Notable deaths last week

Deanna Durbin, a star whose songs and smile made her one of the biggest box office draws of Hollywood’s Golden Age with fans that included Winston Churchill, has died. She was 91.

Family friend Bob Koster of Los Angeles told The Associated Press that Durbin died on about April 20 in a village outside Paris, where she had lived out of public view since 1949.

At the height of her career, the Canadian-born Durbin, who made her first feature, “Three Smart Girls,” at age 13, was among the highest-paid actresses.

Her admirers included Churchill, who said she was his favorite star according to biographer William Manchester, and Anne Frank, who had Durbin’s photo pasted on the wall in the secret quarters where she and her family hid in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

In 1938 she received an honorary Academy Award for her “significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth.”

She made “Can’t Help Singing,” her first and only Technicolor film, in 1944. Her other films were in black-and-white because studio executives said it was too expensive to have Deanna Durbin and color film in the same movie.

Jeff Hanneman, a founding member of Slayer whose career was irrevocably changed after a spider bite, has died. He was 49.

Slayer spokeswoman Heidi Robinson-Fitzgerald said Hanneman died of liver failure at a Los Angeles hospital with his wife, Kathy, by his side.

He had been slowly recovering from what was believed to be a spider bite that nearly cost him his arm after he failed to seek immediate treatment.

Robinson-Fitzgerald said it’s believed the spider bite contributed to the failure of Hanneman’s liver.

Cedric Brooks, a Jamaican saxophone player and influential roots reggae musician, has died. He was 70.

Brooks began his music career in the late 1960s as a studio musician, playing in songs such as Burning Spear’s “Door Peep.” He also had hits with trumpet player David Madden including “Money Maker” and “Mystic Mood.”

Brooks also was a member of the Jamaican ska band The Skatalites.

Former Dow Jones & Co. executive William Cox Jr. has died at age 82, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Larry Shafer, a longtime public servant for the city of Ravenna who was a guardsman at Kent State University during the 1970 deadly shootings, has died at 67.

Shafer’s death came a day before the 43rd anniversary of the gunfire at the northeast Ohio college.

Kent State was the scene of Vietnam War protests May 4, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students. Four students died and nine were injured in the shootings, which contributed to the change in the public’s attitude toward the war.

Brad Drewett, a former tour player who led the ATP as executive chairman and helped increase prize money at Grand Slam tournaments, died Friday. He was 54.

He had Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the governing body of men’s tennis said in a statement he died at his home in Sydney.

John Williamson, a pioneer of the 1960s sexual revolution as co-founder of Topanga Canyon’s Sandstone Retreat, where nudity and free love once took place with abandon, has died at age 80.

Williamson died of cancer March 24 at a hospital in Reno, Nev., said his wife, Barbara Williamson. The pair had lived on a Northern Nevada ranch for the past 18 years, taking in abandoned lions, tigers, cougars and other big cats.

The mother of rapper Chris Kelly told authorities in Atlanta her son became sick after taking cocaine and heroin on the night before he died, according to a police report.

Kelly, half of the 1990s teen rap duo Kriss Kross, was found dead Wednesday of a suspected drug overdose.

Paramedics found Kelly, 34, unresponsive on a living room couch at his Atlanta home and tried administering CPR. Kelly, who was known as “Mac Daddy,” was later pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Native American activist, curator and professor George Horse Capture has died in Great Falls. He was 75.

Horse Capture was an author, archivist and curator at the Plains Indian Museum at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo.

An Austrian organization that tracks the fate of Nazi concentration camp inmates says that one of the oldest known survivors has died aged 107.

The Mauthausen Committee said Leopold Engleitner died April 21.

After refusing to renounce his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness, he survived three concentration camps and forced labor between 1939 and 1945.

John Fenton Wheeler, an Associated Press foreign correspondent who was the last U.S. reporter expelled from Cold War-era Cuba, has died. He was 88.

Sandor Racz, a labor activist and leading figure during Hungary’s anti-Soviet Revolution of 1956, has died at age 80.

Jack Shea, who directed “The Jeffersons” and other TV hits and was a three-time president of the Directors Guild of America, has died at age 84.

Grammy Award-winning cellist Janos Starker has died after months of declining health. He was 88.

Alan Wood, a World War II veteran credited with providing the flag in the famous flag-raising on Iwo Jima, has died. He was 90.

Wood was a 22-year-old Navy officer in charge of communications on a landing ship on Iwo Jima’s shores Feb. 23, 1945 when a Marine asked him for the biggest flag that he could find.

After five days of fighting to capture the Japanese-held island, U.S. forces had managed to scale Mount Suribachi to hoist an American flag.

Wood happened to have a 37-square-foot flag he had found months before in a Pearl Harbor Navy depot. .

Dave Gold, the founder of the 99 Cents Only Stores more than three decades ago who saw it expand into a billion-dollar empire, has died. He was 80.

Gold was 50 when he opened the first store in 1982. He told the Times in 2003 that while working at his father’s liquor store, he discovered that items he discounted to, say, 98 cents or $1.02 never sold out but a 99-cent label was magic.

“When I put a 99-cent sign on anything, it was gone in no time,” he said. “I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to have a store where everything was good quality and everything was 99 cents?”