Spares no one: 20 famous people who died from coronavirus

A Spanish princess and a British marquise, a Czech historian, an Italian movie star, an architect from Boston, a Belgian writer, an Argentine artist, an American actor, and a Parisian psychoanalyst all died from the effects of coronavirus. «Radio Svoboda» tells about twenty victims of the disease, equally merciless to everyone.

Lucia Bose Photo: video frame YouTube / Film & Clips

Lucia Bose (1931 - March 23, 2020), Italian actress

Director Luchino Visconti saw 16-year-old Lucia Bose at the cash register in a popular Milanese pastry shop and immediately guessed the future star in her. In 1947, Lucia won the Miss Italy beauty contest. She became one of the most notable actresses of the era of neorealism, starred with the best directors - in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni “Chronicle of a Love” and “The Lady Without Camellias”, in “Satyricon” by Federico Fellini, in “The Testament of Orpheus” by Jean Cocteau, “Nathalie Grange” Marguerite Duras, "Under the Sign of Scorpio" by the Taviani Brothers. In 1956, she married Spanish matador Luis Miguel Dominguin and settled in Spain.

In 2000, Lucia Bose opened the world's first Museum of Angels in the town of Turegano. In 2019, at the Rome Film Festival, she presented a book of her memoirs.

Maria Theresa of Bourbon-Parma (1933 - March 26, 2020), Spanish Princess

The virus turned out to be merciful to British Prince Charles and Monaco Prince Albert, who suffered a mild illness. But Princess Maria Theresa of Bourbon-Parma, a cousin of the Spanish King Philip VI, became the first victim of COVID-19 among representatives of the royal families of Europe.

Maria Theresa was called the “red princess”: she was a supporter of the Carlist party, but at the same time advocated a socialist monarchy. The princess believed that instead of class struggle, a constant search for agreement was necessary. She received a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the Sorbonne and another PhD in Political Sociology from the University of Madrid. She was a feminist, never married and lived alone. She studied Islam and its relationship to women's rights, among her interlocutors were Yasser Arafat and Hugo Chavez. In 2002, a book about her, “The Red Princess,” was published; in 2014, she herself wrote the story of the Bourbon-Parma family.

Marguerite Derrida (1932 - March 21, 2020), French psychoanalyst, widow of the philosopher Jacques Derrida

Marguerite Okuturie was born in Prague. Her father, a journalist and Slavist Gustave Okuturie (1902–1985), translated into French the books of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Boris Pilnyak and other writers. In 1945-1946, the family lived in Moscow, where Gustave Okouturie worked as a correspondent for the France-Press agency.

Brother Marguerite, historian Michel Aucouturier (1933–2017) was an outstanding researcher of Russian literature of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, translated into French the works of Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, Joseph Brodsky, and was a member of the editorial board of the magazine published in Paris. Continent".

Marguerite Aucouturier translated from Russian and English; in her translations, “The Life of Klim Samgin” by Maxim Gorky, “The Morphology of a Fairy Tale” by Vladimir Propp and the works of the British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein were published in France.

With her future husband, an outstanding philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), she met in 1953. The couple got married in 1957 in the USA. Their son is the writer Pierre Alfieri.

On the subject: They die unexpectedly from coronavirus: doctors are trying to understand why this is happening.

Jan Krzhen (1930 - April 7, 2020), Czech historian

Until 1970, Krzhen headed the Faculty of History at Charles University. He opposed the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops, was expelled from the Communist Party and lost his job, participated in the dissident movement, signed Charter 77, and held underground historical seminars.

Krzen studied the circumstances of the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II. The 1990 work “A Community in Conflict: Czechs and Germans, 1780–1918” caused mixed reactions, in which he tried to destroy many stereotypes in the field of Czech-German relations. In 2002, he received a medal of merit from President Václav Havel. In 2006 he was awarded the Magnesia Litera Prize for the textbook “Two Centuries of Central Europe”. Here you can read Jan Kržen's article "Central Europe in the European Historical and Geographical Context".

Juan Jimenez (1943 - April 2, 2020), Argentine artist

Jiménez, a student of Hugo Pratt, became famous for his work for Métal Hurlant and other European magazines, as well as for science fiction comics, most notably the space saga Metabaron Caste (1992–2003), created with writer and film director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

“When we started working on the complex world of the Metabarons, Jimenez was already the incarnation of the Nameless One, the last immortal Metabaron. In my subconscious, Jimenez cannot die. He will continue to paint like the great warrior he was,” Alejandro Jodorowsky wrote. And this is a Facebook post from his son, actor and musician Brontis Jodorowsky:

Marcel Morot (1933 - April 4, 2020), Belgian writer

Moreau's first novel was published in 1957. He worked in Belgian and French periodicals: in Soir, Parisien and Figaro. Traveled a lot, including throughout the USSR. He was friends with the artists Roland Topor and Jean Dubuffet, corresponded with François Mauriac and Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir spoke highly of his work. Writer Anaïs Nin noted: “There are depths to which most creatures do not venture to look. These are the hellish abysses of our instinctive life, this immersion in our nightmares, so important for our spiritual rebirth. The mythological hero's journey involves a great struggle against demons. Marcel Moreau started this fight."

Trailer for a documentary about the life of Marcel Moreau:

Sergio Rossi (1935 - April 2, 2020), Italian designer

Sergio Rossi learned to sew shoes with his father and in 1968 opened his own workshop. Now it is the largest Italian company for the production of exquisite women's shoes. Rossi’s latest model - Opanca high-heeled sandals with leather on the sides of the foot and laces that hold the foot and extend to the ankle - were so popular that they set a special fashion direction. They tried to reproduce them in shoes, boots and even sneakers.

With the onset of the coronavirus epidemic, Sergio Rossi donated 100 thousand euros to the Sacco Hospital in Milan. His company switched to selling shoes online, announcing that all proceeds will go against COVID-19.

“When the climb gets even harder, you look at what’s ahead and start going down. It is at this moment that it is important to have the strength to find a way to support each other, giving hope and a path to a better tomorrow,” wrote the company’s executive director Riccardo Scutto on this occasion.

Scutto's message about Sergio Rossi's death includes the following words: "He loved women and was able to capture femininity in a unique way by creating shoes that were perfect for a woman's foot."

Helene Aylon (1931 - April 6, 2020), American artist

Ailon took up art at the age of 30 after the death of her husband, the rabbi of one of the New York synagogues. In the 1970s, she met the writer Maya Angelou, one of the comrades of Martin Luther King, and then with other followers of “cultural feminism”, such as Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin. In the 1980s, the main theme of Ailon’s work was anti-militarism, and then Jewishness and the role of women in it. In 1984, before his wedding, his son asked Helen to write a traditional marriage contract, a ketubah, for him. According to the rules, only fathers are mentioned in this document. This hurt Aylon, so she began to ask advice from Orthodox rabbis, and only one of them allowed Helen to write her name on the document - exclusively in the margins or on the back. Ilon did just that, but with a small clarification: wherever the mother’s name might appear in the text, she put an asterisk, and at the bottom in the footnote she added: “To all mothers.” The next text that she annotated was the Torah. For six years, Helen Ailon carefully read the holy book and marked with a horizontal pink line where there was mention of revenge, deceit and hatred of women attributed to God.

Torah marked by Helene Ailon at the Jewish Museum of New York:

Dmitry Smirnov (1948 - April 9, 2020), composer

Dmitry Smirnov was born in Minsk, graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. In 1979, at the VI All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers, in a report by Tikhon Khrennikov, Dmitry Smirnov’s music was severely criticized, and he was included in the so-called “Khrennikov Seven” - a “black list” of seven composers. In 1989, his operas based on William Blake's stories "Tiriel" were staged in Freiburg (Germany) and "Tel" in London. That same year, his First Symphony, The Four Seasons, was performed at the Tanglewood Festival in the USA. Since 1991, Dmitry Smirnov has lived in the UK. He was one of the initiators and organizers of ASM - Association of Contemporary Music. He published several books of poetry under the pseudonym Smirnov-Sadovsky, and translated poetry both from English into Russian (William Blake) and from Russian into English (Mikhail Lermontov). Author of books about music and biography of Blake. He died in Watford hospital.

“I am happy to have been on this earth,” he wrote a few days before his death.

Shimon Okshtein (1951 - April 9, 2020), American artist

Shimon Okshtein was born in Chernivtsi. Since 1979 he lived in the USA. His works are in the collections of the New York Museum of Contemporary American Art, Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum and many private collections.

On the site of Radio Liberty, Shimon Okshtein recalls the writer Alexander Genis:

The main thing in Shimon's painting is the relationship between the animate and the inanimate. We are accustomed to considering the boundary between them unshakable. As stated in Pinocchio, the patient is either alive or dead. The category of animation does not know comparative degree. Grammar does not allow us to add a vague “more or less” to living or nonliving things. But as soon as one breaks away from the conditional grammatical necessity for the sake of honest physiological reality, it becomes clear that a thing is not equal to a thing - one is deader than the other. Inanimateness can serve as a mask covering a life full of passions.

In the paintings of Okshtein things are partially animated, because they are all equipped with sexual characteristics. This is not a still life, but not a portrait. This is a collection of fetishes, mysterious items replacing a woman.

At the same time, the main fetish is the woman herself. There is nothing natural in her, nothing naked, she is covered in all - blush and lipstick, crimson nail polish, delicate lace gloves, black nylon stocking. We do not see a naked body. It is hidden from us, like a gold reserve in a bank safe. Instead, a loose coin of sexual paraphernalia is used. Provocative outfits are charged from the secret that they hide. Their perversity lies in incompleteness. Avoiding nudity, the artist intentionally transfers an erotic charge from nature to culture. It is clothing that makes his beauties obscene.

John Prime (1946 - April 7, 2020), American singer

John Prine's talent was discovered by his colleague, country singer Kris Kristofferson, who heard Prine sing in a Chicago club. His debut album, simply titled John Prine (1971), made him instantly famous. Bob Dylan admired his style of performance, calling it “pure Proustian existentialism.” In recent years, John Prine suffered from cancer and had one of his lungs removed.

Allen Garfield (1939 - April 7, 2020), American actor

Allen Garfield was a journalist, boxer, studied at the famous acting school of Lee Strasberg, played supporting roles in films by Milos Forman, Woody Allen, in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974), Michael Ritchie's The Candidate (1972), and Nashville Robert Altman (1975), Beverly Hills Cop II by Tony Scott (1987). He suffered a stroke while filming The Ninth Gate, and Roman Polanski gave his character partial paralysis. Garfield continued to act in films until 2004, when he suffered a second stroke.​

Michael McKinnell (1935 - March 27, 2020), American architect

McKinnell's style is characterized as a combination of the architecture of memory, a sense of modernity and devotion to modernism. His first significant work was the Boston City Hall - the project he created won the competition when the architect was still a 26-year-old graduate student at Columbia University. He developed it together with the German architect Gerhard Kalmann, and - to the surprise of the authors who had never built anything - their application won the competition, for which another 255 projects were proposed. To many, their plan at that time seemed controversial, but now the city hall has become one of the symbols of Boston.

McKinnell has built many US government and public buildings. He always carried a six-inch ruler in his pocket and explained that the scale of the building should correspond to the size of the human body.

Alexander Tinn George, 7th Marquis Bath (1932 - April 4, 2020), British politician

The owner of a significant fortune (more than 150 million pounds) Alexander George Tin lived in the hippie style, and his name was often found on the pages of the tabloids. He was one of the founders of the dwarf Wessex Regional Party, he sat in the House of Lords of the British Parliament for 7 years, considered himself an artist and founded Longleat Safari Park on the territory of his estate.

On the subject: 'I knew that I was dying': a touching story of a 90-year-old American who defeated coronavirus

Mark Bloom (1950 - March 25, 2020), American actor

In the comedy Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Mark Bloom starred alongside Madonna, Rosanna Arquette, Laurie Metcalf, Aidan Quinn and John Turturro. For young stars, this film was a great start. A year later, Bloom appeared on screen in the comedy Crocodile Dundee. Bloom played many roles in films and television series (The Sopranos, Elementary, Mozart in the Jungle), and worked in the theater, but the authors of his obituaries remember primarily these two comedies of the 1980s.​

Lee Fierro (1929 - April 5, 2020), American actress

Lee Fierro became famous for his role in Steven Spielberg's cult film Jaws. She played Mrs. Kintner, the mother of a boy eaten by a shark. Stupefied with grief, Mrs. Kintner slaps the police chief, who did not close the beach, although he knew about the atrocities of the killer shark.

Adam Schlesinger (1967 - April 1, 2020), American singer

Adam Schlesinger played in the bands Fountains of Wayne, Ivy and Tinted Windows. He was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Grammy for his score for Tom Hanks's That Thing You Do (1996) and three Emmy Awards for television scores. His music for the Broadway production of John Waters' film Cry-Baby enjoyed great success.

Terrence McNelly (1938 - March 24, 2020), American playwright

Terrence McNally has become one of the most famous and prolific playwrights in the United States. He was openly gay and lived in a same-sex marriage for many years with the famous theater producer Tom Kirdahy. In his plays, McNally raised themes of gay life, homophobia, and love in the time of AIDS. “The theater changes the heart, that secret place where we really live,” he said in 2019 when he accepted his fourth Tony Award.​

David Driscell (1931 - April 1, 2020), American art critic

The main topic of David S. Driskell's research was the history of African American art, which many cultural institutions in the United States underestimated, even ignored. His curatorial credits include the exhibition Two Centuries of African American Art: 1750–1955, held in Los Angeles in 1976. With more than 200 paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Driskell demonstrated just how significant the contributions of black artists have been to the history of American art. Driskell wanted to show the white cultural establishment that African American art was false and unfairly marginalized, and he achieved his goal. This exhibition, ArtNews admits, “changed the history of art forever.”​

Jean-Laurent Caucher (1935 - April 7, 2020), French director and actor

Jean-Laurent Cochet became an actor at the Comédie Française, France's oldest theater company, when he was 24. In the 1960s, he founded his own drama school and gradually became France's most renowned acting teacher. Among his students were Gerard Depardieu, Isabelle Huppert and many television, film and pop stars. Huppert says she was fascinated by Cochet's teaching skills. “In his class, I was more of a spectator than an actress.”

Kochet was famous for his rigor - he did not let late come to classes and could not stand it when one of the students coughed during classes. He idolized the theater and believed that the performance should be similar to a religious ceremony.

Among the victims of the coronavirus are Belarusian actor Viktor Dashkevich, Japanese comedian Ken Shimura, former Libyan Prime Minister Mahmoud Djibril and many other people whose names are known to millions. And this kind of martyrology is replenished every day.

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