In Passing

Portland

Stew Albert, 66; political activist

Stew Albert, a co-founder of the Youth International Party, the mischievous countercultural organization whose members were known as Yippies, died of liver cancer Monday in Portland. He was 66.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., who wound up in Berkeley, Calif., in the ‘60s, Albert helped launch the Yippies in 1967 with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Paul Krassner and others. The group was best known for its highly theatrical pranks, such as running a pig for president in 1968.

Albert was clubbed by police in the mayhem surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Chicago 7 trial that charged Hoffman, Rubin, Tom Hayden and other antiwar-movement leaders with conspiracy to incite a riot. He played a role in the creation of People’s Park in Berkeley and helped found the Free University there.

“Our big contribution was our theatrical approach,” Albert told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004. “We tried to be inventive and creative in developing tactics, and we had the belief that, if we did, we could change the world.”

Since 1984, he had lived in Portland, where he was a freelance writer active in radical circles.

London

Moira Shearer, 80; British ballerina

Moira Shearer, a British ballerina who rose to worldwide prominence with the lead role in the 1948 film “The Red Shoes,” has died, her husband said Wednesday. She was 80.

Shearer died Tuesday at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, said her husband, journalist Ludovic Kennedy, whom she married in 1950. Kennedy said she became weak after her birthday last month but he did not reveal the cause of death.

Shearer, born in Dunfermline, Scotland, became principal dancer at London’s Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet in 1942 and won her first major role in 1946, playing the lead in “Sleeping Beauty” at the Royal Opera House.

But it was as the young ballerina Victoria Page in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film “The Red Shoes” that the stunning redhead caught the world’s attention.

The film, loosely based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, is celebrated for its rich use of color and intimate view of backstage life in the world of ballet.

It was a huge international hit and was nominated for the Oscar for best picture; it won Oscars for best art direction and best music. A 1999 British Film Institute survey of movie industry professionals ranked “The Red Shoes” as one of the 10 greatest British films of all time.