In Passing
Dick Latessa, whose long New York stage career started in the 1960s and culminated in 2003 with a Tony Award for playing the adoring husband Wilbur Turnblad in the hit musical comedy Hairspray, has died at his home in Manhattan, aged 87.
Latessa brought warmth and believability to Wilbur, whose wife, Edna, was played in drag by Harvey Fierstein. In their showstopping number, (You're) Timeless to Me, Latessa looked besotted as he wrapped his arms tightly around Fierstein's considerable waist and sang:
Actor Harvey Fierstein, left, in the role of housewife Edna Turnblad and Dick Latessa, who played her husband Wilbur Turnblad in Hairspray. Credit:AO
You're like a stinky old cheese, babe,
Just gettin' riper with age.
You're like a fatal disease, babe,
But there's no cure
So let this fever rage.
Hairspray, based on the John Waters movie of the same name, follows Tracy Turnblad, the plus-size daughter of Edna and Wilbur, as she pursues racial equality on a local dance show in early-1960s Baltimore.
Marion Pritchard, a Dutch social work student who was credited with saving dozens of Jews during the Holocaust, spiriting some to safe houses, hiding others under floorboards, and, in one case, executing a Nazi before he could arrest a family of four, has died in Washington, aged 96.
Pritchard was recognised in 1981 by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, as one of the "righteous among the nations" – those gentiles who, seeking no reward, risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Nazi dragnet that claimed 6 million lives during World War II.
She was said to have fed, clothed, hidden or otherwise aided as many as 150 people, many of them children. She insisted that she could not have done her work without the assistance, overt or implied, of neighbours, friends and other members of the resistance. She observed, her son Arnold Pritchard recalled, that only rarely, if ever, during the Holocaust could one person single-handedly save the life of another.
Mrs Pritchard – then Miss van Binsbergen – was 19 when Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. She credited her father, a Dutch judge who abhorred the Nazi ideology, and her mother, an Englishwoman who raised her daughter in the Anglican faith, with instilling in her a sense of justice and moral resolve.
Patricia Robins, the bestselling romantic novelist, who has died aged 95, was also known to fans of historical fiction as Claire Lorrimer; in later life it was revealed that she had also played a vital role during the Second World War in helping to keep Hitler's forces at bay.
Patricia Denise Robins was born on February 1, 1921, at Hove, Sussex, the second of three daughters of Denise Robins, herself a bestselling novelist known as "the Queen of Romance", whose tales of passion in exotic locations outsold the more sugary offerings of Barbara Cartland. Mavreen, her first historical romance, set in the Regency era, became an instant hit, spending several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and selling more than 2 million copies in the first year alone.