In Memoriam: Bernie Casey and Lillian Ross

 Football Star Turned Actor, Poet and Painter, Dies at 78

By Mike Barnes

Actor Bernie Casey, who appeared in such films as Boxcar Bertha, Never Say Never Again and Revenge of the Nerds after a career as a standout NFL wide receiver, has died. He was 78. 

Casey, who also starred in Cleopatra Jones and several other blaxploitation movies of the 1970s, died Tuesday after a brief illness at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his representative told The Hollywood Reporter.

In the Warner Bros. drama Brothers (1977), Casey distinguished himself by portraying a thinly veiled version of George Jackson, a member of the Black Panther Party who was killed in what officials described as an escape attempt from San Quentin in 1971. His writings had inspired oppressed people around the world, and Bob Dylan recorded a song as a tribute to Jackson in 1971.

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Source: The Hollywood Reporter 

 Lillian Ross, Acclaimed Reporter for The New Yorker, Dies at 99

 

By Michael T. Kaufman

Lillian Ross, who became known as the consummate fly-on-the-wall reporter in more than six decades at The New Yorker, whether writing about Ernest Hemingway, Hollywood or a busload of Indiana high school seniors on a class trip to New York, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 99.

Her longtime editor, Susan Morrison, said the death, at Lenox Hill Hospital, was caused by a stroke.

Ms. Ross preached unobtrusive reporting and practiced what she preached. She outlined her credo in the preface to her book “Reporting” (1964): “Your attention at all times should be on your subject, not on you. Do not call attention to yourself.”

But late in life her writing took a surprising turn from third person to first. In 1998 she published “Here but Not Here: A Love Story,” describing her 50-year love affair with William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, who was married to someone else and who, if anything, had even been more compulsively guarded about his private life than Ms. Ross. Former associates at the magazine accused her of betrayal.

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Source: The New York Times