December 14, 2010. Copyright 2010, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Review 2010: Last Farewells
By Julie Mullins

LONDON, December 14, Graphic News:  Captions accompany photomontage GN27254

1. Australian opera singer Dame Joan Sutherland died at her home in Switzerland on October 10, aged 83. One of the most remarkable opera stars of the 20th century, she was renowned for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s. She was dubbed La Stupenda at Venice’s La Fenice theatre in 1960 after a performance of the title role in Handel's Alcina. Sutherland married Australian conductor and pianist Richard Bonynge in 1954, and the couple worked together throughout her career.

2. Johnny Dankworth, noted English jazz composer, saxophonist and clarinetist, died on February 6 at the age of 82. He was married to jazz singer Cleo Laine, whom he married in 1958. Dankworth was knighted in 2006, joining his wife who was made a Dame in 1997. They were one of the few married couples where both partners held titles in their own right.

3. Former Argentine president Nestor Kirchner died from a heart attack on October 27, aged 60. Little-known even in his own country before he became President in 2003, Kirchner was elected by default when former President Carlos Menem withdrew from the ballot. While in office, he oversaw the stabilisation of Argentina's crisis-ridden economy, paying off the $9.8bn debt to the International Monetary Fund which he blamed, along with many ordinary Argentines, for many of the country’s financial woes. He tackled poverty and unemployment, and surprised many by the speed and determination with which he acted on human rights, persuading Congress to repeal amnesty laws which had protected military officers accused of abuses during the dictatorship of 1976-83. In 2007 he was succeeded as president by his wife, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, but he remained one of her key advisors.

4. Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua, 58, died on May 5 at his presidential villa following a long illness. A reclusive Muslim ex-governor from the northern state of Katsina, Yar’Adua was elected President after winning controversial polls in 2007. At his inauguration he promised to tackle corruption, reform the inadequate power sector and the flawed electoral system but the only area in which he made some progress was tackling the unrest in the oil-rich Niger Delta. He left Nigeria in 2009 for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia and although he returned three months later he was not seen in public again.

5. U.S. actor Tony Curtis died on September 29 at age 85. His career spanned six decades, but his popularity was at its height during the 1950s and early 1960s. He acted in over 60 films in roles covering a wide range of genres, from light comedy to serious drama. His best known movies included The Defiant Ones (1958), Some Like It Hot (1959), and Spartacus (1950) He was married five times and had six children, including actresses Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis, by his first wife, actress Janet Leigh.

6. U.S. singer and actress Lena Horne died in New York on May 9 at the age of 92. In a career spanning more than 60 years she battled racial segregation to become Hollywood’s first black sex symbol, renowned for her beauty and sultry voice. In 1943, she starred in the all-black film musical Stormy Weather, the title song of which became a major hit and her signature tune.

7. Benoit Mandelbrot, Polish-born Franco-American mathematician who pioneered the study of fractal geometry, died from pancreatic cancer at age 85 on October 14. Born in Warsaw in 1924, he moved to France with his family when he was a child. He moved to the U.S. in 1958, acquiring dual French and American citizenship. Mandelbrot worked on a wide range of mathematical problems, including mathematical physics and quantitative finance, but is best known as the father of fractal geometry. He coined the term fractal and described the Mandelbrot set.

8. British-born actress Jean Simmons died from lung cancer at her Santa Monica home, aged 80, on January 22. She made her name playing Estella in David Lean’s 1946 version of Great Expectations and moved to Hollywood in 1950, where she soon became one of Hollywood’s leading ladies, starring alongside Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas and her first husband, Stewart Granger. She received an Oscar nomination for her role as Ophelia opposite Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), a Golden Globe for Best Musical/Comedy Actress in Guys and Dolls (1956), with Marlon Brando, and an Emmy for her role as matriarch Fiona Cleary in The Thorn Birds (1983).

9. Paul the octopus, an unlikely star of the 2010 World Cup, died at his aquarium in Germany on October 26. Paul made his name by successfully choosing a mussel from one of two boxes bearing the flags of competing nations, correctly predicting the result of all seven of Germany’s matches and also choosing Spain to beat the Netherlands in the Final on July 11, making him an instant hero in Spain. Paul was two-and-a-half years old and had been hatched at another centre at Weymouth, England, in 2008. Octopuses rarely live beyond two years so his death was not unexpected.

10. Former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch died in Barcelona on April 21 at the age of 89, following heart problems. As IOC chief from 1980 to 2001, the Spaniard was one of the most powerful men in sport, widely credited with rescuing the Olympic Games, which were at an all-time low after Moscow 1980. The organisation was reportedly very short of money and 65 nations, led by the U.S., boycotted Moscow after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Over the next 21 years, Samaranch turned Olympic fortunes around through television deals and sponsorship and increased the number of participating nations with each successive Olympiad.

11. Hollywood actor Dennis Hopper died from prostate cancer at the age of 74, on May 29. His movies included cult classics such as Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet, but was best known for Easy Rider, the iconic road movie he directed and in which he starred, and which also launched the career of Jack Nicholson. Hopper’s career later suffered as he battled against alcohol and drug abuse, before making a successful comeback in the 1980s.

12. French-born U.S. sculptor Louise Bourgeois died in New York on May 31 at the age of 98. Born in Paris, she moved to New York in 1938 but only gained fame at age 70 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a solo show of her career in 1982. Subsequently recognised as one of the world’s most influential contemporary artists, her giant spider sculptures were exhibited around the world.

13. French film director Claude Chabrol died on September 12 at age 80. A member of the New Wave group of French filmmakers, he came to prominence at the end of the 1950s, alongside contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. Chabrol was the most prolific of the group, averaging almost one film a year from 1958 until his death. His early films, from 1958-63, generally have the experimental qualities associated with the New Wave movement. During his “Golden Era”, from 1967-74, he went on to establish what would be his signature style, usually suspense thrillers in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock.

14. Veteran U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke died at age 69 following heart surgery. Nicknamed “the Bulldozer”, the often abrasive Holbrooke was best known for helping to broker the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 which ended the war in Bosnia, and at the time of his death was serving as President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke was born in New York in 1941, of German-Jewish descent. In a career alternating between finance and diplomacy, he served as assistant secretary of state for Asia as well as U.S. ambassador to Germany. He was in a meeting with current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the U.S. state department when he collapsed with a torn aorta three days before his death.

15. French road cyclist Laurent Fignon, winner of the Tour de France in 1983 and 1984, died from lung cancer on August 31, aged 50. He just missed winning a third Tour by eight seconds, the closest margin in the race’s history, in 1989. He also won the Giro d'Italia in 1989, having been the runner-up in 1984, and the classic Milan-San Remo race in 1988 and 1989.

16. Polish President Lech Kaczynski was among 96 people killed when their Polish Air Force Tupolev Tu-154M crashed in bad weather near Smolensk, Russia, on April 10. Others who died included the president’s wife, Maria Kaczysnska, the chiefs of staff of the Polish army, air force, and navy, the central bank governor, the deputy foreign minister and other government members, and senior members of clergy. They were en route from Warsaw to attend an event to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, when more than 20,000 Poles were murdered by Soviet secret police.

17. Australian scientist David Warren died in Melbourne on July 19, at age 85. He was best known for inventing and developing the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, or “black boxes”, which have proved crucial in the investigation of air accidents. He came up with the idea after investigating a crash of the world’s first commercial jet airliner, the Comet, in 1953. Warren was buried in a casket bearing the label “Flight Recorder Inventor; Do Not Open”.

18. Veteran U.S. actor Leslie Nielsen, star of Airplane! and The Naked Gun, died in hospital in Florida on November 28 at the age of 84, while being being treated for pneumonia. Canadian-born Nielsen began his career as a serious actor but his 1980 role as a hapless doctor in the disaster spoof Airplane! revealed his comic talents and made him a star. He appeared in over 100 movies and had a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.