James Van Der Beek, 48, the golden-haired actor who starred as a coastal-town teenager facing the onslaught of first love and first sex in “Dawson’s Creek,” a popular turn-of-the-millennium TV drama series, died Wednesday. His death was announced in an Instagram post from his official account, which did not say where he died. Van Der Beek revealed in November 2024 that he had colorectal cancer, which develops in the tissue of the colon or rectum.
The show that catapulted him to wide recognition, “Dawson’s Creek,” followed the lives of four teenagers in the fictional New England town of Capeside. Van Der Beek played the titular Dawson Leery, a sensitive, romantic 15-year-old with dreams of becoming a filmmaker. The show ran for six seasons and made an instant star of the show’s leads, including Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams. Van Der Beek capitalized on his success to start a film career with a starring role in the coming-of-age movie “Varsity Blues” (1999), about a Texas high school football team.
Bud Cort, 77, a veteran stage and screen actor whose best-known role was one of his first, playing a death-obsessed, 19-year-old recluse named Harold opposite Ruth Gordon’s 79-year-old, happy-go-lucky Holocaust survivor named Maude in the 1971 off-kilter romantic comedy “Harold and Maude,” died Wednesday in Norwalk, Conn.
Cort appeared in more than 40 movies, dozens of TV shows and countless theater productions, but even late in life he was often recognized on the street for a single role: that of Harold Chasen, a precocious, morose rich teenager who falls into friendship, and then love, with Maude Chardin, who lives in an abandoned railroad car and is old enough to be his grandmother.
Andrew Ranken, 72, drummer and a founding member of London-based Celtic punk band the Pogues, died Tuesday, his longtime bandmates announced in a statement posted Wednesday on Instagram.
Nicknamed the Clobberer, Ranken began playing drums at 14 and joined the Pogues in 1983 after being approached by the band’s late frontman Shane MacGowan, according to the Irish Times. He also performed with bands such as Lola Cobra, the Stickers and the Operation. Known for songs such as “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and “Streams of Whiskey,” the Pogues fused traditional Irish music with punk attitude and energy for their unique, folk-blended sound.
Philippe Gaulier, 82, a French clown who was known as one of comedy’s greatest teachers, with students including Sacha Baron Cohen and Emma Thompson, died Monday. Michiko Gaulier, his wife, said in a statement that the cause was complications of a lung infection, adding that he had been ill since having a stroke in 2023.
In recent decades, Gaulier had gained wide respect in the comedy world thanks to his school, École Philippe Gaulier, which he founded in Paris in 1980 and ran from London during the 1990s, before returning to France in 2002. But his pugnacious style — in which he would insult and mock his pupils — made him a divisive figure.
Gaulier outlined his methods in a book “The Tormentor: My Thoughts on Theater.” He told The New York Times in 2022 that the secret to great clowning was finding “your idiot.” It was almost like a return to childhood, he said: “A clown is a special kind of idiot, absolutely different and innocent.”
Sonny Jurgensen, 91, the Hall of Fame quarterback whose strong arm, keen wit and affable personality made him one of the most beloved figures in Washington football history, died Feb. 6 of natural causes in Naples, Fla., after a brief stay in hospice care.
Jurgensen arrived in Washington in 1964 in a surprise quarterback swap that sent Norm Snead to the Philadelphia Eagles. Over the next 11 seasons, Jurgensen rewrote the team’s record books. He topped 3,000 yards in a season five times, including twice with Philadelphia, in an era before rules changes opened up NFL offenses. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983 and remains the only Washington player to wear the No. 9 jersey in a game.
Greg Brown, 56, whose grungy guitar licks helped propel the band Cake, which he helped found, to the top of the alternative rock charts in the mid-1990s, and whose irony-laced lyrics for their hit song “The Distance” made it a mix tape must-have for a disaffected generation, died on Feb. 5. A statement by Cake on social media cited a “short illness.” Brown had been living in Sacramento, Calif., where he was born and where he and his bandmates formed Cake in 1991.
The five-man band was built around Brown’s love for an eclectic mix of genres, including soul, big-band jazz and old-school country, passions he shared with Cake’s co-founder and lead singer John McCrea. “It’s hard-edged, easy-listening music that’s fairly low volume but not folksy, economical in its arrangement but not boring, and really exciting and dynamic with good songwriting,” Brown told the Los Angeles Times in 1995.
Daniel Cathiard, 81, who with his wife transformed a faltering, centuries-old Bordeaux property into one of the region’s top-rated wine producers, died Jan. 28 at his home in Martillac, France. His death, from a pulmonary embolism, was announced by Chateau Smith Haut Lafitte, his estate in Pessac-Léognan, southwest of Bordeaux.
When Cathiard and his wife, Florence Cathiard, bought Chateau Smith Haut Lafitte in 1990, wine critics thought its best days were long behind it, although the estate was still classified as a Grand Cru Classé, France’s most prestigious rating for a vineyard. But by 2011, the efforts that the couple had invested in it — including attention to the soil, production methods and grape quality — paid off in one of the most sought-after laurels in Bordeaux: a top score from influential American wine critic Robert Parker. “By the mid-2000s, Smith-Haut-Lafitte was competing with the best of Bordeaux in both red and dry whites,” James Suckling, a former editor at Wine Spectator, wrote.
Suzannah Lessard, 81, an author and writer for The New Yorker who examined the ways in which people are marked by place — and the ways in which they, in turn, mark the landscape — and whose bestselling memoir, “The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family,” explored the dark history of Stanford White, the Gilded Age architect who was her great-grandfather, died Jan. 29 in New York City. Her death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of endometrial cancer, said Noel Brennan, her wife.
Saalumarada Thimmakka, 113, an Indian farm laborer who transformed her grief over being unable to conceive children into one of her country’s most enduring environmental legacies, planting and tending thousands of trees, died Nov. 14 in Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore, the capital of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Umesh B.N., the son she legally adopted when she was 100 and he was 27, confirmed her death.
Thimmakka became known as Saalumarada, meaning “row of trees,” a title that reflected her seven-decade planting endeavor and the moral authority she came to hold in a nation grappling with rapid development and environmental loss. After having spent much of her life in obscurity, she began receiving a torrent of honors and accolades in her 80s.