> In certain respects, Barbara McNair (Feb. 4, age 72) was a star typical of her heyday, the 1950s and '60s: She gained fame as a singer and parlayed it into acting roles—first on Broadway in The Body Beautiful and No Strings, later in films with Sidney Poitier and Elvis Presley. In other ways she was unique, becoming the first African-American woman to get her own syndicated musical variety program, The Barbara McNair Show. She later returned to Broadway in the 1973 revival of The Pajama Game and worked for a time on General Hospital.
> Square-jawed and handsome, Daniel McDonald (Feb. 15, age 46) looked the part of a Broadway leading man and filled the role with distinction. In 1997 he earned a Tony nomination for best actor in a musical for his Broadway debut, as Bill Kelly in David Thompson, John Kander, and Fred Ebb's Steel Pier. Other parts included C.K. Dexter Haven in High Society, the male lead in the national tour of Contact, and Sam Carmichael in Mamma Mia!.
> Betty Hutton (March 11, age 85) was Paramount Pictures' No. 1 leading lady from the mid-'40s to the early '50s, starring in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, The Perils of Pauline, and The Greatest Show on Earth, among other films. But her highest-profile role was Annie Oakley in MGM's film of the musical Annie Get Your Gun. Her Broadway career began in 1940 in the musical revue Two for the Show, and she returned in the mid-'50s with Betty Hutton and Her All-Star International Show when her film career began to flag. Her last Broadway appearance was in 1980 as a replacement Miss Hannigan in the original production of Annie, opposite a 14-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker.
> In her later years, Jane Wyman (Sept. 10, age 90) was perhaps better known as the ex-wife of President Ronald Reagan, but in the 1940s and '50s she was one of the biggest names under contract at Warner Bros. In 1947 she earned an Oscar nomination for her work in The Yearling, and two years later she won the award for Johnny Belinda. She would receive two other Oscar nominations (for The Blue Veil and Magnificent Obsession), and in the 1980s she was a mainstay on the prime-time soap opera Falcon Crest.
> Deborah Kerr (Oct. 16, age 86) was synonymous with epic romances of the 1950s, such as From Here to Eternity and An Affair to Remember, but her most famous film role is probably Mrs. Anna in Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I. Her stage work included a revival of Emlyn Williams' The Corn Is Green in the West End and the original Broadway productions of Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (she also starred in the film version) and Edward Albee's Seascape. Originally typecast as the virginal goody two-shoes—Laurence Olivier once termed her "unreasonably chaste," according to her obituary in The New York Times—Kerr changed her perception in Hollywood with her torrid love scenes with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity. She was nominated for Oscars six times and received an honorary one for lifetime achievement in 1994.
> Robert Goulet (Oct. 30, age 73) burst onto the Broadway stage as Sir Lancelot in Lerner and Loewe's Camelot in 1960 and six years later won a Tony Award for The Happy Time, establishing himself as one of musical theatre's top leading men. He never became the superstar his early notices seemed to indicate he would—he arrived between Elvis and the Beatles, when show tunes began to fall from the pop charts—but he remained widely popular in Las Vegas and in national tour revivals. His final Broadway appearance was in 2005 as a replacement Georges in the revival of La Cage aux Folles. In addition to his Tony, Goulet also won an Emmy and a Grammy.
> It's hard to think of Roscoe Lee Browne (April 11, age 81) and not hear his voice, a mellifluous baritone that connoted something regal and refined. He worked as a college professor of French and comparative literature and as a sales representative for a liquor importer before abruptly deciding to become an actor. The next day he earned a role in the New York Shakespeare Festival production of Julius Caesar. His career would span some 50 years and include a raft of Broadway, movie, and television appearances, as well as an Emmy Award (The Cosby Show), an Obie Award (The Old Glory), and a Tony nomination (Two Trains Running).
> Mostly a commercial actor on television and radio, Anne Pitoniak (April 22, age 85) turned toward the stage in her mid-50s, after her children had grown and she and her husband had divorced. She soon became a member of the company at Actors Theatre of Louisville. There she met playwright Marsha Norman, and in 1983 Pitoniak made her Broadway debut in Norman's 'night, Mother, earning a Tony nomination for best actress. She would play Broadway six more times and earn a second Tony nomination, for the 1994 revival of Picnic.
> Miyoshi Umeki (Aug. 29, age 78) was the first Asian to win an Academy Award, a best supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of a star-crossed lover in Sayonara. (Her onscreen love in the movie, Red Buttons, also won an Oscar.) The next year she earned a Tony nomination for her turn in Flower Drum Song. Umeki later played Mrs. Livingston in the TV version of The Courtship of Eddie's Father, but when the show was canceled in 1972, she retired from acting.
> George Grizzard (Oct. 2, age 79) made his Broadway debut in 1955 and would go on to become one of the more captivating presences on the American stage for the next 50 years, as well as one of the foremost interpreters of Edward Albee's work. He played Nick in the premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, earned a Tony for the 1996 revival of A Delicate Balance, and capped his Broadway career with a well-received performance in the 2005 revival of Seascape. He also enjoyed a successful film (Advise and Consent) and television career.
> Though he worked with writers such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and David Mamet, Curt Dempster (Jan. 19, age 71) was determined to stay outside the New York theatre mainstream, and in so doing he created an institution. At the Ensemble Studio Theatre, which he founded in 1972, Dempster produced more than 6,000 original works, many of them as part of his signature event, the annual Marathon of One-Act Plays. For 35 years, audiences witnessed up-and-coming talents such as Kevin Bacon, Mary Stuart Masterson, Joe Morton, Sarah Jessica Parker, and John Turturro and heard the early words and ideas of playwrights such as Wendy Wasserstein, Christopher Durang, and John Patrick Shanley.
> Larry Hamlin (June 6, age 58) founded the North Carolina Black Repertory Company and the National Black Theatre Festival, which is held every summer in Winston-Salem. When Hamlin opened his theatre in 1979, it was the first black professional theatre in the state. Ten years later, with the help of poet Maya Angelou, he started the festival, which has attracted Oprah Winfrey and other big-name talent.
> Lonny Chapman (Oct. 12, age 87) founded the Lonny Chapman Group Repertory Theatre in North Hollywood, Calif., and was a founding member of the West Coast branch of the Actors Studio. At the theatre, Chapman staged more than 350 productions and at least 45 premieres of original works.
> With partner Madelyn Pugh, Bob Carroll Jr. (Jan. 27, age 88) made television history when he created the pilot for I Love Lucy. Over the next 25 years, he and Pugh would write all of Lucille Ball's television shows as well as many episodes of The Mothers-in-Law and Alice.
> If the name Bernard Gordon (May 11, age 88) doesn't ring a bell, that's probably because Gordon couldn't use it for most of his career. A blacklisted screenwriter during the '50s and '60s, he wrote crime, science fiction, and war pictures (most notably The Battle of the Bulge) under the pseudonym Raymond T. Marcus and the names of people who fronted for him, such as Philip Yordan. In 1980, when the Writers Guild of America restored the names of blacklisted authors to their scripts, it discovered that Gordon had written at least 11 pseudonymous and fronted works—more than any other screenwriter.
> It seems odd that a writer's best-known work would not be any of those that won him an Oscar, a Tony, or an Emmy, but Sidney Sheldon (Jan. 30, age 89) made his name by authoring more than two dozen potboiler romances that collectively sold more than 300 million copies. He is also known for creating The Patty Duke Show, I Dream of Jeannie, and Hart to Hart.
> As a confidant of President Lyndon Johnson and later head of the Motion Picture Association of America for 38 years, Jack Valenti (April 26, age 85) was synonymous with power. His most lasting achievement is the movie ratings system, which allowed for greater freedom in filmmaking without government censorship. The system is not without its critics, many of them directors who bristle at its seemingly arbitrary nature, but Valenti is widely credited with dissolving the much harsher Hays Code and indirectly paving the way for a second golden age of American film, in the late '60s and the '70s.
> Floria Lasky (Sept. 21, age 84) was one of the first female lawyers to rise to prominence on Broadway, where her clients included Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, Frederick Loewe, and Tennessee Williams. She continued to manage the estates of many of her clients after their deaths, including those of Robbins and Loewe.
> As a Hollywood superagent, Freddie Fields (Dec. 11, age 84) represented, at various points, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson, and Woody Allen. His agency, Creative Management Associates, later merged with the International Famous Agency to become International Creative Management, one of the largest talent agencies in the country.
> Kitty Carlisle Hart (April 17, age 96) might be best remembered by most of the country as a regular panelist on the game show To Tell the Truth, but she was much more than that: actor, sometime opera singer, widow of playwright-director Moss Hart, and, perhaps most significantly, longtime chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts. She traveled the state and the country as a tireless champion for increased public funding of the arts.
> Charles Nelson Reilly (May 25, age 76) was, like Hart, much more than his game-show persona, in his case the master of the double-entendre on Match Game. A Tony winner for playing Bud Frump in the original production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Reilly also created the role of Cornelius Hackl in Hello, Dolly! and was a well-regarded Broadway director, helming Paul Robeson, The Belle of Amherst, and the 1997 revival of The Gin Game, for which he earned a Tony nomination.
> Brett Somers (Sept. 15, age 83) was Reilly's longtime colleague on Match Game as well as an actor and comedian. The wife of Jack Klugman (the two separated but never divorced), she also played his onscreen ex-wife on TV's The Odd Couple. In 2003 she returned to the stage at 79 in a one-woman show, An Evening With Brett Somers, which won Back Stage's Bistro Award.
> Vincent Sardi Jr. (Jan. 4, age 91) ran Sardi's restaurant, Broadway's unofficial home office, for five decades before retiring in 1997. According to his obituary in The New York Times, Sardi "exercised what he called 'a fine Italian hand,' seating a hungry actor near a producer with a suitable part to cast." In 2004, he earned a special Tony Award for excellence in theatre.
> Michael Shurtleff (Jan. 28, age 86) was one of Broadway's leading casting directors in the 1960s and '70s, assembling the players for shows such as Becket, Oliver!, Dylan, 1776, and the original production of Chicago. Among the early-career actors he cast were Christopher Walken, Gene Hackman, and Betty Buckley. In 1978 his well-regarded self-help book for actors, Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part, was published and it remains in print.
> In the late '60s, actor Fred Kareman (Feb. 25, age 76) needed a way to navigate the vagaries of his unforgiving profession, so he went to his mentor, Sanford Meisner, who told him he should teach. So Kareman did, from then until Dec. 15, 2006, when heart disease made it too difficult for him to continue. Among his students were Marisa Tomei, Les Moonves, Mary Steenburgen, Maria Bello, and Oscar nominee Frederic Forrest (The Rose), who wrote of his teacher, "He made you see all the possibilities in life."
> If it weren't for Nancy Littlefield (Aug. 30, age 77), Law & Order might never have been filmed in New York. As the head of what is now called the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting, Littlefield worked diligently from 1978 to 1983 to resurrect the city's flagging screen industry, collaborating with labor unions and slicing through reams of red tape to make shooting in Gotham much less of a byzantine enterprise.
> Somehow it seemed fitting that Ingmar Bergman (age 89) and Michelangelo Antonioni (age 94) would die on the same day (July 30). Two giants of international cinema in the second half of the 20th century, they brought new emotional and intellectual depth to film. Bergman's ruminations on love, death, and God could be seen in works such as The Seventh Seal, Fanny and Alexander, and The Virgin Spring, which earned the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 1961. His influence was not confined to the screen: His Smiles of a Summer Night was the basis for the Stephen Sondheim–Hugh Wheeler–Harold Prince musical A Little Night Music, and he directed nearly 100 productions for the stage. Antonioni depicted alienation in the modern world in movies such as Blow-Up, The Passenger, and L'Avventura, using sparse dialogue and long takes. Along with Federico Fellini, he helped turn postwar Italian film away from neorealism and toward a personal cinema of imagination. In 1995, Hollywood honored him with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement.
> Possibly the last of Broadway's great golden-age director-choreographers, Brooklyn-born Michael Kidd (Dec. 23, age 92) was a five-time Tony Award winner for his choreography of Finian's Rainbow, Guys and Dolls, Can-Can, Li'l Abner, and Destry Rides Again. Other notable Broadway credits include The Rothschilds, the Lucille Ball vehicle Wildcat, The Goodbye Girl (starring Bernadette Peters and Martin Short), and the experimental Love Life, directed by Elia Kazan, for which Kidd created the controversial "Punch and Judy Get a Divorce" ballet. But his most famous work would be on film. His choreography for the MGM classic Seven Brides for Seven Brothers epitomizes his muscular, acrobatic style in its sensational challenge dance about raising a barn. Other film work includes Where's Charley?, Guys and Dolls, The Bandwagon, Hello, Dolly!, and Star!, and he appeared to memorable effect as a performer in the 1955 MGM musical It's Always Fair Weather and the 1975 black comedy Smile. In 1997 Kidd received an honorary Oscar "in recognition of his services to the art of dance in the art of the screen." Like his contemporaries Jerome Robbins, Hanya Holm, and Agnes de Mille, Kidd was scrupulous in always connecting movement to character. He was particularly known for the wit in his dances; one need only check out his "Are You Ready, Gyp Watson?" number from Destry Rides Again (available at www.bluegobo.com) to see his dry sense of humor in this loving parody of de Mille.
> As the creator of Playhouse 90, one of the pillars of television's golden age, Martin Manulis (Sept. 28, age 92) achieved something stunning and almost impossible to measure. What gauge would you use? Would it be the number of once and future stars who appeared on the program, a fraction of whom included Peter Lorre, Melvyn Douglas, Boris Karloff, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Lee Remick, Kim Stanley, Kim Hunter, Jack Lemmon, Geraldine Page, Burt Reynolds, Maureen Stapleton, and Angela Lansbury? The number of notable film directors he employed (including John Frankenheimer, George Roy Hill, Arthur Penn, and Sidney Lumet)? The fact that he helped launch the career of Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone? Or the number of stories that premiered on Playhouse 90 and later became memorable movies, such as Days of Wine and Roses, Judgment at Nuremberg, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Miracle Worker, and Marty? Perhaps Manulis' accomplishment comes down to this: He created television that was both critically and commercially successful.
Compiled by Andrew Salomon.
asalamon@backstage.com In addition to original reporting, sources included Wikipedia.org, The New York Times, the Internet Movie Database, the Internet Broadway Database, the Lortel Archives, and The Associated Press.