In Passing
Los Angeles
Alice Ghostley, actress, singer
Alice Ghostley, the Tony Award-winning comedic actress and singer who specialized in playing ditsy ladies and was best known on television for her supporting roles as Esmeralda on “Bewitched” and Bernice on “Designing Women,” died Friday. She was 81.
Ghostley died at her home in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles after a long battle with colon cancer and a series of strokes.
Ghostley made her Broadway debut in “Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1952,” the hit revue in which she received critical acclaim for singing the satirical sendup “The Boston Beguine,” which became her signature song.
Ghostley won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a play in 1965 for “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”
During her long show-business career, she regularly moved between the stage, cabaret, movies and television.
On “Bewitched,” she played the timid good witch Esmeralda, the housekeeper, from 1969 to 1972. And from 1987 to 1993, she played Bernice Clifton on “Designing Women,” a role that earned her an Emmy nomination for supporting actress in a comedy. Among her film credits are “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Graduate,” “Gator” and “Grease.”
Charleston, S.C.
James Rigney, fantasy writer
James Oliver Rigney Jr., a major voice in modern fantasy literature who wrote the best-selling series “The Wheel of Time” using the pen name Robert Jordan, has died. He was 58.
Rigney, who was working on the saga’s final volume, died Sunday at the Medical University of South Carolina of complications from primary amyloidosis with cardiomyopathy. The rare blood disease caused the walls of his heart to thicken.
“Few people have managed to imagine a world the way that Robert Jordan did,” said Wendy Bradley, editor of the science-fiction magazine Farthing. “That was a great strength of his writing. He was trying to tell a story on a heroic scale, and he was good – he had the same grip on storytelling that J.K. Rowling has.”
More than 30 million copies of the books have been sold, and the series has been translated into about two dozen languages, according to Tor, his New York publisher. By the 1990s, Rigney had come to dominate the fantasy genre spawned by J.R.R. Tolkien and “The Lord of the Rings.”