Notable deaths last week

• A. Alfred Taubman, the self-made Michigan billionaire whose philanthropy and business success - including weaving the enclosed shopping mall into American culture - was clouded by a criminal conviction late in his career, has died. He was 91.

Taubman, who donated hundreds of millions of dollars to universities, hospitals and museums, died Friday night at his home of a heart attack, according to son Robert S. Taubman, president and CEO of Taubman Centers, Inc.

"This company and all that you stand for were among the greatest joys of his life," Robert S. Taubman wrote in a message to the company's employees. "He was so proud of what this wonderful company he founded 65 years ago has accomplished."

Taubman's business success spanned from real estate and art houses to the hot dog-serving A&W restaurant chain, for which he traveled to Hungary to figure out why the country's sausage was so good. He also became a major backer of stem-cell research.

But it was his rearrangement of how people shop - parking lot in front, several stores in one stop close to home - that left a mark on American culture. Taubman Centers, a subsidiary of his Taubman Co., founded in 1950, currently owns and manages 19 regional shopping centers nationwide.

"Everything that excited me that I got interested in, I did," Taubman said in a 2007 interview.

• Bahamian R&B singer Johnny Kemp, who is best known for the hit song "Just Got Paid," has died in Jamaica. He was 55.

Jamaica police said Friday that Kemp was found floating at a beach in Montego Bay on Thursday morning. It had not yet been determined how he died.

Police said Kemp arrived in Jamaica on a cruise ship but added that they did not have further details.

Reach Media Inc. said Kemp had been scheduled to be on a Caribbean cruise this week, but the U.S.-based parent company of the "Tom Joyner Morning Show" said it did not have further details.

• Cardinal Francis George, a vigorous defender of Roman Catholic orthodoxy who played a key role in the church's response to the clergy sex abuse scandal and led the U.S. bishops' fight against Obamacare, has died after a long fight with cancer. He was 78.

George, who retired as Chicago archbishop in the fall of 2014, a few months before announcing his treatment for kidney cancer had failed, died late Friday morning, according to the Archdiocese of Chicago.

George grew up in a working class neighborhood on Chicago's northwest side, and a five-month bout with polio at age 13 left him with a lifelong limp. He was initially rejected from a high-school seminary because he was disabled, but he went on to become an intellectual leader within the church.

He earned two doctorates, spoke Italian, Spanish, French and other languages, and wrote several books. A member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, he eventually helped lead the religious order as vicar general based in Rome.

In 1990, he was appointed bishop of Yakima, Washington, then archbishop of Portland, Oregon, before being assigned to Chicago.

• Former U.S. Sen. Robert Griffin, a Michigan Republican whose withdrawal of support hastened President Richard Nixon's resignation during the Watergate scandal, has died at age 91.

Griffin was defeated in 1978 but landed a new career in 1987 as a Michigan Supreme Court justice - a job he described as his "highest calling" as a public servant.

He served eight years on the Michigan Supreme Court through 1994.

• Jaroslav Holik, an offensive forward who helped Czechoslovakia win a hockey world title and an Olympic bronze medal in 1972, has died. He was 72.

The Czech ice hockey federation said Friday that Holik, the father of NHL player Bobby Holik, died after battling an unspecified, long-term illness.

Holik scored 57 goals for Czechoslovakia in his 142 international games and led his country to the bronze medal at the 1972 Olympics in Sapporo. The Czechs also won six world championship medals, including gold in 1972.

• Paul Almond, a Canadian-born filmmaker whose landmark 1964 documentary "Seven Up!" inspired an extended look at British children's unfolding lives, has died. Almond was 83.

The Montreal native started his career at the CBC and went on to produce and direct more than 100 dramas for the Canadian network as well as U.S. and U.K. broadcasters, according to Almond's website. He also wrote and adapted plays for TV.

He brought the works of Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams and other famed writers to TV, and his projects featured future stars including Sean Connery, Maggie Smith and William Shatner.

• Lee Remmel, whose six-decade relationship with the Green Bay Packers spanned a sports writing career and a 30-plus year stint in the team's front office, has died. He was 90.

Remmel is a member of the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame, and the Lambeau Field press box was named after him in 2003.

"He was the best. I cherish my times with Lee," former Packers quarterback Brett Favre said. "I will tell Leland J. Remmel stories as long as I'm able."

Remmel joined the Packers in 1974, the start of a 30-year career leading public relations for the team. He was named team historian in 2004, retiring from that position three years later.

Before working for the team, Remmel covered the Packers as a sports writer and columnist for nearly 30 years for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. He covered his first game in 1945.

Remmel worked the first 40 Super Bowls - the first eight as a journalist and the rest as a member of either the NFL's auxiliary media relations staff or the Packers' front office.

• Jimmy Gunn, a defensive end who was part of Southern California's "The Wild Bunch" defensive line in 1969 and later played seven years in the NFL, has died. He was 66.

Gunn joined with end Charles Weaver, tackles Al Cowlings and Tody Smith and middle guards Willard "Bubba" Scott and Tony Terry to comprise "The Wild Bunch." They were named after the 1969 Western directed by Sam Peckinpah.

Known for their reckless abandon and hard-nosed play, "The Wild Bunch" helped USC go 10-0-1 in 1969, including a Rose Bowl win over Michigan. In the 1969 game against crosstown rival UCLA, they sacked Bruins quarterback Dennis Dummit 10 times for losses of 75 yards. Playing in an era of powerful running games, "The Wild Bunch" allowed just 2.3 yards per carry all season.

Gunn was a member of USC's 1967 national championship team and played in three Rose Bowls.

He spent seven years in the NFL with the Chicago Bears, New York Giants and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. After his playing days ended, Gunn became a business executive and real estate developer.

• Stanislav Gross, who became the Czech Republic's youngest prime minister before resigning over questions about his personal finances, has died. He was 45.

Czech media reported that he suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurological disease that results in the loss of muscle function.

He moved from the post of interior minister to head the government in 2004 after his predecessor, Vladimir Spidla, resigned. Just 35, he was Europe's youngest premier. Gross served for almost nine months before he was forced to step down over a dispute among his coalition partners about how he financed a flat in Prague and how his wife funded her business.

• Chef Homaro Cantu, who artfully blended science and fine dining at his Michelin-starred Chicago restaurant, has died.

The 38-year-old Cantu, one of Chicago's most renowned chefs, turned cooking into alchemy through his brand of molecular gastronomy at Moto, the restaurant he led in the city's West Loop neighborhood.

His death was ruled a suicide by the Cook County medical examiner's office, which said Wednesday that Cantu had hanged himself. Cantu's body was found Tuesday in a building on the northwest side where he had planned to open a brewery by this summer.

Cantu grew up in Portland, Oregon, and graduated from Le Cordon Bleu. He worked in nearly 50 kitchens on the West Coast and then moved to Chicago, where he spent four years working for famed chef Charlie Trotter, eventually rising to the position of sous chef before leaving to open Moto. Trotter died in 2013.

• Mike Mitchell, the all-time leading thoroughbred trainer at Del Mar racetrack with 476 victories, has died after a long struggle with brain cancer. He was 66.

Mitchell won 19 training titles on the Southern California circuit, including seven at Del Mar, the last coming in 2011 at the seaside track north of San Diego. His biggest success came late in his career with Ireland-bred Obviously, who won five graded stakes races in 2012-13 and finished third in the 2012 Breeders' Cup Mile at Santa Anita.

• The International Tennis Hall of Fame says that Thelma Coyne Long, an Australian who won 19 Grand Slam titles in singles, doubles or mixed doubles, has died. She was 96.

Long was inducted in 2013.

She won two major championships in singles, 12 in doubles and five in mixed doubles. At the 1952 Australian Championships - the tournament now known as the Australian Open - Long won the singles, doubles and mixed doubles titles.

Two years later, at age 35, she became the oldest Australian women's singles champion.

• Sound engineer Jimmy Johnson knew he had captured something special on tape as Percy Sledge finished singing "When a Man Loves a Woman" in a recording studio in 1965.

Sledge, who died Tuesday, grew up singing in nearby cotton fields of northwest Alabama and never had been in a studio before that day. He didn't even know how to work a microphone during that first session, Johnson said.

Johnson had to twirl the volume dials on the recording machine just to keep Sledge's untrained voice at the correct levels during the session, but it worked. The track would become a No. 1 hit in 1966 and establish Sledge as a rhythm-and-blues singer of the first order.

"It gave us chills," Johnson said.

Afterward, Sledge became a star and helped his native northwest Alabama establish itself as a recording Mecca that drew Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Allman Brothers, Bob Seger and other top-shelf stars of the 1960s and '70s in search of the "Muscle Shoals Sound."

Johnson, now 72, said it all began when Sledge sang "When a Man Loves a Woman," with its haunting lyrics and his mournful, blue-eyed style.

"Everything lined up for this," said Johnson, who played rhythm guitar for the great Muscle Shoals studio group called "The Swampers."

"I mean, the song was one of the best songs I've ever heard even to this day. The lyrics were incredible. The melody was wonderful. Percy's voice and the job he did," Johnson said in his home overlooking the Tennessee River. "I mean, hey, it still holds up today."

• Mark Reeds, an assistant coach for the playoff-bound Ottawa Senators and a former NHL player, has died at 55.

Reeds had been fighting cancer for more than a year, and the news came as a blow to a team already dealing with general manager Bryan Murray's cancer diagnosis.

Owner Eugene Melnyk lauded Reeds' "charismatic fighting spirit ... right until the end." Murray said the team lost a "very important member ... of our Senator family."

• A younger brother of U.S. House Speaker John Boehner has died in Ohio. Richard Boehner was 60.

• Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, whose "The Open Veins of Latin America" became a classic text for the left in the region and propelled the author to fame, died Monday at age 74.

Galeano's work inspired several generations of Latin Americans with powerful, acerbic descriptions of the continent's exploitation by capitalist and imperialist forces. The writer defined himself as someone who helped rescue "the kidnapped memory" of Latin America, a "despised and beloved land."

• A man believed to be New Jersey's longest-serving mayor has died. Gerry Calabrese, 90, was the mayor of Cliffside Park for the past 50 years.

Calabrese was a Democrat who was first elected as the Bergen County community's chief executive in 1959. He had held the job continuously since 1965.

• Baltimore Colts tight end Jim Mutscheller, who caught a 6-yard pass from Johnny Unitas to set up the overtime touchdown that won the 1958 NFL championship game, has died. He was 85.

Mutscheller played for the Colts from 1954-61 and made the Pro Bowl in 1957. His most memorable play was the sideline catch to the 1-yard line against the New York Giants, with Mutscheller's block on the next snap helping clear the way for Alan Ameche to barrel into the end zone for the title.

• Guenter Grass was to Germany what William Faulkner was to the old American South: The bard, scourge and pathfinder of a society ruined by moral disgrace and humiliated by military defeat.

For much of his adult life, the Nobel-winning writer held the rare status in the literary world of both national historian and inventor. Grass, who died at age 87, often angered his fellow citizens by reminding them of their shared Nazi past. But through language of renewed freedom and lyricism and stories that were surreal yet recognizable, he also assumed the even greater challenge of imagining what they might become.

"His literary legacy will stand next to that of Goethe," German Culture Minister Monika Gruetters said in a statement following the news of his death.

Grass' first and most famous novel, "The Tin Drum," came out in 1959 and ranks with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" as a modern, international classic and as a mini-encyclopedia of a country's state of mind.

Combining naturalistic detail with fantastical images, Grass captured the German reaction to the rise of Nazism, the horrors of the war and the guilt that lingered after Adolf Hitler's fall. The book follows the life of Oskar Matzerath, the boy in Danzig who is caught up in the political whirlwind of the Nazi rise to power and, in response, decides not to grow up. His toy drum becomes a symbol of this refusal.

"There are books that open doors for their readers, doors in the head, doors whose existence they had not previously suspected," Rushdie once wrote, citing "The Tin Drum" as a youthful rite of passage.

"This is what Grass's great novel said to me in its drumbeats: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world."

Grass - winner of the Nobel in 1999 and the picture of the urbane intellectual with his pipe, gravelly voice, bushy mustache and slightly disheveled look - became a force in Germany's cultural and political discussion.

He argued passionately, and unsuccessfully, against the reunification of East and West Germany after the 1989 tearing down of the Berlin Wall, fearing even the potential of German dominance. He wrote speeches for one of Germany's most prominent liberal politicians, Willy Brandt. To much criticism, he wrote a prose poem, "What Must Be Said," in which he assailed Germany for allegedly aiding Israel's nuclear program and worried that a military strike "could annihilate the Iranian people."

Grass had faulted Germans so often, and for so long, about not confronting the Nazi era, that his opponents took special delight when the author admitted to his own slip of memory. He had always acknowledged being a Nazi supporter in his youth, but in 2006 he revealed in his memoir "Skinning the Onion" that, as a teenager, he had served in the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of Hitler's notorious paramilitary organization.

Recalling the pull of Nazi propaganda, he said that when he was assigned to the 10th SS Panzer Division "Frundsberg" he found "nothing offensive" about the prospect.

Grass offered an unheroic picture of his service with the division, which fought Soviet troops in the last days of the war in eastern Germany. It ended with his capture by the Americans in May 1945 after a shrapnel wound left his arm so stiff he couldn't move it. His division was delayed getting into the fighting because it was waiting for tanks that never came.

• Julie Wilson, one of the most bewitching artists of the cabaret stage, renowned for her dramatic interpretations of classic and forgotten songs and for her occasional roles on Broadway, died April 5 at her home in New York. She was 90.