In Passing
Gloucester, Va.
Jo An Davis, congresswoman
U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Davis, a Republican who represented southeastern Virginia for seven years, died Saturday after a two-year battle with breast cancer.
Davis, 57, was found to have breast cancer in 2005 and had a recurrence this year. In 2000, Davis became Virginia’s first Republican woman elected to Congress; she was a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Gov. Timothy Kaine will schedule a special election, probably before the end of the year, to fill the remaining year of Davis’ term.
New York
George Grizzard, stage, film actor
Broadway and screen actor George Grizzard, who won acclaim and a Tony Award for performing in Edward Albee’s dramas, has died. He was 79.
Grizzard died Tuesday at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center of complications from lung cancer.
Grizzard’s film roles included a bullying U.S. senator in “Advise and Consent” in 1962 and an oilman in “Comes a Horseman” in 1978. On television, Grizzard made regular appearances on “Law & Order” and won a best supporting actor Emmy for the 1980 TV movie “The Oldest Living Graduate.”
But he considered himself primarily a stage actor.
He made his Broadway debut in 1955 as Paul Newman’s brother and fellow convict in “The Desperate Hours.” He was nominated for Tonys for “The Disenchanted” in 1959 and “Big Fish, Little Fish” in 1961.
With Albee, Grizzard appeared in the original 1962 production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and won a Tony more than 30 years later in 1996 for his performance in a revival of a 1967 play, “A Delicate Balance.”
Columbia, S.C.
Harry Dent, GOP strategist, adviser
Harry Shuler Dent, a Republican political operative who helped Sen. Strom Thurmond slow school desegregation in the South, who devised the Southern strategy that elected Richard M. Nixon president and who later became a lay minister, died Sept. 28 at his home in Columbia, S.C.
Dent, 77, had Alzheimer’s disease.
From his early years supporting Thurmond’s segregationist agenda to the 1960s, when he assured Southern politicians that Nixon would not force civil rights laws on unwilling states, Dent enraged moderates and liberals alike. After he linked Republican presidential candidate John Connally with gays and blacks, Connally called him “the original dirty trickster.” Time magazine quoted adversaries who dubbed him “a Southern-fried Rasputin” in “Uncle Strom’s Cabin.”
“When I look back, my biggest regret now is anything I did that stood in the way of the rights of black people. Or any people,” Dent told the Washington Post in 1981, when he announced he was quitting his South Carolina law practice to devote himself to his ministry.