Nora Aunor, 71, who became one of the biggest stars of Philippine cinema during a career that spanned seven decades, died Wednesday, according to social media posts from her children. No further details on the cause or place of her death were immediately given.
Aunor first gained fame in her teens as a singer in the 1960s before moving on to movies. She amassed more than 200 credits in film and television that included many classics of Philippine cinema, and won dozens of acting awards. Memorable roles included 1976’s “Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos” (“Three Years Without God”), 1984’s “Bulaklak sa City Jail” (“Flowers of the City Jail”) and 1995’s “The Flor Contemplacion Story.”
She swept best actress awards in the country for her performance in 1990’s “Andrea, Paano ba ang Maging Isang Ina?” (“Andrea, What is It Like to be a Mother?”) and won best actress at the Asian Film Awards for her portrayal of a midwife in 2012’s “Thy Womb.”
Wink Martindale, 91, the genial host of such hit game shows as “Gambit” and “Tic-Tac-Dough,” who also did one of the first recorded television interviews with a young Elvis Presley, died Tuesday at Eisenhower Health in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Martindale had been battling lymphoma for a year.
Elaine Wynn, 82, who came to Las Vegas when her husband, Steve, parlayed bingo parlor holdings into a casino empire and who became a formidable presence herself in the city’s business and philanthropic life, died Monday at her home in Los Angeles.
Elaine Wynn’s influence reached beyond Las Vegas as a cultural steward, including serving on the Kennedy Center board during the Obama administration and as a deep-pocketed art collector whose wealth was estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.9 billion. At a Christie’s auction in 2013, she paid $142.4 million for a triptych, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” by British painter Francis Bacon. “I had buyer’s remorse,” she told Forbes. “But only for 30 minutes.” The paintings were loaned to the Portland Art Museum.
Mario Vargas Llosa, 89, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose epic novels probed the moral depravity of authoritarian rule in Latin America and who sought to remedy social ills — as he insisted intellectuals must — with a quixotic run for the presidency in his native Peru, died April 13 in Lima. His three children announced the death on social media but did not provide a cause.
Vargas Llosa joined writers including Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico and Julio Cortázar of Argentina to lead the Latin American “boom” of literary fiction in the 1960s, a burst of creativity and stylistic experimentation that produced some of the era’s most-acclaimed novels.
Often with dramatic emphasis on politics, Vargas Llosa’s major works — among them “Conversation in the Cathedral” (1969), “The War of the End of the World” (1981) and “The Feast of the Goat” (2000) — portray nefarious military rulers, fanatical rebels and cynical clerics conspiring to keep Latin America mired in war, poverty and corruption.
Writing “is a way of living with illusion and joy and a fire throwing out sparks in your head, struggling with intractable words until you master them,” he said in his 2010 Nobel acceptance speech. “This is an experience that continues to bewitch me as it did the first time, as complete and dizzying as making love to the woman you love for days, weeks, months, without stopping.”
Richard Armitage, 79, who as deputy to Secretary of State Colin Powell helped guide U.S. foreign policy during President George W. Bush’s tumultuous first term and was a central figure in chapters of U.S. national security from the Vietnam War era to the post-Sept. 11, 2001, war on terror, died April 13 at a hospital in Arlington, Va. The cause was a pulmonary embolism.
Barrel-chested and with a vocabulary often closer to a sailor’s than a diplomat’s, Armitage was little known to the wider public until 2006 — more than a year after he retired as deputy secretary of state — when he publicly admitted his role three years earlier in events that led to the unmasking of a serving CIA officer, Valerie Plame.
Armitage apologized for what he said was his inadvertent role in the “Plame affair,” which was widely seen as an attempt by high-ranking White House officials in the Bush administration to punish Plame’s then-husband, retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, for publicly contradicting a key piece of the White House’s rationale for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Without cover, Plame was forced to retire from the spy agency. Armitage was not charged with wrongdoing.
Jean Marsh, 90, the striking British-born actor who was both the co-creator and a beloved Emmy-winning star of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the seminal 1970s British drama series about class in Edwardian England, died April 13 at her home in London. The cause was complications of dementia, said filmmaker Michael Lindsay-Hogg, her close friend.
“Upstairs, Downstairs” captured the hearts, minds and Sunday nights of Anglophile PBS viewers decades before “Downton Abbey” was even a gleam in Julian Fellowes’ eye. The show, which ran from 1971 to 1975 in England and from 1974 to 1977 in the United States, focused on the elegant Bellamy family and the staff of servants who kept their Belgravia town house running smoothly, according to the precise social standards of Edwardian aristocracy. Marsh chose the role of Rose, the household’s head parlor maid, a stern but good-hearted Cockney.
By the time the show ended its American run, it had won a Peabody Award and seven Emmys. Marsh took home the 1975 Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series.
Mary Selecky, 78, the pioneering former Washington secretary of health, credited with drastically cutting the rate of smoking and increasing the number of vaccinated children in the course of her 14 years as the state’s top health official, died April 7.
Selecky led the Stevens, Pend Oreille and Ferry County health district for 20 years before her time in statewide office. She was appointed as state health secretary in 1999 and remained in the job until her 2013 retirement. First appointed by Gov. Gary Locke, she was retained for the job by Govs. Chris Gregoire and Jay Inslee.
As health secretary, she also headed the state’s response to mad-cow disease and the 2009 swine flu crisis and led efforts on HIV prevention even when many larger public health agencies had not addressed that crisis.
Elsa Honig Fine, 94, an art historian who founded a feminist art journal and published influential textbooks on Black and women artists in an era when scholarship in those areas was scarce, died April 7 at her home in Manhattan. The cause was heart failure.
When Fine began publishing Woman’s Art Journal in 1980, the art world was still largely male dominated, and many female artists were relegated to the supporting roles of muse, wife or hobbyist. The inaugural issue laid out their mission: “recovering a lost heritage” of female artists. Fine, in particular, was frustrated with the cyclical nature of attention received by artists like Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel and Leonora Carrington, who were discovered, forgotten and then rediscovered and hailed as folk heroes.
Fine helped resurrect the work of overlooked women who defied convention, including Rosa Bonheur, a 19th-century lesbian who painted pastoral scenes, and Romaine Brooks, who dressed in men’s clothes and created moody gray portraits. The magazine, which still comes out semiannually, became the longest continually published feminist art journal.
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