Bill Walton, 71, a center whose extraordinary passing and rebounding skills helped him win two national college championships with UCLA and one each with the Portland Trail Blazers and Boston Celtics, and who overcame a stutter to become a loquacious commentator, died Monday at his home in San Diego. The NBA said he died of colon cancer.

Larger than life, only in part because of his nearly 7-foot frame, Walton was a two-time NCAA champion at UCLA, a two-time champion in the NBA, a Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, an on-court icon in every sense of the word. Off the court, Walton was a chronic fun-seeker, a broadcaster who adhered to no conventional norms and took great joy in that, a man with a deeply serious side about the causes that mattered most to him.

Johnny Wactor, 37, a former “General Hospital” actor, was shot and killed May 25 when he interrupted thieves stealing the catalytic converter from his car in Los Angeles. Wactor portrayed Brando Corbin on the ABC soap opera from 2020-22. He also appeared in a variety of films and TV series, including “Station 19,” “NCIS,” “Westworld” and the video game “Call of Duty: Vanguard.”

Albert S. Ruddy, 94, a colorful, Canadian-born producer and writer who won Oscars for “The Godfather” and “Million Dollar Baby,” developed the raucous prison-sports comedy “The Longest Yard” and helped create the hit sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes,” died May 25 at the UCLA Medical Center, according to a spokesperson, who added that among his final words were, “The game is over, but we won the game.”

Tall and muscular, with a raspy voice and a city kid’s swagger, Ruddy produced more than 30 movies and was on hand for the very top and very bottom, from “The Godfather” and “Million Dollar Baby” to “Cannonball Run II” and “Megaforce,” nominees for Golden Raspberry awards for worst movie of the year.

Doug Ingle, 78, co-founder of the 1960s rock band Iron Butterfly and the voice behind their iconic hit “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” died May 24. His death was announced by his son, Doug Ingle Jr., in a social media post, reported Rolling Stone. He did not provide a cause of death.

Ingle, who sang and played the organ for Iron Butterfly, was the last surviving member of the band’s classic late-1960s lineup. Formed in San Diego, Iron Butterfly achieved fame with the 17-minute epic “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” which sold an estimated 30 million copies worldwide.

Ángeles Flórez Peón, 105, who left her job as a young seamstress to join leftist guerrillas in the Spanish Civil War and — after her capture and decades in self-exile — returned to Spain as one of the last links to the failed 1930s battles against the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco, died May 23 at a hospital in Gijón, Spain.

Over the past decades, Flórez wrote two memoirs and was sought out by scholars and historians. Quick-witted, wry and possessing a prodigious memory, she engrossed audiences with vivid and heartbreaking recollections of the nearly three-year civil war (1936-39) that claimed at least 200,000 lives and left the iron-grip regime of Franco, who ruled until his death in 1975.

Flórez also represented a bridge to the celebrated cadre of women who joined anti-Franco units as fighters or in support roles — and who sometimes became international symbols of the battles in newsreels, propaganda leaflets and reports from journalists that included the writer Ernest Hemingway. “The image of women fighting mobilized the men,” Spanish historian Beatriz de las Heras Herrero wrote.

“I was always a rebel,” said Flórez in a 2016 interview with the Spanish newspaper El País.

Caleb Carr, 68, the scarred and gifted son of founding Beat Lucien Carr who endured a traumatizing childhood and became a bestselling novelist, accomplished military historian and late-life memoirist of his devoted cat, Masha, died of cancer May 23, according to an announcement from his publisher, Little, Brown and Co.

In Carr’s best-known book, “The Alienist,” John Schuyler Moore is a New York Times police reporter in 1890s Manhattan who helps investigate a series of vicious murders of adolescent boys. Carr would call the novel as much a “whydunit” as “whodunit,” and wove in references to the emerging 19th-century discipline of psychology as Moore and his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler track down not just the killer’s identity, but what drove him to his crimes.

Morgan Spurlock, 53, a documentary filmmaker who gained fame with his Oscar-nominated 2004 film “Super Size Me,” which followed him as he ate nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days — but later stepped back from the public eye after admitting to sexual misconduct — died May 23 in New York City. His brother Craig Spurlock said the cause was complications of cancer.

“Super Size Me,” which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, grossed over $22 million, made Spurlock a household name, earned him an Academy Award nomination for best documentary and helped spur a sweeping backlash against the fast-food industry. The film chronicled the detrimental physical and psychological effects of Spurlock’s McDonald’s diet: He gained about 25 pounds, saw a spike in his cholesterol and lost his sex drive.

Darryl Hickman, 92, one of Hollywood’s most versatile child actors in the 1940s in films such as the Depression-era saga “The Grapes of Wrath” and the dark thriller “Leave Her to Heaven,” and who later played a supporting role to his younger brother Dwayne on TV’s “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” died May 22. Hickman, who lived in Montecito, Calif., had been treated for Parkinson’s disease.

Bette Nash, 88, whose nearly seven decades of serving airline passengers aboard the Washington, D.C.-to-Boston shuttle earned the route the nickname the Nash Dash and won her a spot in Guinness World Records as the longest-serving flight attendant in history, died May 17. Nash never officially retired, and her death, from breast cancer, was announced by her employer, American Airlines. She lived in Manassas, Va.

According to Guinness, Nash began her flight attendant career at 21. In 2022, Guinness named Nash the world’s longest-serving flight attendant. “I wanted to be a flight attendant from the time I got on the first airplane … the pilot and flight attendant walked across the hall and I thought, ‘Oh my God,’ I said that was for me,” Nash told CNN in 2016.

Schuyler Jones, 94, a globe-trotting American adventurer whose exploits drew comparisons to iconic movie character Indiana Jones, has died. Jones’ stepdaughter, Cassandra Da’Luz Vieira-Manion, posted on her Facebook page that Jones died on May 17. “He was a fascinating man who lived a lot of life around the world,” she wrote.

In his 1956 book “Under the African Sun,” Jones tells of surviving a helicopter crash in a marketplace in In Salah, Algeria, the Wichita Eagle reported. After the helicopter crashed, he discovered he was on fire; gale-force winds had reignited the ashes in his pipe. “Camels bawled and ran, scattering loads of firewood in all directions,” Jones wrote. “Children, Arabs and veiled women either fled or fell full length in the dust. Goats and donkeys went wild as the whirling, roaring monster landed in their mist … weak with relief, the pilot and I sat in the wreckage of In Salah’s market place and roared with laughter.”

Don Perlin, 94, a veteran comic book artist who, after decades in the industry, helped create the popular but nontraditional superheroes Moon Knight and Bloodshot, died May 14 at a nursing home in Jacksonville, Fla.

Perlin began working in the comic book industry in the late 1940s, but some of his greatest successes came later. In 1974, he was recruited by Roy Thomas, an editor at Marvel, to draw the series “Werewolf by Night.” The next year as part of that series, he and writer Doug Moench created Moon Knight, a mercenary armed with silver weaponry to slay supernatural creatures. In 1976, the creative team introduced the idea that Moon Knight had multiple identities, which would eventually be revealed to be a sign of a dissociative identity disorder. In 2022, Oscar Isaac starred as the character in a six-part series on Disney+.

Susanne Page, 86, whose intimate photographs of the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation opened a rare window on the everyday culture of Indigenous people in America’s Southwest, died May 13 in Alexandria, Va. The cause of death was brain cancer.

Page was in the midst of a 40-year career as a photographer for the United States Information Agency when she began creating vivid images of Native Americans and the flora and fauna that sustained them — work that embraced the beauty of the natural world and its profound spiritual significance to those Indigenous people. Her work appeared in magazines such as National Geographic and Smithsonian and in several books.

Corey Evan Bellett, 37, a Seattle man remembered by his wife as a talented chef and dedicated husband, was killed May 11 at the Capitol Hill light rail station after a fight with two men, one of whom allegedly stabbed him several times with a box cutter. Bellett was returning home from work to his Beacon Hill home.

Corey Bellett was born in San Antonio and moved to Issaquah as a child. He was a chef at Harry’s Fine Foods on Capitol Hill, the restaurant where “he found a home,” Bridgett Bellett said. Bridgett and Corey Bellett had married recently. May 27 would have marked five months of marriage.