MiamiHerald.com: Obituaries

Maggie Daley, who dedicated herself to children's issues and the arts while also zealously guarding her family's privacy during 22 years as Chicago's first lady, died on Thursday, more than nine years after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Christopher Ma, a new-media pioneer who pushed The Washington Post Co. to launch the free daily Express tabloid, has died. He was 61.

One of the founders of a leading Jamaican reggae and rocksteady trio from the 1960s has died.

Andrea F. Rosenblatt filled her home with books, and spent most of her life sharing her love of reading with Miami-Dade County students.

Tom Wicker, the former New York Times political reporter and columnist whose career soared following his acclaimed coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Friday at his home in Rochester, Vt. He was 85.

Frederik Meijer, who built the regional retail powerhouse Meijer Inc. while nurturing his lifelong love of the arts, died late Friday at a hospital in western Michigan. He was 91.

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu passionately believed his homeland in eastern Nigeria deserved to be its own country, a new nation free of the borders imposed by foreigners as colonialism lifted across Africa in the 1960s.

To organize his research on the Watts riots, journalist Robert E. Conot sketched out the hour-by-hour progress of events in 1965 on a 25-foot-long stretch of paper, then dressed the diagram in the exhaustive detail for which he became known.

FREMONT, Calif. - Bay Area martial arts legend Al Novak,who influenced movie icon Bruce Lee, died Saturday in a Fremont hospital after he was hit earlier in the week by a car while sitting in his wheelchair, friends said.

Ken Russell got Oliver Reed and Alan Bates to wrestle naked, turned Vanessa Redgrave into a demonic nun and cast Ringo Starr as the pope. Critics and mainstream audiences often hated his films. Actors and admirers loved him.

Oscar Griffin Jr., whose investigation of swindler Billie Sol Estes won a 1963 Pulitzer Prize for the small Texas newspaper where he worked, has died. He was 78.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's daughter, whose defection to the West during the Cold War embarrassed the ruling communists and made her a best-selling author, has died. She was 85.

PHILADELPHIA - Drawn to the outrageous and outlandish like a giant freaky moth to a flame, Ken Russell, the English filmmaker best known for his stormy adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love," and for turning a Franz Liszt biopic into an over-the-top rock opera with robot Nazis, and for the religio-sexual brouhaha of his 17th century witchcraft drama "The Devils," died in his sleep Sunday.

Ken Russell, the often controversial British director known for his flamboyant visual style in films such as "The Devils," "Altered States" and the Who's rock opera "Tommy," has died. He was 84.

Margie Petersen, a philanthropist who with her late husband, publishing magnate Robert E. Petersen, established the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, has died. She was 76.

Famed lawyer J.B. Spence, known as the Dean of Torts for his scores of million-dollar-plus verdicts, died Saturday at Doctors Hospital, near his home in Coral Gables. He was 89, a 2010 Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame inductee, and “semi-retired’’ from The Cochran Firm, according to daughter Martha Spence, also of Coral Gables.

Alexandru Tocilescu, a respected Romanian theater director equally at home with Shakespeare and his country's national playwright, died on Wednesday. He was 65.

Veteran stand-up comic Patrice O'Neal, who gained a wider following through TV and radio and helped roast Charlie Sheen, died Tuesday from complications of a stroke he suffered last month. He was 41.

Former Mississippi Gov. William Waller Sr., who as a district attorney twice unsuccessfully prosecuted the man eventually convicted of killing civil rights leader Medgar Evers, has died. He was 85.

In the 1950s, Zdenek Miler stumbled over a molehill in woods west of Prague, giving him the idea for an animated cartoon character that has enchanted millions of children around the world and even made it into space on a NASA shuttle.

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