A look back at the esteemed personalities who left us this year, who’d touched us with their innovation, creativity and humanity.
By CBSNews.com senior producer David Morgan. The Associated Press contributed to this gallery.
She was the archetypal Sixties rock chick; a pop star at 17; Mick Jagger’s muse at 19; and by 24, a junkie on the streets. But Marianne Faithfull (Dec. 29, 1946-Jan. 30, 2025), who burst out of the ’60s British Invasion with the hit “As Tears Go By,” launched a second act in the late 1970s. Her lithe voice, later weathered from surviving sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, was brought forth in such albums as “Broken English,” “Dangerous Acquaintances,” and “Easy Come, Easy Go.”
The daughter of an eccentric British professor and an Austrian baroness, Faithfull was just out of convent school, and was performing as a folk singer, when she was discovered at a party by the manager of the Rolling Stones. Jagger and Keith Richards wrote her breakthrough hit, “As Tears Go By.”
Just as her career exploded, at 18, she married a London art dealer and had a baby. “I was very overenthusiastically eager for life,” she told “Sunday Morning” in 2009. “I wanted to just bite into it and swallow it whole.”
She then left her marriage for Jagger. They became one of Swinging London’s most photographed couples. Then, in February 1967, British police barged into a Rolling Stones party at Richards’ home. The police found drugs, and Marianne naked in a fur rug. Though charges were later dropped, Faithfull’s image was disgraced. She felt she’d let her parents down: “I think that’s the worst feeling in the world,” she told Anthony Mason.
She played up the “bad girl” image by acting in the film “Girl on a Motorcycle.” But she miscarried Jagger’s child after eight months, and while on a trip to Australia with Jagger, she swallowed 150 sleeping pills. She spent six days in a coma. Faithfull recovered, but her relationship with Jagger did not.
She fell into heroin addiction. She said, “It’s certainly not what I was dreaming of when I was eight or ten – I’m going to grow up and become a junkie and live on the street!” she said. She would lose custody of her son, Nicholas, and the damage began to show in her singing voice. But in 1979, she pulled herself together to release a raw and daring comeback album, “Broken English.” “I became myself,” she said, “and it was not a person people thought I was. It was more intelligent, stronger, ravaged in its own way, but very quite interesting.”
It would be several more years before she freed herself of addiction, and in 2008 recorded “Easy Come, Easy Go,” with Sean Lennon, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, Cat Power, and Keith Richards. She also returned to acting, in “Paris, Je T’aime,” “Marie Antoinette,” and “Faces in the Crowd.”
Faithfull said she appreciated the long, hard road she’d traveled: “I think I’ve been very unconscious for a long time, and only now have I begun to get it. As long as I got it before I croaked, I think that’s the main thing.”
Jules Feiffer
The works of the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and humorist Jules Feiffer (Jan. 26, 1929-Jan. 17, 2025) included a long-running comic strip, plays, screenplays and children’s books in which he chronicled childhood, urban angst, politics, sexism, war, and other topics. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political quandaries that colored 20th century life.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with “communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority.”
After attending the Pratt Institute in New York City, Feiffer drew his first comic strip, “Clifford,” from the late 1940s until he was drafted in 1951. After leaving the Army, he returned to cartooning, and joined The Village Voice beginning in 1956. Feiffer became a fixture of the New York City alternative weekly newspaper. His satirical strip, “Feiffer,” ran there for more than four decades.
He also wrote novels, plays and screenplays, to convey ideas, he told Time magazine, that he felt he couldn’t address “in six panels of a cartoon.” His book “Passionella” became the basis of the musical “The Apple Tree.” He won an Obie Award for 1967’s “Little Murders,” and wrote “The White House Murder Case,” “A Think Piece,” “Knock Knock,” “Grown Ups,” and “A Bad Friend.” He wrote “Carnal Knowledge” as both a play and a film, directed by Mike Nichols. He also scripted Robert Altman’s film based on the “Popeye” comic strip.
One of his most enduring works was his illustrations for “The Phantom Tollbooth,” published in 1961. The adventure story of a bored child who is transformed upon entering a magic tollbooth, it was written by Feiffer’s friend, Norton Juster. “Norton would read me what he had written,” Feiffer told “Sunday Morning” in 2012, “and in order to avoid doing the work I was supposed to doing, I began sketching characters for the ‘Phantom Tollbooth.’ And as it evolved, it just seemed like a natural act, that if this book was going to be Illustrated, why not by me?”
Bob Uecker
In six undistinguished seasons as a catcher in the majors, Bob Uecker (Jan. 26, 1934-Jan. 16, 2025) played for four teams, with a career batting average of .200. But for a half-century as a play-by-play announcer, the Milwaukee native was a mascot for his city, and for the sport at which he never quite excelled, his enthusiasm and humor earning him the nickname “Mr. Baseball.”
Hired by the Milwaukee Brewers as a scout, Uecker demonstrated his lack of ability in that department. But then, the team’s owner moved him to the broadcast booth, where Uecker stayed for 54 years.
A favorite Uecker line? “‘Juuuuust a bit outside.’ That’s where my wife put me a lotta times!”
His dry wit fueled his second career as an actor, comedian, commercial pitchman, and perennial guest on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” He notably played announcer Harry Doyle in the “Major League” movies.
In 2024, Uecker told “Sunday Morning” he shared a bond with players on the field: “I played the game. So, I know how hard it is. I know how tough it is. … The game celebrations, when we win, that’s a big part of it, man, to be able to walk into that clubhouse and be with ’em.”
David Lynch
Writer, director and painter David Lynch (Jan. 20, 1946-Jan. 15, 2025) was a remarkable cinematic visionary, whose films “Blue Velvet,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Lost Highway,” and the TV series “Twin Peaks” were highly stylized dream states, evoking lost innocence, eroticism, and the roiling mysteries that exist underneath placid, peaceful exteriors. His films’ interior logic would invariably prompt more questions than answers, but the imagery and sonic sensations he mastered would generate a tremendous devotion from his fellow filmmakers and audiences.
A Montana native, Lynch studied at the American Film Institute and turned his thesis project into his first feature, “Eraserhead,” a black-and-white experimental film about parenthood. Its exceptional photography and sound design made it a cult favorite. On the basis of “Eraserhead,” Lynch was hired by Mel Brooks’ production company to write and direct his first Hollywood feature, “The Elephant Man.” Lynch earned two Oscar nominations.
He turned down George Lucas’ offer to direct the third “Star Wars” film, “Return of the Jedi,” and instead tackled Frank Herbert’s “Dune.” A visual feast, the film was a critical failure. But his relationship with producer Dino de Laurentiis got him his next major film, “Blue Velvet,” an idiosyncratic murder mystery starring Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper.
Lynch’s subsequent films, for the most part, were similarly dream-like in their narrative and presentation: “Wild at Heart,” “Lost Highway,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Inland Empire.” But his biggest imprint on the popular zeitgeist was with the 1990 TV series “Twin Peaks,” about the investigation into a teenage girl’s murder. A wonderfully moody drama, it blended the form of TV soap operas with the paranormal, all in the deceptively tranquil setting of a Pacific Northwest logging town. Though only on ABC for two seasons, it spawned a feature film spinoff, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” and a follow-up series on Showtime, in 2017.
Despite being the director of some dark movies, Lynch called himself a “bliss ninny.” A longtime practitioner of transcendental meditation (or TM), in 2005 he began the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. One of its goals: to teach students how to meditate.
Lynch told “Sunday Morning” in 2016 that he vividly remembers his very first experience with TM: “I started meditation on July 1, 1973, on a sunny Saturday morning at 11 o’clock. I remember it as if it was yesterday. And it was so beautiful. I’ve been meditating twice a day for over 41 years and never missed a meditation.
“People see things like stress, traumatic stress, tension, anxiety, sorrow, depression, hate, anger and fear start to lift away,” Lynch said. “So, it’s like pure gold coming in from within, and garbage going on.”
Sam Moore
In the 1960s, Sam Moore (Oct. 12, 1935-Jan. 10, 2025) was one half of soul music’s most explosive duo, Sam & Dave, who were known as “double dynamite” and “the sultans of sweat.” Their string of 10 straight Top 20 R&B hits included two soul masterpieces, “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” “and “Soul Man.”
Moore developed his pleading tenor voice while singing in church (he initially wanted to become a preacher). In 1957, he was set to travel to Chicago to replace the great Sam Cooke in a gospel group, The Soul Stirrers. But then, he told “Sunday Morning” in 2014, he attended a Jackie Wilson concert: “He was singing and winking and blinking and gyrating the body. … I saw men screaming, women, and I said, I want to do that!” laughed Moore. He ended up hiding from the gospel group, who left for Chicago without him. “They had to, because they couldn’t find me!” he laughed.
Moore met Dave Prater at a Miami nightclub, and their routine came together by accident. The two didn’t even rehearse. “It was all spontaneous. … We used the stage in the nightclubs like a pulpit. I preached. You would hear people from the audience go, ‘Say it, Sam. Tell the truth, Sam.'”
Producer Jerry Wexler later caught their act, signed the duo to Atlantic Records, then sent them to Memphis, where Stax Records paired Sam & Dave with two young songwriters, Dave Porter and Isaac Hayes. The team turned out such hits as “Soul Man,” “You Got Me Hummin,'” “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody,” “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” “I Thank You,” “Everybody Got to Believe in Somebody,” and “Soul Sister Brown Sugar.”
Moore’s relationship with Prater was tumultuous, and never recovered after Prater shot and wounded his own wife in a domestic dispute in 1968. Moore recalled that he told Prater, “‘I’ll sing, I’ll even record with you. But I’ll never talk to you again. Never. And I didn’t for 12-and-a-half years. Didn’t.” (Prater died in a car accident in 1988.)
Moore continued to tour, and in 2006 released the album “Overnight Sensational,” in which he performed alongside such artists as Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Mariah Carey, Sting, Billy Preston and Eric Clapton. He also recorded a tribute to George Jones with the country band Nu-Blu.
In 1992 Moore and (posthumously) Prater were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
He told “Sunday Morning” that he had always been uncomfortable being called the original “Soul Man.” “But I know this: at the end of the night, before I leave the stage, I better do ‘Soul Man.’ Gotta do it. Do I get tired? Ya, but you know what? When they go into it and I look up and see them jumpin’ up and down, it all leaves.”
#Notable #Deaths
