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Posted: |
Dec 31, 2016 - 8:20 PM
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By: |
Howard L
(Member)
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from today's (print) NY Times--
Among Deaths in 2016, a Heavy Toll in Pop Music
By WILLIAM McDONALD
Death may be the great equalizer, but it isn’t necessarily evenhanded. Of all the fields of endeavor that suffered mortal losses in 2016 — consider Muhammad Ali and Arnold Palmer in sports and the back-to-back daughter-mother Hollywood deaths of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds — the pop music world had, hands down, the bleakest year.
Start with David Bowie, whose stage persona — androgynous glam rocker, dance pop star, electronic experimentalist — was as shape-shifting as his music. The year was only days old when the news came that he had died of cancer at 69. He had hinted that his time was short in the lyrics of his final album, released just two days before his death, but he had otherwise gone to great lengths to hide his illness from the public, a wish for privacy that ensured that his death would appear to have come out of the blue.
Then came another shock, about three months later, when Prince accidentally overdosed on a painkiller and collapsed in an elevator at his sprawling home studio near Minneapolis. Death came to him at 57, and by all indications no one, including Prince Rogers Nelson, had seen it coming. As energetic onstage as ever, holding to an otherwise healthy regimen, he had successfully defied age into his sixth decade, so why not death, too?
Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, in his 83rd year, undoubtedly did see it coming, just over his shoulder, but he went on his — I hesitate to say merry — way, ever the wise, gravel-voiced troubadour playing to sellout crowds and shrugging at the inevitable, knowing that the dark would finally overtake him but saying essentially, “Until then, here’s another song.”
It was as if 2016 hadn’t delivered enough jolts to the system when it closed out the year with yet another pop-star death. George Michael, the 1980s sensation whose aura had dimmed in later years, was 53 when he went to bed and never woke up on Christmas.
Pop music figures fell all year, many of their voices still embedded in the nicked vinyl grooves of old records that a lot of people can’t bear to throw out. The roster included Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane; Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Glenn Frey of the Eagles; and Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire.
Leon Russell, the piano pounder with a Delta blues wail and a mountain man’s mass of hair, died. So did Merle Haggard, rugged country poet of the common man and the locked-up outlaw. He was joined by the bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley and the guitar virtuoso who was practically glued to Elvis’s swiveling hips in the early days: Scotty Moore.
And then there was George Martin, whose recording-studio genius had such a creative influence on the sounds of John, Paul, George and Ringo (and, by extension, on the entire rock era) that he was hailed as the fifth Beatle.
If the music stars could fill arenas, so could idols of another stripe: the mighty athletes who left the scene. No figure among them was as towering as Ali. Some called him the greatest sports figure of the 20th century, the boxer who combined power, grace and brains in a way the ring had never seen. But he was more than a great athlete. Matters of war, race and religion coursed through his life in a publicly turbulent way.
Some people hated him when he refused to be drafted during the Vietnam War, a decision that cost him his heavyweight title. But more people admired him, even loved him, for his principled stands, his high spirits, his lightning mind, his winking self-regard and, yes, his rhyming motormouth. Until illness closed in, little could contain him, certainly not mere ropes around a ring.
Palmer, too, was transformational, golf’s first media star. The gentleman’s game was never quite the same after he began gathering an army on the rolling greenswards and leading a charge, his shirt coming untucked, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his club just that, a weapon, as he pressed the attack. An entire generation of middle-class postwar guys took up the game because of Arnie, and not a few women did, too. He was athletically blessed, magnetically cool, telegenically handsome — but he was somehow one of them, too.
The same was said of Gordie Howe, Mr. Hockey, a son of the Saskatchewan prairie who tore up the National Hockey League, hung up his skates at 52 and died at 88; and of Ralph Branca, a trolley car conductor’s son who was a living reminder that one crushing mistake — his, the fastball to Bobby Thomson that decided the 1951 National League pennant — can sometimes never be lived down.
Pat Summitt, the coach who elevated women’s basketball, led her Tennessee teams to eight championships and won more games than any other college coach, could not defeat Alzheimer’s disease, dying at 64. And within months the National Basketball Association lost two giants from different eras. Clyde Lovelette, an Olympic, college and N.B.A. champion who transformed the game as one of its first truly big men, was 86; his hardwood heir Nate Thurmond, a defensive stalwart who battled Russell, Wilt and Kareem in the paint in a 14-year Hall of Fame career, was 74.
Even older, in the baseball ranks, was Monte Irvin. When he died at 96, there were few people still around who could remember watching him play, particularly in his prime, in the 1940s, when he was a star on the Negro circuit but barred from the whites-only major leagues. He made the Hall of Fame anyway as a New York Giant and became Major League Baseball’s first black executive, but when he died, fans pondered again the question that has hung over many an athletic career shackled by discrimination: What if?
A different question, in an entirely different sphere, arose after the stunning news that Justice Antonin Scalia had died on a hunting trip in Texas: What now? In the thick of one of the most consequential Supreme Court careers of modern times, he left a void in conservative jurisprudence and, more urgently, a vacancy on the bench that has yet to be filled, raising still more questions about what may await the country.
Other exits from the public stage returned us to the past. Nancy Reagan’s death evoked the 1980s White House, where old-Hollywood glamour and well-heeled West Coast conservatism took up residence on the banks of the Potomac. John Glenn’s had us thinking again about a long-ago burst of national pride soaring into outer space.
The deaths of Tom Hayden and Daniel Berrigan, avatars of defiance, harked back to the student rebellions of the 1960s and the Vietnam War’s roiling home front. Phyllis Schlafly’s obituaries were windows on the roots of the right wing’s ascension in American politics. The death of Janet Reno, the first woman to serve as attorney general, recalled the Clinton years, all eight of them, from the firestorm at Waco, Tex., to the international tug of war over a Cuban boy named Elián González, to the bitter Senate battle over impeachment.
On other shores, Fidel Castro’s death at 90 summoned memories of Cuban revolution, nuclear brinkmanship and enduring enmity between a cigar-smoking strongman and the superpower only 90 miles away. The name of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Egyptian diplomat who led the United Nations, led to replayed nightmares of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia. The death of Shimon Peres removed a last link to the very founding of Israel and conjured decades of growing military power and fitful strivings for peace. And that of Elie Wiesel, in New York, after his tireless struggle to compel the world never to forget, made us confront once again the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
If writers, too, are truth-seekers, even in fiction, then the world is poorer without the literary voices of Harper Lee, Umberto Eco, Pat Conroy, Jim Harrison, Anita Brookner, Alvin Toffler, Gloria Naylor and William Trevor, not to mention the playwrights Peter Shaffer, Dario Fo and, pre-eminently, Edward Albee — all dead in 2016.
But just as treasured were those who spun make-believe for our viewing pleasure — none more lustily than Ms. Fisher, the nothing-dainty-about-her Princess Leia of the “Star Wars” tales. Just a day later, capping a year of startling deaths, Ms. Reynolds, a singing and acting leading lady of an earlier era, died at 84 in the throes of a mother’s grief.
Devotees of the “Harry Potter” movies were saddened by the death of Alan Rickman, who played the deliciously dour professor Severus Snape in that blockbuster franchise but whose career, on both stage and screen, was far richer than many of Snape’s younger fans may have known. Zsa Zsa Gabor’s celebrity, by contrast, outshone a modest acting career.
Gene Wilder and Garry Shandling died in the same year, both having perfected a brand of hilariously neurotic comedy fit for a therapy-obsessed culture. And this time Abe Vigoda, of the “Godfather” movies and “Barney Miller,” actually did die, after having not actually done so years ago when wildly uninformed people spread the word that he had.
On the other side of the camera were directors whose vision came to us from all parts: Jacques Rivette, the French New Wave auteur, with his convention-defying meditations on life and art; Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian master, with his searching examinations of ordinary lives; Andrzej Wajda, a rival to Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa in some critics’ eyes, with his haunting tales of Poland under the boot first of Nazis and then of Communists.
A long roster of television stars of a generation or two ago passed on, images of their younger selves frozen in time: Noel Neill (“Adventures of Superman”), Alan Young (“Mister Ed”), Robert Vaughn (“The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”), William Schallert and Patty Duke (father and daughter on “The Patty Duke Show”), Dan Haggerty (“The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams”), Florence Henderson (“The Brady Bunch”) and Alan Thicke (“Growing Pains”). And Garry Marshall, the creative force who practically owned prime time with “Happy Days,” “Mork & Mindy,” “Laverne & Shirley” and more, died at 81.
On Broadway, lights were dimmed in memory of Brian Bedford, Tammy Grimes and Anne Jackson, all brilliant in their day. The architect Zaha Hadid left behind monuments to her fertile imagination and shaken acolytes around the world. The street photographer Bill Cunningham, who found fashion statements on every corner, was suddenly missing, making Manhattan, overnight, a less idiosyncratic, less interesting place. That smiling skinny man pedaling his bicycle among the honking cabs in a blue French worker’s jacket with a camera slung around his neck — what a picture! — had split from the scene.
So had seemingly a generation of fellow photographers who had made art in recording the last half of the 20th century: Ruth Gruber, Marc Riboud, Louis Stettner and more. And so had the TV journalists Morley Safer and Gwen Ifill and the TV commentator John McLaughlin, all of whom had tried to make sense of it.
Music’s other precincts were emptier without the conductor and revolutionary composer Pierre Boulez and the new music soprano Phyllis Curtin; the jazz artists Mose Allison, Bobby Hutcherson and Gato Barbieri; the rapper Phife Dawg (Malik Taylor); and the Latin megastar Juan Gabriel.
Silicon Valley saw a giant depart in Andrew S. Grove, who led the semiconductor revolution at Intel. The television industry lost a culture-changing executive, Grant Tinker, who in the ’80s made NBC the network to watch in prime time. Astrophysics, and the smaller world of women in science, said farewell to a pioneer and a champion in Vera Rubin.
And for tens of thousands of people who might have choked to death had they not been saved by his simple but ingenious maneuver, the passing of Henry J. Heimlich prompted not just sympathy but, even more, gratitude.
Come to think of it, eliciting a large, if silent, thank you from those who live on is not a bad way for anyone to go. Which brings us to Marion Pritchard. Few who died in 2016 could have inspired measures of gratitude more profound. She was a brave young Dutch student and a conscience-stricken gentile who risked her life to save Jews from death camps in the early 1940s, in one instance shooting a Nazi stooge before he could seize three little children she had been hiding.
By her estimate she saved 150 people. How many were still alive when she died a few weeks ago at 96 is anyone’s guess. But we know for certain that some were, and we can reasonably surmise that a good many more were, too, all of them still in possession of her selfless gift and her matchless legacy, their very lives.
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Posted: |
Dec 31, 2016 - 8:23 PM
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By: |
Howard L
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Clockwise from top left: Janet Reno, Edward Albee, Fidel Castro, Florence Henderson, Muhammad Ali, Nancy Reagan, Leonard Cohen, Bill Cunningham, John Glenn, Prince and Elie Wiesel.
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Jefferson...YOU ARE AMAZING!
Thank you so much for this document!
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from today's (print) NY Times--
Among Deaths in 2016, a Heavy Toll in Pop Music
By WILLIAM McDONALD
Death may be the great equalizer, but it isn’t necessarily evenhanded. Of all the fields of endeavor that suffered mortal losses in 2016 — consider Muhammad Ali and Arnold Palmer in sports and the back-to-back daughter-mother Hollywood deaths of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds — the pop music world had, hands down, the bleakest year.
Start with David Bowie, whose stage persona — androgynous glam rocker, dance pop star, electronic experimentalist — was as shape-shifting as his music. The year was only days old when the news came that he had died of cancer at 69. He had hinted that his time was short in the lyrics of his final album, released just two days before his death, but he had otherwise gone to great lengths to hide his illness from the public, a wish for privacy that ensured that his death would appear to have come out of the blue.
Then came another shock, about three months later, when Prince accidentally overdosed on a painkiller and collapsed in an elevator at his sprawling home studio near Minneapolis. Death came to him at 57, and by all indications no one, including Prince Rogers Nelson, had seen it coming. As energetic onstage as ever, holding to an otherwise healthy regimen, he had successfully defied age into his sixth decade, so why not death, too?
Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, in his 83rd year, undoubtedly did see it coming, just over his shoulder, but he went on his — I hesitate to say merry — way, ever the wise, gravel-voiced troubadour playing to sellout crowds and shrugging at the inevitable, knowing that the dark would finally overtake him but saying essentially, “Until then, here’s another song.”
It was as if 2016 hadn’t delivered enough jolts to the system when it closed out the year with yet another pop-star death. George Michael, the 1980s sensation whose aura had dimmed in later years, was 53 when he went to bed and never woke up on Christmas.
Pop music figures fell all year, many of their voices still embedded in the nicked vinyl grooves of old records that a lot of people can’t bear to throw out. The roster included Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane; Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Glenn Frey of the Eagles; and Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire.
Leon Russell, the piano pounder with a Delta blues wail and a mountain man’s mass of hair, died. So did Merle Haggard, rugged country poet of the common man and the locked-up outlaw. He was joined by the bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley and the guitar virtuoso who was practically glued to Elvis’s swiveling hips in the early days: Scotty Moore.
And then there was George Martin, whose recording-studio genius had such a creative influence on the sounds of John, Paul, George and Ringo (and, by extension, on the entire rock era) that he was hailed as the fifth Beatle.
If the music stars could fill arenas, so could idols of another stripe: the mighty athletes who left the scene. No figure among them was as towering as Ali. Some called him the greatest sports figure of the 20th century, the boxer who combined power, grace and brains in a way the ring had never seen. But he was more than a great athlete. Matters of war, race and religion coursed through his life in a publicly turbulent way.
Some people hated him when he refused to be drafted during the Vietnam War, a decision that cost him his heavyweight title. But more people admired him, even loved him, for his principled stands, his high spirits, his lightning mind, his winking self-regard and, yes, his rhyming motormouth. Until illness closed in, little could contain him, certainly not mere ropes around a ring.
Palmer, too, was transformational, golf’s first media star. The gentleman’s game was never quite the same after he began gathering an army on the rolling greenswards and leading a charge, his shirt coming untucked, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his club just that, a weapon, as he pressed the attack. An entire generation of middle-class postwar guys took up the game because of Arnie, and not a few women did, too. He was athletically blessed, magnetically cool, telegenically handsome — but he was somehow one of them, too.
The same was said of Gordie Howe, Mr. Hockey, a son of the Saskatchewan prairie who tore up the National Hockey League, hung up his skates at 52 and died at 88; and of Ralph Branca, a trolley car conductor’s son who was a living reminder that one crushing mistake — his, the fastball to Bobby Thomson that decided the 1951 National League pennant — can sometimes never be lived down.
Pat Summitt, the coach who elevated women’s basketball, led her Tennessee teams to eight championships and won more games than any other college coach, could not defeat Alzheimer’s disease, dying at 64. And within months the National Basketball Association lost two giants from different eras. Clyde Lovelette, an Olympic, college and N.B.A. champion who transformed the game as one of its first truly big men, was 86; his hardwood heir Nate Thurmond, a defensive stalwart who battled Russell, Wilt and Kareem in the paint in a 14-year Hall of Fame career, was 74.
Even older, in the baseball ranks, was Monte Irvin. When he died at 96, there were few people still around who could remember watching him play, particularly in his prime, in the 1940s, when he was a star on the Negro circuit but barred from the whites-only major leagues. He made the Hall of Fame anyway as a New York Giant and became Major League Baseball’s first black executive, but when he died, fans pondered again the question that has hung over many an athletic career shackled by discrimination: What if?
A different question, in an entirely different sphere, arose after the stunning news that Justice Antonin Scalia had died on a hunting trip in Texas: What now? In the thick of one of the most consequential Supreme Court careers of modern times, he left a void in conservative jurisprudence and, more urgently, a vacancy on the bench that has yet to be filled, raising still more questions about what may await the country.
Other exits from the public stage returned us to the past. Nancy Reagan’s death evoked the 1980s White House, where old-Hollywood glamour and well-heeled West Coast conservatism took up residence on the banks of the Potomac. John Glenn’s had us thinking again about a long-ago burst of national pride soaring into outer space.
The deaths of Tom Hayden and Daniel Berrigan, avatars of defiance, harked back to the student rebellions of the 1960s and the Vietnam War’s roiling home front. Phyllis Schlafly’s obituaries were windows on the roots of the right wing’s ascension in American politics. The death of Janet Reno, the first woman to serve as attorney general, recalled the Clinton years, all eight of them, from the firestorm at Waco, Tex., to the international tug of war over a Cuban boy named Elián González, to the bitter Senate battle over impeachment.
On other shores, Fidel Castro’s death at 90 summoned memories of Cuban revolution, nuclear brinkmanship and enduring enmity between a cigar-smoking strongman and the superpower only 90 miles away. The name of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Egyptian diplomat who led the United Nations, led to replayed nightmares of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia. The death of Shimon Peres removed a last link to the very founding of Israel and conjured decades of growing military power and fitful strivings for peace. And that of Elie Wiesel, in New York, after his tireless struggle to compel the world never to forget, made us confront once again the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
If writers, too, are truth-seekers, even in fiction, then the world is poorer without the literary voices of Harper Lee, Umberto Eco, Pat Conroy, Jim Harrison, Anita Brookner, Alvin Toffler, Gloria Naylor and William Trevor, not to mention the playwrights Peter Shaffer, Dario Fo and, pre-eminently, Edward Albee — all dead in 2016.
But just as treasured were those who spun make-believe for our viewing pleasure — none more lustily than Ms. Fisher, the nothing-dainty-about-her Princess Leia of the “Star Wars” tales. Just a day later, capping a year of startling deaths, Ms. Reynolds, a singing and acting leading lady of an earlier era, died at 84 in the throes of a mother’s grief.
Devotees of the “Harry Potter” movies were saddened by the death of Alan Rickman, who played the deliciously dour professor Severus Snape in that blockbuster franchise but whose career, on both stage and screen, was far richer than many of Snape’s younger fans may have known. Zsa Zsa Gabor’s celebrity, by contrast, outshone a modest acting career.
Gene Wilder and Garry Shandling died in the same year, both having perfected a brand of hilariously neurotic comedy fit for a therapy-obsessed culture. And this time Abe Vigoda, of the “Godfather” movies and “Barney Miller,” actually did die, after having not actually done so years ago when wildly uninformed people spread the word that he had.
On the other side of the camera were directors whose vision came to us from all parts: Jacques Rivette, the French New Wave auteur, with his convention-defying meditations on life and art; Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian master, with his searching examinations of ordinary lives; Andrzej Wajda, a rival to Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa in some critics’ eyes, with his haunting tales of Poland under the boot first of Nazis and then of Communists.
A long roster of television stars of a generation or two ago passed on, images of their younger selves frozen in time: Noel Neill (“Adventures of Superman”), Alan Young (“Mister Ed”), Robert Vaughn (“The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”), William Schallert and Patty Duke (father and daughter on “The Patty Duke Show”), Dan Haggerty (“The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams”), Florence Henderson (“The Brady Bunch”) and Alan Thicke (“Growing Pains”). And Garry Marshall, the creative force who practically owned prime time with “Happy Days,” “Mork & Mindy,” “Laverne & Shirley” and more, died at 81.
On Broadway, lights were dimmed in memory of Brian Bedford, Tammy Grimes and Anne Jackson, all brilliant in their day. The architect Zaha Hadid left behind monuments to her fertile imagination and shaken acolytes around the world. The street photographer Bill Cunningham, who found fashion statements on every corner, was suddenly missing, making Manhattan, overnight, a less idiosyncratic, less interesting place. That smiling skinny man pedaling his bicycle among the honking cabs in a blue French worker’s jacket with a camera slung around his neck — what a picture! — had split from the scene.
So had seemingly a generation of fellow photographers who had made art in recording the last half of the 20th century: Ruth Gruber, Marc Riboud, Louis Stettner and more. And so had the TV journalists Morley Safer and Gwen Ifill and the TV commentator John McLaughlin, all of whom had tried to make sense of it.
Music’s other precincts were emptier without the conductor and revolutionary composer Pierre Boulez and the new music soprano Phyllis Curtin; the jazz artists Mose Allison, Bobby Hutcherson and Gato Barbieri; the rapper Phife Dawg (Malik Taylor); and the Latin megastar Juan Gabriel.
Silicon Valley saw a giant depart in Andrew S. Grove, who led the semiconductor revolution at Intel. The television industry lost a culture-changing executive, Grant Tinker, who in the ’80s made NBC the network to watch in prime time. Astrophysics, and the smaller world of women in science, said farewell to a pioneer and a champion in Vera Rubin.
And for tens of thousands of people who might have choked to death had they not been saved by his simple but ingenious maneuver, the passing of Henry J. Heimlich prompted not just sympathy but, even more, gratitude.
Come to think of it, eliciting a large, if silent, thank you from those who live on is not a bad way for anyone to go. Which brings us to Marion Pritchard. Few who died in 2016 could have inspired measures of gratitude more profound. She was a brave young Dutch student and a conscience-stricken gentile who risked her life to save Jews from death camps in the early 1940s, in one instance shooting a Nazi stooge before he could seize three little children she had been hiding.
By her estimate she saved 150 people. How many were still alive when she died a few weeks ago at 96 is anyone’s guess. But we know for certain that some were, and we can reasonably surmise that a good many more were, too, all of them still in possession of her selfless gift and her matchless legacy, their very lives.
McDonald left out singer Bobby Vee, who died from complications related to Altzheimer's Disease.
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Posted: |
Jan 16, 2017 - 12:44 PM
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By: |
Howard L
(Member)
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"...a reflection in part of the widespread embrace of television in the 1950s and ’60s; those generations of stars are now passing from the scene."
from today's (print) NY Times--
2016 Was a Bad Year for Celebrity Deaths, by These Measures
By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
2016 was a particularly bad year for celebrity deaths, judging by the many mourners on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But verifying that the year was unusually lethal for stars is tricky.
For one thing, celebrity is a subjective quality, and the claim that more celebrities died in any given year is not easily supportable with objective data.
But that has not stopped different media companies, including The New York Times, from trying. The British Broadcasting Corporation and Legacy.com, a company that produces online obituaries with funeral homes and newspapers (among them The Times), began investigating the perceived phenomenon this spring, when they first noticed a spate of sorrowful emails and social media posts about the high number of celebrity deaths. Both concluded that there was an unusual proliferation of them in 2016, though each used a different method to support that claim.
The BBC compared the number of what it called “pre-prepared” obituaries — those written in advance of a person’s death — that ran in 2016 to the number that appeared in previous years, going back to 2012. In December, the BBC published an article saying that it ran 49 such obituaries on radio, television or online in 2016, compared to 32 in 2015.
“Since I’ve been doing this job, for 10 years, we’ve never used this many obituaries,” Nick Serpell, the BBC’s obituary editor, said in a recent telephone interview, referring to obituaries written in advance.
Mr. Serpell acknowledged that using the number of obituaries written in advance as an indicator of major deaths was “flawed,” but said he thought it was “the only way to measure something.”
“Obviously we have people in the U.K. who you’ve never heard of who are famous for us, and you’ve got people that we’ve never heard of, usually linebackers from American football,” he said.
Legacy.com’s study was conducted by Linnea Crowther, a senior writer of obituaries for public figures and other articles. She tried to avoid the problem of subjective judgment by focusing on people she regarded as broadly famous. She compared the number of deaths of famous people that Legacy.com wrote about in 2016 with those going back to 2010, assigning relative levels of fame by starting with her own opinion, monitoring the reaction to the death on social media and consulting her colleagues.
“The lists I compiled were a little subjective, to be sure,” Ms. Crowther wrote about her methodology. “There’s no truly objective way to rank people as really famous or pretty famous versus just a little noteworthy. But what I strove to do was to be as consistent as possible as I looked at the people who have died over the past seven years.”
In a recent telephone interview she acknowledged that the lists were still somewhat subjective.
“It’s kind of a data project, but it’s not quite as objective as a purely data project would be,” Ms. Crowther said.
She maintained that most people would agree that the celebrities she counted merited the designation.
“Everybody has slightly different ideas about what constitutes celebrity,” she said. “If you look at Wikipedia’s list of celebrities, there are more than 6,000, and some of them are horses. Those didn’t make it to my list.”
Ms. Crowther released her results and conclusions in quarterly posts, the last one published during the first week of 2017. Major celebrities she counted in the fourth quarter of 2016 included Carrie Fisher, Janet Reno, Florence Henderson and Fidel Castro. Among the second tier of celebrities she cited the actor Ron Glass, who was familiar to audiences from his work on TV shows like “Firefly” and “Barney Miller.”
Ms. Crowther counted a total of 95 celebrity deaths in 2016, compared with an annual average of 59 for the years 2010 through 2015. She counted 32 major celebrity deaths in 2016 compared with an annual average of 13 for the six previous years.
Ms. Crowther also counted an unusually high number of deaths in the first quarter of 2016. She noted that the average age of people whose deaths she measured in 2016 was 74.2, slightly younger than the 2010-15 average of 76.7, and that an unusually large number of the deceased — like David Bowie, Sharon Jones and George Michael — came from the music world.
The Times, in its own assessment of the incidence of major deaths in 2016, used two different subjective measurements, neither a perfect indicator of celebrity. Most of what was found supported the conclusions of the BBC and Legacy.com, except for one crucial difference.
First we counted the number of people in our Notable Deaths interactive feature, an annual collection of prominent obituaries. In 2016 there were 357 obituaries in Notable Deaths, 56 more than the 301 entries in 2015. In the first four months of 2016, 135 people were added to the feature, substantially more than in most four-month periods. In January alone, 41 were added, the most in any single month since 2012.
Notable Deaths has grown significantly larger every year since it was created in 2010, which seems to support the trend noted by Legacy.com and the BBC.
Next we counted the number of obituaries that appeared on the front page of the newspaper in 2016 and 2015, either as an article, a photograph or an item in the short summaries that appear at the bottom of the page. Most of these obituaries were also promoted on The Times’s home page and in its social media accounts.
In 2015, 31 obituaries ran on the front page compared with 29 in 2016. A total of 147 obituaries were mentioned on the front page in 2015 and just 135 in 2016. In January 2016, 25 obituaries appeared on the front page, the most of any single month.
So 2016 represented either the latest year of increasing celebrity deaths or a small step back from 2015, depending on the metric The Times used.
Of course, there are obvious problems with both of these measurements, as there are with those used in the other studies, because they are based on subjective judgments.
Placement in The Times is a result of editorial decisions; some deaths that might otherwise be reported on the front page, for example, could be displaced by other news — particularly in an election and Olympic year. The opposite could be true for the Notable Deaths feature, which grew in part because of decisions to expand it by recognizing important but lesser-known subjects.
An obituary on the front page of The Times is also not reserved for conventional celebrities. Some are there because the subjects made fascinating contributions to the world but never found wide fame. (Exceptional writing may have also helped push some obituaries onto Page 1.)
One such obituary, for Tyrus Wong, the artist and Disney animator who gave “Bambi” its signature look, became the first front-page obituary of 2017, on Jan. 1.
Even if 2016 was an unusually heavy year for celebrity deaths, the number may seem typical a few years from now. Both Mr. Serpell and Ms. Crowther said that deaths of major figures had been trending upward in the years they examined and that they expected the trend to continue.
They speculated that was a reflection in part of the widespread embrace of television in the 1950s and ’60s; those generations of stars are now passing from the scene.
“Is 2017 going to, quote, ‘settle back down’?” Ms. Crowther asked. “Probably not.”
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