while still a student at William Taft High School in New York City's borough of the Bronx, where she had been voted the "Prettiest, Peppiest Cheerleader."

After graduation, she worked as a Spanish interpreter for a time but also sang on weekends with the band of Ken Greenglass, who encouraged her and eventually became her manager.

Her first big break came when she landed a tour with the Tommy Tucker band, and she followed that up with gigs with Tex Beneke, Ray Eberle and on radio and television.

Among her radio appearances was one on a Spanish language show, "Cita Con Eydie ("A Date with Eydie"), which was beamed to Latin America by Voice of America. Early in her career, Gorme considered changing her name, but her mother protested. "It's bad enough that you're in show business. How will the neighbors know if you're ever a success?" she told her, so Gorme decided to keep the family name but changed her given name from Edith to Edie. Later, having grown tired of people mistaking it for Eddie, she changed the spelling to Eydie.

[Parker]

Lee Thompson Young, a former Disney Channel star who appeared on "Rizzoli & Isles," was found dead this morning at the age of 29.

Police confirmed that the versatile young actor died in an apparent suicide of a gunshot wound. TMZ reports that Young’s landlord found him when he did not report to the set of the TNT drama this morning.

When officers arrived to his apartment at the 5000 block of Tujunga Avenue, they pronounced him dead at the scene. There is no word on whether Young left a note, and the coroner is taking over the case.

"It is with great sadness that I announce that Lee Thompson Young tragically took his own life this morning," said Young's long-time manager Jonathan Baruch in a statement.

"Lee was more than just a brilliant young actor, he was a wonderful and gentle soul who will be truly missed. We ask that you please respect the privacy of his family and friends as this very difficult time."

[Martina]

OH no! That's heartbreaking. I loved his character on Rizzoli and Isles. He was a good actor. He did a lot with a small but regular part. So appealing as an actor. I just hate to hear that.

Originally Posted by Parker

Lee Thompson Young, a former Disney Channel star who appeared on "Rizzoli & Isles," was found dead this morning at the age of 29.

Police confirmed that the versatile young actor died in an apparent suicide of a gunshot wound. TMZ reports that Young’s landlord found him when he did not report to the set of the TNT drama this morning.

When officers arrived to his apartment at the 5000 block of Tujunga Avenue, they pronounced him dead at the scene. There is no word on whether Young left a note, and the coroner is taking over the case.

"It is with great sadness that I announce that Lee Thompson Young tragically took his own life this morning," said Young's long-time manager Jonathan Baruch in a statement.

"Lee was more than just a brilliant young actor, he was a wonderful and gentle soul who will be truly missed. We ask that you please respect the privacy of his family and friends as this very difficult time."

[Kelt]

Marian McPartland, Jazz Pianist and NPR Radio Staple, Dies at 95



By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: August 21, 2013

Marian McPartland, the genteel Englishwoman who became a fixture of the American jazz scene as a pianist and, later in life, hosted the internationally syndicated and immensely popular public radio show “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz,” died on Tuesday at her home in Port Washington, N.Y. She was 95.

Ms. McPartland was a gifted musician but an unlikely candidate for jazz stardom. She recalled in a 1998 interview for National Public Radio that shortly after she arrived in the United States in 1946, the influential jazz critic Leonard Feather, who himself was born in England and who began his career as a pianist, said, “Oh, she’ll never make it: she’s English, white and a woman.”

Mr. Feather, she added, “always used to tell me it was a joke, but I don’t think he meant it as a joke.”

The odds against any woman finding success as a jazz musician in the late 1940s and early ’50s were formidable, but Ms. McPartland overcame them with grace. Listeners were charmed by her Old World stage presence and captivated by her elegant, harmonically lush improvisations, which reflected both her classical training and her fascination with modern jazz.



By 1958 she was well enough known to be included in Art Kane’s famous Esquire magazine group photograph of jazz musicians, the subject of Jean Bach’s 1994 documentary, “A Great Day in Harlem.” One of the few women in the picture, she stood next to her friend and fellow pianist Mary Lou Williams.

Ms. McPartland’s contributions to jazz were not limited to her piano playing. An enthusiastic and articulate spokeswoman for the music, she lectured at schools and colleges and wrote for Down Beat, Melody Maker and other publications. (A collection of her essays, “All in Good Time,” was published in 1987 and reissued in 2003.) Most notably, for more than 30 years her “Piano Jazz” was one of the most popular jazz shows ever on the radio.

The show, produced by South Carolina’s public radio network, made its debut on NPR in 1978. The format was simple: an informal interview interspersed with extemporaneous duets.

“I didn’t have any idea I’d be good at something like this,” Ms. McPartland told The Associated Press in 2000. “I certainly never thought people would know me because of my voice.” But she proved a natural.

As its title suggests, “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz” was originally a show about piano players. But the guest list came to include vocalists, among them Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett and even Willie Nelson and Elvis Costello, as well as trumpeters, saxophonists and other instrumentalists.

Jazz pianists remained the focus, however, and over the years Ms. McPartland played host to some of the most famous, from the ragtime pioneer Eubie Blake to the uncompromising avant-gardist Cecil Taylor. She gamely played duets with all of them, even Mr. Taylor, whose aggressively dissonant approach was far removed from Ms. McPartland’s refined melodicism.

“I just did the kind of thing he does,” she said. “Or else I went in the opposite direction, and that sounded fairly interesting too.”

“Piano Jazz” was heard on more than 200 radio stations all over the world. It received a Peabody Award in 1983.

Ms. McPartland recorded her last show in September 2010, although she did not officially step down as host until November 2011; “Piano Jazz” has continued with reruns and guest hosts.

Marian McPartland was born Margaret Marian Turner in Windsor, England, on March 20, 1918. She began picking out melodies on the family piano when she was 3, and at 17 she entered the Guildhall School of Music in London.

In 1938, over her parents’ strong objections, she left school to go on tour with a four-piano vaudeville act. “My mother said, ‘Oh, you’ll come to no good, you’ll marry a musician and live in an attic,’ ” she recalled in 1998. “Of course, that did happen.”

While on a U.S.O. tour in 1944 she met the American jazz cornetist Jimmy McPartland in Belgium; they married in early 1946, and she moved with him to Chicago later that year.

Ms. McPartland worked for a while in her husband’s group, but he was a tradition-loving Dixieland musician and she was more interested in the harmonically sophisticated new sounds coming from New York City, where the McPartlands moved in 1949.

Encouraged by her husband, she formed a trio and found work at the Embers, an East Side nightclub, in 1950. Two years later she began what was supposed to be a brief engagement at the Hickory House, one of the last surviving jazz rooms on the city’s once-thriving 52nd Street nightclub row. That booking turned into an eight-year residency.

The McPartlands’ marriage ended after two decades, but they remained close friends and continued to work together occasionally. The divorce, she was fond of saying, did not take. She helped care for him when he had lung cancer, and they remarried shortly before he died in 1991.

Her survivors include two grandchildren.

Ms. McPartland recorded for Savoy, Capitol and other labels in the 1950s and ’60s, but in 1969, disenchanted with the business, she formed her own record company, Halcyon. “It was quite a job,” she told one interviewer. “I used to actually go to a record store like Sam Goody and tell them, ‘I need that money you owe me.’ ”

Halcyon released 18 albums in 10 years and had a roster that included her fellow pianists Teddy Wilson and Earl Hines as well as Ms. McPartland herself, but her career as an executive ended when she signed with Concord Jazz in 1979. She remained a Concord artist until she stopped recording, just a few years before her death.

The bare-bones accompaniment of bass and drums was always Ms. McPartland’s preferred format, but she also appeared in concert with symphony orchestras, and in 1996 she recorded an album of her own compositions, “Silent Pool,” on which she was accompanied by a string orchestra.

That album provided a rare showcase for an underappreciated aspect of her talent: although she told The New York Times in 1998 that she “never had all that much faith in myself as a composer,” she was a prolific songwriter whose work was recorded by Peggy Lee, Mr. Bennett, Sarah Vaughan and others. She performed her symphonic work “A Portrait of Rachel Carson” with the University of South Carolina Symphony Orchestra in 2007.

In her last years Ms. McPartland received numerous honors. She was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2000, given a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in 2004, inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2007 and named a member of the Order of the British Empire in 2010.

And she continued playing almost to the end. Reviewing her appearance at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Manhattan the night before her 90th birthday in 2008, Nate Chinen wrote in The Times, “Ms. McPartland still has her pellucid touch and her careful yet comfortable style.”

Unlike some jazz musicians of her generation, Ms. McPartland never became set in her ways; her playing grew denser and more complex with time, and even late in life she was experimenting with new harmonic ideas. “I’ve become a bit more — reckless, maybe,” she said in 1998. “I’m getting to the point where I can smash down a chord and not know what it’s going to be, and make it work.”

[Kobi]

Julie Harris, 87, one of the great stage actresses of the last half-century who amassed five Tony awards and was also renowned for her film work, died Aug. 24 at her home in West Chatham, Mass.

In a career of durability, longevity and versatility, time and her own gifts transmuted her roles from troubled tomboy to appealing ingénue to scheming older woman. Presidential wife Mary Todd Lincoln, poet Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare’s Ophelia were all portrayed with panache and verve by Julie Harris.

She was the wistful, lonesome pre-adolescent Frankie in Carson McCullers’s “The Member of the Wedding” on Broadway and in Hollywood. The film performance more than 60 years ago earned her an Academy Award nomination.

The year the movie came out, 1952, she created the devil-may-care Sally Bowles on Broadway in “I Am a Camera,” winning the first of her Tony awards.

Broadway appearances also included “The Lark” in 1955, in which she played Joan of Arc and appeared as Joan on the cover of Time magazine. She was in “Forty Carats” in 1968 and “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln” in 1972. She played Mrs. Lincoln in the stage and film versions.

In the movies, her work on “East of Eden” with James Dean was credited by director Elia Kazan with bringing out the best in her often difficult co-star. She was in “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” and she and Paul Newman acted in “Harper,” a private-eye drama. She was also known for “Reflections in a Golden Eye.”

A Tony recognized her portrayal of the reclusive New England poet Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst.” An audio recording of that role won her a Grammy Award for best spoken-word recording.

She was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005.

At a ceremony in the White House, President George W. Bush said: “It’s hard to imagine the American stage without the face, the voice and the limitless talent of Julie Harris. She has found happiness in her life’s work, and we thank her for sharing that happiness with the whole world.”

That work also included many television appearances, most notably in “Knots Landing,” in which she was a scheming Southern belle.

Known for her sensitivity, she was quoted as saying that “God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other. . . . It’s a way of expressing our humanity.” She was also a gritty survivor of surgery after a backstage fall, of at least one stroke, and of breast cancer. Chemotherapy continued while she played in the long-running “Knots Landing.”

In the Ken Burns series “The Civil War,” she gave voice to diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut.

Julia Ann Harris was born in the prosperous Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, Mich., on Dec. 2, 1925. Her father, William Pickett Harris, was an investment banker. Her mother, Elsie, was a nurse. She was impressed by plays they saw in Detroit, and in her teens , unwilling to remain at home and do what was expected of a young woman of her background, she enrolled in the Yale School of Drama. In 1945 she left in mid-semester for a role in a Broadway show, which flopped, sending her back to New Haven.

She made her home on Cape Cod. Reference works indicated that three marriages ended in divorce. She had one son.