Lily Rabe

JILL CLAYBURGH, the sophisticated Hollywood and Broadway actress known for portrayals of empowered women in a career spanning five decades, has died. She was 66.

Her husband, Tony Award-winning playwright David Rabe, said Clayburgh died Friday surrounded by her family at her home in Lakeville, Conn., after a 21-year battle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He said she dealt with the disease courageously, quietly and privately, “and made it into an opportunity for her children to grow and be human.”
Clayburgh, alongside such peers as Anne Bancroft, Shirley MacLaine and Jane Fonda, helped to usher in a new era for actresses in Hollywood by playing women who were confident and capable yet not completely flawless. Her dramatic turn as a divorcee exploring her sexuality after 16 years of marriage in “An Unmarried Woman” earned Clayburgh her first Oscar nod.

“There was practically nothing for women to do on the screen in the 1950s and 1960s,” Clayburgh said in an interview with The Associated Press while promoting “An Unmarried Woman” in 1978. “Sure, Marilyn Monroe was great, but she had to play a one-sided character, a vulnerable sex object. It was a real fantasy.”
Besides appearing in such movies as “I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can,” “Silver Streak” and “Running With Scissors,” Clayburgh’s Broadway credits included Noel Coward’s “Design for Living” and the Tony Award-winning musicals “Pippin” and “The Rothschilds.”
Clayburgh’s work also stretched across TV. She earned two Emmy nods: for best actress in 1975 for the ABC TV film “Hustling” and for her guest turn in 2005 on FX’s “Nip/Tuck.”

SPARKY ANDERSON, who managed Cincinnati’s powerful Big Red Machine to baseball dominance in the 1970s and became the first manager to win World Series championships in both the National and American Leagues, died on Thursday at his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 76.
His death was announced by the Reds, whom he managed to championships in 1975 and ’76, and the Detroit Tigers, whom he took to a World Series title in 1984. Anderson had been placed in hospice care at his home because of complications of dementia, his family said in a statement Wednesday.
Anderson was only 35 when he was named manager of the Reds for the 1970 season, having spent nearly his entire baseball career in the minor leagues.
Anderson drew on his keen sense of baseball strategy, his ability to deal with players as individuals and his obsession with winning.

George Lee Anderson was born on Feb. 22, 1934, in Bridgewater, S.D.
SHIRLEY VERRETT, the vocally lustrous and dramatically compelling American opera singer, died Friday morning at her home in Ann Arbor, Mich. She was 79. The cause was heart failure after several months of illness, said her daughter, Francesca LoMonaco. In her prime years, Verrett was a remarkably complete and distinctive operatic artist. She began as a mezzo-soprano and went on to sing soprano roles to international acclaim.
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