Every year, we lose artists, journalists, athletes, and world-changing figures. And in
2022, some truly fascinating people passed. Some, however, are less known than others.
In the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, Ivan Reitman helped shape American comedy of the era. Raised in Canada
and getting his start in low-budget B-movies, Reitman produced National Lampoon's Animal
House in 1978, which, adjusted for inflation, remains one of the highest-grossing comedies
of all time. Animal House made a movie star out of Saturday Night Live cast member John Belushi.
Reitman would later produce and direct works that would surpass the box-office numbers for
Animal House while further elevating more early SNL stars. Specifically,
Reitman directed Stripes starring Bill Murray and the blockbusters Ghostbusters
and Ghostbusters II, with Murray and Dan Aykroyd.
"You know it's just occurred to me we really haven't had
a completely successful test of this equipment."
"I blame myself." "So do I."
In the 1990s and beyond, Reitman continued to make films, having a hand in hits like Dave,
Kindergarten Cop, Space Jam, and Private Parts.
The Associated Press reported that on February 12, 2022, the producer and
filmmaker had died in his sleep at his home in Montecito, California. Reitman was 75.
One of the most influential and progressive filmmakers to ever work in cinema, Jean-Luc
Godard elevated and revolutionized his medium in the mid-20th century,
influencing the way movies are made in Europe and Hollywood for the next few generations.
Godard began his career as an outspoken critic for the 1950s magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which
influenced that era's young moviemakers to take risks and be more provocative with style and form.
In 1960, Godard's first feature, Breathless, heralded a new school that French culture writers
deemed la Nouvelle Vague, or the New Wave. Big on emotional realism, striking imagery, politics,
and deconstruction, Godard also popularized the jump cut and made it palatable for mainstream
movies to explore the darker side of the human experience. Among the many acclaimed films of
Godard include Pierrot le Fou, Contempt, Every Man for Himself, and Alphaville.
After experiencing a severe decline in health, Godard died at his home in Rolle, Switzerland,
according to his attorney, Patrick Jeanneret. Jeanneret told the Times,
"He could not live like you and me, so he decided with a great lucidity,
as he had all his life, to say, 'Now, it's enough.'"
Godard arranged for an assisted suicide and died at the age of 91.
Born in Quebec where he was a junior hockey standout,
Guy Lafleur was drafted number one overall in the 1971 NHL Amateur
Draft by the Montreal Canadiens, and he lived up to that promise and hype.
"You want to be the best." "Yes."
"Aren't you the best?" "So far."
Suiting up as a right wing for the Canadiens for 14 seasons, Lafleur, nicknamed "The Flower," was
named to six All-Star teams, scored the most points in the entire league in three seasons,
won the Hart Memorial Trophy twice as the league's most valuable player, and led his
team to five Stanley Cup championships, including four straight from 1976 to 1979.
"I think people took it for granted how many times they won the cup there,
you know, now you realize how hard it was."
His 1,353 points place him among the most prolific scorers in pro hockey history,
and as such he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1988.
On April 22, 2022, the National Hockey League, which Lafleur dominated for the entirety of the
1970s, announced that the French-Canadian hockey superstar had died at the age of 70.
Three years earlier, Lafleur had been diagnosed with cancer.
Julie Powell was the writer behind
the popular and inspiring blog "The Julie/Julia Project" for Salon.com.
"I was just purely trying to make, I don't know, a space for myself in my own life."
Through her blog project, which later turned into a bestselling book, Powell spent a year preparing
and then writing about every recipe featured in Julia Child's towering tome Mastering the Art of
French Cooking. Powell's 2005 book served as the source material for the 2009 film Julie and Julia,
in which Amy Adams portrayed Powell as she taught herself to cook and became a better
writer. Powell's second book caused scandal and generated headlines, as Cleaving: A Story of
Marriage, Meat, and Obsession was a memoir and meditation on the author's sexual proclivities.
On November 1, 2022, the Times published word from Powell's husband, Eric Powell,
that the home cook, writer, and blogging pioneer had died of
cardiac arrest on October 26 at her home in Olivebridge, New York. Powell was 49.
One of the first employees of CNN was Bernard Shaw, the news service's first lead anchor.
"I wouldn't think of myself as a journalist of color. I mean, my skin is black.
I love that. But I'm a journalist first. World class."
TV news viewers became familiar with Shaw in the 1970s, as he was frequently the reporter of
the record and the voice of information and reason on the scene when major news broke.
Shaw covered the Watergate scandal for CBS, and while working as ABC News' South America bureau
chief and lead correspondent, he helped obtain footage of the Jonestown, Guyana,
mass suicide. He left ABC to take a chance on the unproven CNN and would stay with the network
from its inception until his retirement in 2001, during which time he became a full-on news-media
celebrity for his dispatches from the first Gulf War, live in Baghdad amidst falling bombs.
"For the past 20 minutes, I've been hiding under a table."
In 2022, CNN broke the story of Shaw's death from pneumonia at the hospital in Washington,
D.C., where he'd been treated for the viral infection. Shaw was 82 years old.
According to The New York Times, Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh's journey as
a religious and philosophical leader and activist began in earnest in the 1960s,
when he studied and lectured at multiple Ivy League schools,
and his staunch and aggressive peace advocacy helped inspire the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Thích Nhất Hạnh was considered for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967, nominated by his close ally,
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also founded the relief organization Youth for Social
Services to assist individuals displaced or injured by the Vietnam War and put his
pro-peace sentiments and tenets of what he called "engaged Buddhism" to paper starting in the 1960s,
eventually publishing numerous bestselling volumes of poetry and philosophical analysis. He founded
several monasteries and Buddhism centers around the world while traveling the lecture circuit,
returning to Vietnam in the 2000s after a ban by the communist government was finally lifted.
"We have to change our way of thinking and seeing things. And this is possible."
Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, Thích Nhất Hạnh's organization of Buddhist monasteries,
announced on its founder's Twitter that the spiritual leader had died
at midnight on January 22, 2022, at the Từ Hiếu Temple in Hue, Vietnam.
After enduring a debilitating brain hemorrhage and stroke in 2014, he died at the age of 95.
Among the most prolific character actors of the 1970s and 1980s,
Sally Kellerman had a career that lasted more than six decades, consisting primarily
of quick gigs on episodic television until she landed a massive, star-making role in
the 1970 film version of M*A*S*H. Kellerman portrayed Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan
in the Korean War comedy, garnering an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.
"This isn't a hospital. It's an insane asylum. And it's your fault!"
M*A*S*H would launch a long collaboration with filmmaker Robert Altman,
who'd go on to cast Kellerman in Brewster McCloud, The Player, and Ready to Wear.
In 1986, Kellerman played the romantic lead in the popular Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School.
Alan Eichler, Kellerman's publicist and manager,
told National Public Radio that the actor died at her home in the Woodland Hills neighborhood
of Los Angeles on February 25, 2022. The cause of death was heart failure. Kellerman was 84.
Peter Robbins' acting resume isn't extensive, and it spans just nine years,
but his work as a kid voice actor is some of the most heard and enjoyed to ever play
on television. In 1965, after guest-starring on episodes of Rawhide, The Donna Reed Show,
and The Munsters, Robbins landed the voice role of Charlie Brown on A Charlie Brown Christmas,
a beloved part of the holiday entertainment canon.
Robbins so nailed the personality and voice of sad sack Charlie Brown that he would reprise the role
in five more specials, including It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and the feature film A
Boy Named Charlie Brown. As a teen actor, Robbins portrayed another comic strip character, Alexander
Bumstead, on the one-season TV version of Blondie, but would walk away from showbiz in 1972.
On January 28, 2022, The New York Times reported that Robbins had died 10 days earlier
in Oceanside, California. Publicly dealing with mental health issues for many years,
Robbins died by suicide. Robbins was 65 years old.
In 1981, Chariots of Fire became an unlikely box office hit and winner of the Academy Award for
best picture. The film tells the story of two friends, runners, grappling with their
deeply held religious views on their journey to the 1924 Olympics. The scenes of athletes
triumphantly running in slow-motion to a soaring synthesizer-based score became often imitated in
real life and movies, always accompanied by that iconic, familiar music — composed and performed
by Greek-born New Age musician Vangelis. A self-taught piano wiz, according to NPR, Vangelis
played with the prog-rock group Aphrodite's Child before striking out on his own. His instrumental
main theme from Chariots of Fire went to No. 1 on the pop chart and won Vangelis an Oscar.
Vangelis' assistant told NPR that the composer and keyboardist died on May 17, 2022, at a Paris
hospital. Vangelis died from complications surrounding heart failure at the age of 79.
With some pop and rock sensibilities injected into his otherwise traditional country tunes,
Mickey Gilley topped the country charts often in the mid-1970s, with songs like "Room Full
of Roses," "City Lights," and "Don't the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time." Gilley also
had a keen eye for business and the marketing of country music, and in the 1970s opened Gilley's,
a sprawling honky-tonk-style bar and club in suburban Houston. Gilley's and its
mechanical-bull competitions inspired the hit 1980 movie Urban Cowboy, which in turn led to
a pop-country crossover boom in subsequent years. By the time Gilley would slow down his recording
career to focus on performing his hits, he had a lot of them: 17 country chart-toppers altogether.
On May 7, 2022, Billboard, on whose country singles and
albums charts Gilley so frequently appeared in the 1970s and 1980s,
reported that the singer and songwriter had died. Performing at his own Mickey
Gilley Grand Shanghai Theatre in the country music hotspot of Branson, Missouri, up until a
rapid decline in health a few weeks earlier precluded it, Gilley died at the age of 86.
Although he was a significant and important figure in the history of stand-up comedy,
Budd Friedman wasn't a comic or a writer. He was a producer, a businessperson,
and a club owner, and he gave so many stand-ups their big breaks, stage time,
and exposure that he helped a pop cultural shift take place, which in turn made him famous.
"I'm Budd Friedman, your matchmaker of merriment, and, boy, have I got a show for you tonight."
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Friedman opened The Improvisation in New York City in 1963,
one of the first ever nightspots devoted to stand-up comedy. In 1975,
he would expand with an Improv in Hollywood. It would be the first of 21 branches, a launchpad to
success for most major comedians of the late 20th century, including Richard Lewis, Freddie Prinze,
Jerry Seinfeld, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Larry David, and Jay Leno. The Improv inspired
a nationwide comedy club boom, which died out in the 1980s with the advent of cable TV,
a new medium that could frequently and cheaply program stand-up comedy, such as A&E's "An Evening
at the Improv," shot at the Hollywood Improv, and hosted by Friedman for 13 of its 15 seasons.
The Hollywood Improv announced on its Twitter account on November 12, 2022, that Friedman had
died. According to Variety, the cause of death was heart failure. Friedman was 90 years old.