Arts & Entertainment
Remembering 2001: Hollywood Reporter's gay and gay-friendly obits
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Remembering 2001: Hollywood Reporter's gay and gay-friendly obits
Remembering 2001: Hollywood Reporter's gay and gay-friendly obits
In a year marked by incalculable loss, The Hollywood Reporter on Friday noted the deaths of a long list of gay and gay-friendly celebrities. Among them was one of Hollywood's most accomplished behind-the-scenes talents, Ralph Burns, 79, a jazz pianist who scored many of Broadway's and Hollywood's top musicals. Burns, who was openly gay, won Oscars for scoring Cabaret and All That Jazz and a Tony award for Fosse. He also created the arrangements for Ray Charles's recordings of "Georgia" and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Other notables on the obit list: Rosemary DeCamp, character actress whose name became campy dialogue in The Boys in the Band; Jack Haley Jr., married to Liza Minnelli from 1975 to 1979; Kim Stanley, who won an Emmy in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Christopher Hewett, who originated the wildly fey character of Roger DeBris in the film The Producers; former teen heartthrob Troy Donahue; Dagmar, a '50s TV personality whose name belied her roots in West Virginia; Herbert Ross, director-choreographer behind such gay film staples as The Turning Point and Soapdish; and Dick Schaap, a sports columnist and reporter whose gay-friendly views were ahead of his time.