/ Stars that died in 2023

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Sir Frank Lampl, British businessman died he was , 84.

Sir Frank William Lampl was Life President of Bovis Lend Lease, the leading global construction management company that he created from the British building firm Bovis during a 15-year period as Chairman and CEO died he was , 84..

(6 April 1926 – 23 March 2011)
Career
The son of a prominent Czechoslavakian lawyer, he spent his teenage years as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Dachau Nazi concentration camps, and his first construction job was as a slave labourer on an underground BMW factory outside Munich.
After World War II, Frank Lampl resumed his studies in Brno and inherited property from his murdered family. But after the communist takeover he was denounced as a bourgeois undesirable and sentenced to imprisonment in the uranium mines of Jachymov.
He married Blanka Kratochvilova, and they had one son.
Frank Lampl benefited from a general amnesty on Stalin’s birthday and was released in 1953 on condition that he take up work in either mining or construction. Having tired of mining he returned to construction. By 1963 he was managing director of the Pozemni Stavby Zavod Opava state construction company and won a place at Brno University.
Unwilling to be caught by a third oppressive regime when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 Frank Lampl and his wife left with one suitcase to visit their son Thomas who was studying at Oxford University in England.
They never returned and at the age of 42 Sir Frank began his career in construction again. He joined the British building firm Bovis in 1971[4] and by 1975 led Bovis’s first foray overseas enjoying particular success in the then booming Middle East.
In 1978 Sir Frank became chief executive of Bovis International and further contract successes followed, an achievement crowned by the Queen’s Award for Exports in 1984 and 1986. Bovis had been a division of the diversified transport and shipping company P&O since 1974, and in 1985 Frank Lampl joined the P&O main board in his capacity as Chairman of Bovis Construction.[4]
Bovis became a name synonymous with the Big Bang building boom of London in the 1980s and the company’s introduction of US construction management skills facilitated rapid completion of the most complicated projects. The biggest was Canary Wharf with the tallest building in Europe.
At the same time Sir Frank realised that Bovis needed to diversify internationally if the company was to survive after the boom was over. By 1990 Bovis had completed three substantial acquisitions in the US and in 1991 was able to win the Atlanta Olympic Games construction management contract.
There was also a highly successful series of acquisitions on the continent of Europe bringing major projects and Bovis also won EuroDisney outside Paris, finished in 1992,[5] and a huge shopping centre under Red Square in Moscow.
Additionally Sir Frank set up an operation in his former home town Brno and Bovis participated in several major Czech developments. And the Asian expansion of Bovis resulted in some notable wins, particularly the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, then the tallest building in the world.
In 1999 Sir Frank oversaw the successful sale of Bovis to the Australian retail real estate group Lend Lease and then announced his retirement at the start of the new Millennium. However, he remained Life President of Bovis Lend Lease and travelled extensively to see Bovis projects around the world.
Sir Frank was well known in Israel and lived with his 2nd wife artist Wendy, dividing his time between his home in Wiltshire, London's striking new Chelsea Bridge Wharf development and Washington. He was knighted in the 1990 New Year’s Honours and was an ex-chancellor of Kingston University as well as a holder of numerous honorary degrees.

 

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Monday, May 16, 2011

Richard Leacock , British documentary film maker (Louisiana Story, Primary, Monterey Pop, Janis) died he was , 89.

Richard Leacock  was a documentary film director and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema and Cinéma vérité  died he was , 89..

(18 July 1921 – 23 March 2011)

Early life and career


Leacock was born in London on 18 July 1921. Leacock grew up on his father's banana plantation in the Canary Islands until being sent to boarding schools in England at the age of eight.
He took up photography with a glass plate camera, built a darkroom and developed his pictures, but was not satisfied. At age 11 he was shown a silent film Turk-Sib about the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway. He was stunned, and said to himself "All I need is a cine-camera and I can make a film that shows you what it is like to be there".
At the age of 14 he wrote, directed, filmed and edited Canary Bananas (10 min. 16mm, silent), a film about growing bananas, but it did not, in his opinion, give you "the feeling of being there".
He was educated at Dartington Hall School from 1934-38, alongside Robert Flaherty's daughters, and where David Lack (Life of the Robin) taught biology.
Having filmed in the Canary Islands and then in the Galapagos Islands (1938-9) for ornithologist David Lack's expedition, he moved to the USA and majored in Physics at Harvard in order to master the technology of filmmaking. Meanwhile he worked as cameraman and assistant editor on other peoples films, notably To Hear Your Banjo Play (1941), filming a folk music festival atop a mountain in south Virginia where there was no electricity, with a 35mm studio camera and 35mm optical film sound recorder using batteries in a large truck, a rare achievement at that time. Three years as a combat photographer in Burma and China were followed by 14 months as cameraman on Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story.[2]
In the meantime, Leacock had married Eleanor "Happy" Burke in 1941. Daughter of the world-famous literary critic, philosopher, and writer Kenneth Burke, she had studied at Radcliffe College, but graduated from Barnard in New York City. The Leacocks had four children together. After ethnographic fieldwork with the Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi) of Labrador, Eleanor Leacock (1922-1987) earned her doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University (1952). Ten years later, after her marriage broke up, she went on to become a pioneering feminist anthropologist.[3]
Documentaries


Many relatively conventional jobs followed, until 1954. He was then asked to make a reportage on a traveling tent theater in Missouri: the first film that he wrote, directed, photographed and edited himself, since Canary Bananas.
This film, Toby and the Tall Corn, went on the American cultural TV program, Omnibus, in prime time and brought him into contact with Robert Drew, an editor at LIFE magazine in search for a less verbal approach to television reportage. Another new contact, Roger Tilton wanted to film an evening of people dancing to Dixieland music spontaneously. Leacock filmed Jazz Dance for him, using hand held camera techniques.
Leacock's search for high quality, mobile, synchronous equipment to facilitate observation was ongoing. By 1960 this had been achieved, and resulted in Robert Drew's film Primary, an intimate observation of a primary election with Democratic hopefuls John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin.[2]
A number of films followed made by Drew, Pennebaker, Maysles and their associates, but the US networks were not impressed. In France at the Cinémathèque Française, when Drew and Leacock screened Primary and On the Pole, Henri Langlois introduced the films as "perhaps the most important documentaries since the brothers Lumiere". After the screening, a monk in robes came up to them and said, "You have invented a new form. Now you must invent a new grammar!"
When Drew went to work for ABC-TV, Leacock Pennebaker was formed and produced Happy Mother's Day, Don't Look Back, Monterey Pop, A Stravinsky Portrait and many others ending with the remnants of Jean-Luc Godard's One A.M. - One P.M. (1972).
In 1968 he was invited to join Ed Pincus creating a new, small film school at MIT. Since 16mm filming was becoming so expensive, his group developed super-8 film synch equipment with modified mass-produced cameras that were much cheaper. Many filmmakers emerged from this program, including Ross McElway (Sherman's March), among others.
In 1989 he retired and moved to Paris, where he met Valerie Lalonde and, together, they made Les Oeufs a la Coque de Richard Leacock (84 minutes), the first major film shot with a tiny Video-8 Handycam to be broadcast on prime-time television in France. Leacock and Lalonde continued making films of their own choice without the pressures of TV producers.
Leacock died on 23 March 2011 at age the age of 89 in Paris. Before his death, he was raising funds for his multi-format memoir, “Richard Leacock: The Feeling of Being There,” a bound paper book and digital video book set to be published by Semeïon Editions.[4]
Selected filmography
  • 1935 Canary Bananas (8 min.)
  • 1941 To Hear Your Banjo Play (20m, dir. Charles Korvin (Geza Karpathy))
  • 1946 Louisiana Story (cameraman)
  • 1948 Mount Vernon and The New Frontier (cameraman)
  • 1949 Earthquake in Ecuador (director cameraman)
  • 1950 Head of the House (writer-director-editor)
  • 1952 The Lonely Night (dir. Irving Jacoby, filmed by Leacock)
  • 1954 Jazz Dance (20min., cameraman)
  • 1954 Toby and the Tall Corn (30 min., writer-director-camera-editor for Omnibus)
  • 1956 A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp
  • 1957 How the F-100 Got Its Tail (20 min., for Omnibus)
  • 1957-9 Frames of Reference, Coulomb's Law, A Magnet Laboratory, Crystals
  • 1958 Bernstein in Israel (30 min., Omnibus)
  • 1959 Bernstein in Moscow (55 min.)
  • 1959 Bull Fight at Malaga (20 min.)
  • 1960 Primary (30 min.)
  • 1960 Adventures on the New Frontier (possibly a longer version of Primary, Close-Up, ABC)
  • 1960 Yank! No! (55 min., Close-Up, ABC)
  • 1960 Kenya: Land of the White Ghost (Close-Up, ABC)
  • 1961 The Children Were Watching (dir. Leacock, Close-Up, ABC)
  • 1960 On the Pole (aka, Eddie, 55 min, co-produced and directed, The Living Camera)
  • 1961 Peter and Johnny (55 min., produced by Leacock, The Living Camera)
  • 1961 The Chair (55 min., co-produced, directed, and photographed, The Living Camera)
  • 1962 Nehru (55 min, co-produced, directed, and shot with Gregory Shuker, The Living Camera)
  • 1962 Susan Starr (54 min., filmed by a number of cinematographers, including Leacock, The Living Camera)
  • 1963 Crisis (55 min.)
  • 1963 Happy Mother's Day (30 min.)
  • 1964 Republicans - The New Breed (30 min., with Noel E. Parmentel Jr.)
  • 1965 A Stravinsky Portrait (55 min., made with Rolf Liebermann)
  • 1965 Geza Anda (30 min, with Rolf Liebermann)
  • 1965 Ku Klux Klan - Invisible Empire (50 min., produced and written by David Lowe for CBS Reports)
  • 1966 Oh Mein Pa-Pa! (made with Rolf Liebermann)
  • 1966 The Anatomy of Cindy Fine (20 min.)
  • 1966 Old Age, The Wasted Years (30 min. x 2 for WNET)
  • 1966 Monterey Pop! (assisted D.A. Pennebaker)
  • 1968 1-AM - 1-PM (90 min., with Pennebaker and Jean-Luc Godard)
  • 1968 French Lunch (cameraman)
  • 1968 Hickory Hill (18 min., with George Plimpton)
  • 1969 Chiefs (18 min., with Noel E. Parmentel Jr.)
  • 1969 Maidstone (cameraman with others)
  • 1970 Company (60 min., one of three cameramen)
  • 1970 Queen of Apollo (20 min., with Elspeth Leacock)
  • 1972 Thread (20 min.)
  • 1977 Isabella Stewart Gardner (30 min.)
  • 1978 Centerbeam (20 min.)
  • 1980 Light Coming Through (20 min.)
  • 1981 Community of Praise (55 min.)
  • 1984 Lulu in Berlin (50 min.)
  • 1991 Les Oeufs a la Coque de Richard Leacock (84 min.) video
  • 1992 Rehearsal: The Killings of Cariola (35 min.)
  • 1992 Les Vacances de Monsieur Leacock (20 min.)
  • 1992 Kren: Parking (3 min.)
  • 1993 "Gott sei Dank" eine Besuch bei Helga Feddersen (30 min.)
  • 1993 Felix et Josephine (33 min.)
  • 1993 Hooray! We're Fifty! 1943-1993 (30 min.)
  • 1993 A Celebration of Saint Silas (30 min.)
  • 1994 A Hole in the Sea
  • 1996 A Musical Adventure in Siberia
Films about Leacock
  • Ein Film für Bossak und Leacock (1984) – German documentarist Klaus Wildenhahn's homage to Richard Leacock and Jerzy Bossak
  • On Being There with Richard Leacock by Jane Weiner, a JDB Films and Striana co-production. (work-in-progress)

 

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Trevor Storton, English footballer died he was , 61.

Trevor Storton  was an English footballer who played as a central defender died he was , 61..

(26 November 1949 – 23 March 2011)

The early years
He began his career at Tranmere Rovers, playing alongside his older brother Stan, he played over 100 games for the club between 1967 and 1972, when he joined Liverpool. Storton was one of a number of players signed by Liverpool manager Bill Shankly in the late 60s and early 70s, in an attempt to rebuild the team, but he struggled to gain a regular place in the first-team. He played ten games in his first-season, and was a regular fixture in the squad for the UEFA Cup campaign, which he ended with a winner's medal.
The following season, he only made two appearances, and he was sold to Chester City in 1974.
A decade at Chester
Storton played for Chester for ten years from 1974–1984, amassing 468 appearances for the club. 396 of them were in the league, placing him third in the club's all-time list, behind Ray Gill and Ron Hughes (but Storton played more games if cup football if taken into consideration). This spell included two runs to the FA Cup fifth round, the Football League Cup semi-finals in 1975 and promotion from Division Four in the same year, and winning the Debenhams Cup in 1977, as the club enjoyed arguably the most successful period its history.
He served as Chester's caretaker-manager for a brief spell in 1983-84 but he quit the role at the start of 1984 after Ronnie Hildersley and Paul Sanderson were signed on loan from Manchester City without his knowledge.[1] He left for Oswestry Town shortly after new manager John McGrath arrived. Storton's final game for Chester was a 3–0 home loss to Swindon Town in front of just 880 fans on 8 February 1984, a sorry end to his long association with the club.
Non league career
Storton later played under his brother Stan for Telford United in an FA Trophy final at Wembley. He managed Bradford Park Avenue for seven years. More recently he has assisted Neil Parsley at a number of non-league clubs. He then worked as a coach at Conference North side Harrogate Town under Neil Aspin, who on 16 June 2009, also appointed him assistant manager of his new club, FC Halifax Town.
However, he was diagnosed with cancer soon afterwards and the illness finally claimed his life on 23 March 2011, at the age of 61.[2]
Teodor Negoiţă, 63, Romanian polar explorer and scientist.
Teodor Gheorghe Negoiţă (September 27, 1947 – March 23, 2011) was a polar region explorer. In 1995, he became the first Romanian explorer to reach the North Pole. He later ran the first permanent Romanian research and exploration station in Antarctica, the Law-Racovita Station, which he established in 2006.

Biography
Teodor Gheorghe Negoiţă was born on September 27, 1947 in the Sascut town, located in the Bacău County. Because his parents were teachers, the young Teodor had the luck to have at home a library which contained a lot of old books on travel. Even at that age he was fascinated by the description of some expeditions in the most difficult regions of the globe.
Later on, he attended the Industrial Chemistry College of IaÅŸi, graduating as a chemical engineer. He also engaged in the technical part of science, trying to bring new modifications to some big installations. After that he was transferred to Bucharest at a Design and Research institute.
He died on March 23, 2011.
Speleological science
Teodor Negoita had a passion for ethnology and he was most interested in the equatorial forest, Amazon and New Guinea. In his free time, he studied in particular a group of pygmies from Equatorial Africa. At that time he was corresponding with a Catholic institute from Paris which sent him the documentation he needed, but at the time it was impossible for Negoiţă do field research.
He found refuge in a domain which he could improve in his country: speleological science. He was 33 when he learned, on his own alpine speleology. His major field of interest were vertical caves, which with a depth of 200–300 meters, were less researched.
His passion for speleology evolved later into ice caves. He managed to get the best speleology equipment of the time, brought in from Czechoslovakia. Teodor Negoita felt that he needed to develop more than a solitary passion, so he initiated a more consistent project. In 1987,he founded the first Romanian Institute of Polar Research. However, his first attempts at obtaining financing failed and only in 1990 did he finally managage to realize something tangible monetarily speaking.
North Pole expeditions
Teodor Negoiţă organized many Romanian expeditions in the frozen areas around the North Pole: Greenland, the far North of Canada and Spitsbergen island in the (Svalbard) archipelago. He created teams in various domains, these being the first Romanian teams that acted over the borders in a varied structure including geographers, geologists, engineers, doctors, and biologists.
He went on his own in Greenland and Spitsbergen (Svalbard) archipelago, on his skis approximately 300 km through the frozen lands.
Since his first expedition, he established the contact with Danish, Norwegian, Canadian and Russian researches, with the intention that his Romanian research group not follow the research paths of other countries, but to make original research, that would distinguish the Romanian innovation.
In 1994, he established the Romanian Institute of Polar Research as a private institution, with the intention of gathering scientists from various domains with the passion for polar exploration. The research incomes are provided by sponsors and government and European money, through the research projects that the foundation attends to. After 1995 he ran the Romanian future expeditions.
Teodor Negoiţă trained for a more than a year to make an expedition to the North Pole (on skies) during a Russian research expedition. Thus he improved his physical condition, so that he was able to ski for hundreds of kilometers, to resist the cold and to pull a sled that weighs 50-100 kilograms. He would train eight hours a day by pulling up to two tires, to make an exact simulation of sled to the North Pole.
On April 21, 1995, the explorer Teodor Negoiţă became the first Romanian explorer to reach the North Pole on skis during the Russian expedition. He is the only Romanian thus far to have ever reached Fram’s land.
South Pole expeditions
After the North Pole expedition Negoiţă turned his attention to Antarctica.
Antarctica is the only harsh environment on the planet. Here we find the driest atmosphere on the planet, this provide high quality astronomical studies, atmospheres studies, research regarding climate changes, magnetism research. Over Antarctics lies the largest ozone hole, research regarding pollution can be made at this place, from here we can sample a lot of meteorites, find new minerals, some with special qualities that can become source for new technology. Antarctic is also a “biological laboratory“, extremely interesting for wild life research.[1]
At the same time Teodor Negoiţă became a doctor in chemistry, by defending a PhD thesis titled: "Pollution control in Arctic and Antarctic areas".
In December 2000, Romanian President Emil Constantinescu awarded Teodor Negoiţă the Star of Romania Medal - degree of officer.
Founder of the first Romanian research station in Antarctica
Teodor Negoiţă’s steps to build a Romanian exploration station in Antarctica started in 1997, when he began to publish research essays at the “Antarctic Treaty”, of which Romania became a member in 1971.
From 2000, Teodor Negoiţă has the honor of having the opening speech at the Antarctic Treaty organized at London, in front of representatives of 43 countries. The goal of this meeting was to regulate the naval rules in Antarctic Seas, the main argues regarding the Romanian, USA and Great Britain essays. Negoiţă presented the study “Directions concerning maritime Antarctic transport and environment pollution”.
With the occasion of the annual meeting of the Antarctic Treaty , which took place in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 2005, an agreement was signed with Australia which gave to the Romanian Antarctic Foundation, led by Teodor Negoiţă, one of their research bases from the Antarctic east coast. The signing of this agreement took place in the presence of ambassadors of the two countries: Romania and Australia.
After more than 100 years, I brought Racoviţă back in Antarctic regions. The greatest achievement of my career was when I took from the base from the Australians. I got so emotional, that I couldn’t even signed.[2]
Having the purpose to reopen the station from Antarctica, Teodor Negoiţă made his 13th expedition in the polar regions, spending two months and a half in the Antarctic continent, in an exploration team made of two women, researchers in biology and biochemistry domains, the first Romanian women in Antarctic. The purpose of the expedition was, besides taking control of the station, to get ground samples, sediments and micro-organisms from the frozen continent.
On January 13, 2006, the Law-Racovita Station was opened—Romania's first permanent research and exploration station in Antarctica. The Romanian Antarctic Research Base Law-Racovita was handed over to Romania by the Australian Antarctic Division.
The Romanian research base in Antarctic carries both the name of the first Australian researcher that explored the east of the Antarctic, Phillip Law, and the name of the first biologist that studied living in Antarctica, Emil Racovita. It was founded in 1989 by the Australian Government, nowadays the antipodes country runs another 3 research stations in the region.
"It is a first time in the Romanian Antarctic research, the country that signed the 1971 Antarctic Treaty which gives us the right to use the far south of Antarctica, in peaceful purposes. It is much easier for a country with a global position like Romania to reopen an older base than building a new one." said Teodor Negoiţă at the opening of the station.[3]
As a result of using this station, the yearly travel and maintaining costs of a Romanian expedition are estimated to be around 20,000 dollars.
The station is established in Princess Elisabeth region, in the Larsemann Hills in the East Antarctica at a close distance, 2 km from the Russian Federation and Chinese stations, resulting a close cooperation with the researchers of this countries, allowing experience exchange.
The research station is positioned in a rocky region, not an icy one. It offers numerous access possibilities on the Antarctic icecap both for walking and using endless track.
The Law–Racoviţă station houses the first Romanian research team since 2006, at the beginning of the southern region. Romanian research team intends to do bioprospecting, ecological and weather forecast, the measuring seismic and geomagnetic activity, gathering data regarding radio communication interference.
The Romanian research station is built from anti-corrosive and thermo-isolating materials, it consists of a laboratory, a radio station, five bedrooms and a fuel depot.
Later plans
Of the 13 polar expeditions which he participated in, eight were led and organized by Teodor Negoiţă. Five of his Romanian companions lost their lives during the first expedition, when strong winds caused the helicopter to crash.
Negoiţă expressed his desires to do research on the Larsemann hills, having the purpose of gathering samples from soil and lakes, to carry out medical tests, pollution studies and climate changes. He was also interested in gathering micro-organisms and meteorites samples from ice.
Negoiţă expressed his disappointment regarding the lack of funds for organizing these expedition. The total expedition cost for 3 researchers, to mobilise for 3 months on the Antarctic land, rise up to 25,000 euro.
He said, "I started to cry on my one in the middle of the frozen Iceland – thinking of the luck of the Chinese and Russian researchers were having. From the point of view of the attention that we are given from the state, we are behind even Bulgarians. They get 300,000 dollars per each year from the Bulgarian Minister of Foreign Affairs."
Most of the European countries, including the former-socialist countries, Russia, Ukraine or Bulgaria, hold the research institutes under the patronage of the local Academy and of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Romania does not have any government institute in this domain, but a private institute, independent from the Government and the Academy, Romanian Institute of Polar Research, the personal is made up of 10 researchers.
The Romanian Academy gave as a reason not to fund an institute the small number of researchers. Negoiţă sustained that the members of Academy are misinformed, there are 20 researchers in Romania at the current time, of which ten are employees of Romanian Polar Research Institute.
Published papers
Negoiţă published over 28 scientific papers. To promote his activity he choose to use the belletristic style that the Romanian large public to became interested in this fascinated domain of actual science.
His books include:
  • Science on ice .With Chinese people in Antarctica (2005), written on the base of his journal keep up during the 130 days of the winter of 2002-2003, when Teodor Negoiţă participated of the 19th Chinese expedition in the extremely South Pole continent.
Honours and awards
Negoiţă was appointed an Officer in the Order of the Star of Romania in December 2000 and, in 2008, he was promoted to the rank of Commander in that Order.

 

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Dickey Betts died he was 80

Early Career Forrest Richard Betts was also known as Dickey Betts Betts collaborated with  Duane Allman , introducing melodic twin guitar ha...