Robert MacNeil, 93, the Canadian-born journalist who delivered sober evening newscasts for more than two decades on PBS as the co-anchor of “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” later expanded as “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” died Friday at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital, in Manhattan.
MacNeil, known as Robin, and Jim Lehrer, a former Texas newspaperman, formed one of television journalism’s most successful and enduring partnerships in 1975, when they launched what became “The PBS NewsHour.” As the news world transformed around them with the arrival of 24-hour cable news and combative political talk shows, they maintained a reputation for sober, straightforward reporting and analysis.
“In Mr. MacNeil and Mr. Lehrer, ‘The NewsHour’ has the only two major anchors on television who actually practice journalism,” New York Times media critic John Corry wrote in 1983. “They ask questions and then listen to the answers. Network anchors just read the news.” Although it was accused at times of being boring and elitist, the program developed a loyal audience, with about 5 million viewers tuning in each night by the time MacNeil retired as executive editor and co-anchor in 1995.
Roberto Cavalli, 83, the Italian fashion designer who celebrated glamour and excess, sending models down the runway and actresses onto red carpets wearing leopard-print dresses, bejeweled distressed jeans, satin corsets and other unapologetically flashy clothes, died Friday in Florence, Italy.
Cavalli’s signature style — “molto sexy, molto animal print and molto, molto Italiano,” as British newspaper The Independent once described it — remained essentially unchanged throughout his long career. But he skillfully reinvented his clothes for different eras, enjoying several renaissances and building a global lifestyle brand in the process.
Cavalli was largely unknown outside Europe, until, in the 1990s, he reinvented luxury denim, first with the sandblasted look and then, in a stroke of invention, by putting Lycra in jeans to make them fit snugger and sexier. When model Naomi Campbell wore a pair during a runway show in 1993, stretch jeans became a huge trend.
His always exuberant style became an immediately recognizable aesthetic. “He dressed us thinking that life — and fashion — should be lived at full speed,” said Nina Garcia, the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine.
O.J. Simpson, 76, the football superstar who became a symbol of domestic violence and racial division after he was found not guilty of murdering his ex-wife and her friend in a trial that riveted the nation and had legal and cultural repercussions for years afterward, died Wednesday. The cause was cancer, according to a post from his family on the social media platform X. Additional details were not immediately available.
It was a stunning downfall for a man who had risen from a poor neighborhood in San Francisco to become one of the greatest running backs in football history, an actor in more than 20 Hollywood movies, a corporate pitchman — sprinting through airports for Hertz Rent-a-Car in his most memorable television commercials — and a TV sports commentator. He had good looks, a warm smile and a poised manner that made him a popular sports media personality long after his playing days had ended.
The double-murder charges shattered his reputation as a high-achieving, amiable star.
He was accused of killing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in a brutal knife attack on the walkway outside her town house in the fashionable Brentwood section of Los Angeles in June 1994. Although Simpson was found not guilty in the criminal trial, the Goldman and Brown families in 1997 won a $33.5 million civil judgment against him from a predominantly white jury. Because it was a civil trial, a unanimous vote was not required to find him liable for the murders.
Peter Higgs, 94, who predicted the existence of a new particle that came to be named after him (as well as God) and sparked a half-century, worldwide, billion-dollar search for it culminating in Champagne in 2012 and a Nobel Prize a year later, died Monday at home in Edinburgh, Scotland. The cause was a blood disorder, said Alan Walker, his close friend and fellow physicist at the University of Edinburgh, where Higgs was an emeritus professor.
Higgs was a 35-year-old assistant professor at the university in 1964 when he suggested the existence of a new particle that would explain how other particles acquire mass. The Higgs boson, also known as “the God particle,” would become the keystone of a suite of theories known as the Standard Model, which encapsulated all human knowledge so far about elementary particles and the forces by which they shaped nature and the universe.
A half-century later, on July 4, 2012, he received a standing ovation as he walked into a lecture hall at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Geneva and heard that his particle had finally been found. On a webcast from the laboratory, the whole world watched him pull out a handkerchief and wipe away a tear.
Clarence Henry, 87, the New Orleans rhythm-and-blues mainstay who was known as Frogman — and best known for boasting in his durable 1956 hit, “Ain’t Got No Home,” that “I sing like a girl/ And I sing like a frog” — died April 7 in New Orleans of complications following back surgery.
“Ain’t Got No Home,” which reached No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100, became Henry’s signature hit and definitively captured his humor and his vocal high jinks. Written by Henry and released when he was a teenager, the song brought him his nickname and went on to become a perennial favorite on movie soundtracks, heard in “Forrest Gump,” “Diner,” “Casino” and other films. The Band opened “Moondog Matinee,” its 1973 album of rock ’n’ roll oldies, with “Ain’t Got No Home.”
Lynne Reid Banks, 94, a British writer whose best-selling, sometimes contested works ranged from the feminist novel “The L-Shaped Room” to “The Indian in the Cupboard” and its sequels, a chapter-book series about a boy and his animated plastic figurine that was read by millions of children on both sides of the Atlantic, died April 4 in Surrey, England. The cause was cancer.
Banks, a onetime actress and television reporter, made her literary debut in 1960 with “The L-Shaped Room,” a novel about a young, unmarried woman who goes to live during her pregnancy in a boardinghouse room of the shape described in the title. She went on to write what she described as “book after non-best-selling book” until she “stumbled upon the idea,” as she put it, “of bringing a toy plastic American Indian to life in a magic cupboard.” So came “The Indian in the Cupboard” in 1980, followed by four sequels.
However, critics objected over the years to what they regarded as Banks’ reliance on racial and cultural stereotypes, in particular in her representation of Native Americans. The American Indian Library Association included “The Indian in the Cupboard” on a list of “titles to avoid.” Years later, she expressed regret about the way she had depicted a Black character who lives at the boardinghouse with the protagonist. “There are certain aspects of the book now, in my treatment of him, that embarrass me,” Banks told an interviewer.
Albert Heath, 88, a virtuoso jazz drummer who collaborated with luminaries such as John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Nina Simone and Herbie Hancock; performed and recorded with his older brothers, Percy and Jimmy; and for a few years played alongside Percy in one of the great jazz ensembles, the Modern Jazz Quartet, died of leukemia April 3 in Santa Fe, N.M.
Heath, who was known as Tootie, was primarily a bebop and hard bop drummer but was adept in a range of styles. In 2020, the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master.
Taro Akebono, 54, a Hawaii-born sumo wrestler and a former grand champion, died of heart failure in early April while receiving care at a hospital in Tokyo, the United States Forces in Japan said in a statement Thursday. He was the first foreign-born wrestler to reach the level of “yokozuna” — or grand champion — in Japan.
Born Chad George Ha’aheo Rowan in Hawaii and raised in the rural side of the Koolau mountains from Honolulu, Akebono became Japan’s 64th yokozuna in 1993. He went on to win a total of 11 grand championships.
Anne Innis Dagg, 91, a Canadian zoologist who broke new ground in animal research while studying giraffes in the wild and who later campaigned against institutional sexism after she was denied tenure by an all-male committee and told that women belonged in the home instead of the academy, died April 1 at a hospital in Kitchener, Ontario. The cause was complications from pneumonia, said Paul Zimic, the executive producer of “The Woman Who Loves Giraffes,” a 2018 documentary about her life.
A few years before Jane Goodall began her field studies on chimpanzees in Tanzania and a decade before Dian Fossey started her research on mountain gorillas in Rwanda, Dagg went to South Africa to study giraffes in the bush near Kruger National Park. She was only 23 when she arrived in 1956 and was considered the first scientist to study giraffes in the wild — and one of only a few researchers at the time to study any animal in its natural habitat. Fred Bercovitch, a comparative wildlife biologist on the board of the Anne Innis Dagg Foundation — a conservation and education group — said Dagg was “at the cutting edge” in focusing on animal behavior and ecology, doing research that entered the mainstream only in the 1960s.