Deaths in 2025: A yearlong procession of giants
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
By WILLIAM McDONALD
One after another they fell, towering names that needed no introduction. Pope Francis. Robert Redford. Diane Keaton. Dick Cheney. Brian Wilson. Gene Hackman. Ozzy Osbourne. Jane Goodall. Roberta Flack. George Foreman. Tom Stoppard. Frank Gehry. Rob Reiner.
The obituary pages track the deaths of the famous and the mighty in any given year, of course, but in 2025 we witnessed a seemingly unending procession of them, many from the worlds of music, movies and television. Marquee names, all.
The deaths of screen idols summoned shared memories of unforgettable performances. We recalled Redford, a serious-minded matinee idol, embracing Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were” or leaping off a riverside cliff with Paul Newman in the irreverent western buddy movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” We recalled Keaton, wise, witty and fashion-forward in her idiosyncratic way, bantering with Woody Allen in “Annie Hall” or with Jack Nicholson in “Something’s Gotta Give.”
The circumstances of Hackman’s death were grim. At 95, afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease, he collapsed from a heart malady in his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in February, most likely a week after his wife, classical musician Betsy Arakawa, died there as well, from a rare virus. Another week would pass before their bodies were discovered.
But those tragic details could not tarnish Hackman’s film legacy: two Oscar statuettes among five nominations for intense, unglamorous performances in now-classic films like “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The French Connection” and “Unforgiven.”
If the deaths at the Hackman home were unsettling, those at the Reiner residence in Los Angeles were shocking. On a Sunday in December came the news that actor-director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Reiner, had been the victims of a double homicide. (Their troubled son Nick was later charged with the murders.) Reiner’s crowd-pleasing movies from the 1980s and ’90s will continue to be watched, but now with a mournful eye.
Director David Lynch, too, was associated with era-defining films, though of a more visionary sort — off-kilter classics like the surrealist horror flick “Eraserhead,” the haunting historical portrait “The Elephant Man,” the neo-noir mystery “Mulholland Drive” and the creepy psychological thriller “Blue Velvet,” whose offspring, the TV series “Twin Peaks,” was just as strange.
Val Kilmer, who died at age 65, was remembered for, among other juicy roles, his uncanny impersonation of Jim Morrison of the Doors and his brooding reinterpretation of Batman as a conflicted middle-aged guy.
The movie world lost a firmament of other stars, including two femme fatales of the 1960s: Brigitte Bardot, who redefined sex symbolism in France, and her more down-to-earth counterpart in Italy, Claudia Cardinale. Tony Roberts, Woody Allen’s perennial onscreen pal and sounding board, was gone, and so was Terence Stamp, the chameleonic British award-winner who was as comfortable in the sensitive role of a naive but doomed seaman in “Billy Budd” as he was, decades later, as a sinister alien in two “Superman” movies.
The television landscape was stripped of a host of familiar faces, actors who were practically defined by their characters in popular shows: Richard Chamberlain, the steady hospital surgeon in “Dr. Kildare” and the lovelorn priest in the miniseries “The Thorn Birds”; Loretta Swit, the temperamental Army major in “M*A*S*H”; Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the Huxtables’ teenage son with growing pains on “The Cosby Show”; George Wendt, a barfly on “Cheers”; and Loni Anderson, the platinum-blond receptionist on “WKRP in Cincinnati.”
In another precinct of the performing arts, one of the greatest playwrights of our time, Stoppard, ended his long run at 88.
Pop music was bereft with the loss of Brian Wilson, the emotionally troubled genius who founded the Beach Boys. Wilson died at 82 in June.
Osbourne gained renown as a heavy-metal pioneer and sometime stomach-turner (oh, that poor decapitated bat) with his group Black Sabbath, only to become an unlikely genial family man in a hit reality TV show.
Folk music had no more recognizable voice than that of Peter Yarrow, singing in sweet three-part harmony with Paul and Mary through the 1960s. It was a decade that began with balladeer Connie Francis ruling the charts with heartfelt tunes like “Who’s Sorry Now” and “Where the Boys Are.” Yarrow was 86; Francis, 87.
Giants of other genres died as well. Pianist, composer and bandleader Eddie Palmieri was not only a father of salsa in the United States but also one of the most creative musical synthesizers of the last half of the 20th century, blending Latin sounds with other strands of popular music and even modern classical styles.
Jazz lost Chuck Mangione, who found a place for the mellow fluegelhorn amid the usual brass; Roy Ayers, who became one of the most sampled jazz vibraphonists in hip-hop; and Jack DeJohnette, a peerless drummer who kept the beat behind Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett.
The classical scene was emptier with the deaths of Alfred Brendel, a largely self-taught pianist who breathed new life into old concert standbys; Christoph von Dohnanyi, a conductor whose baton had international reach; and Sofia Gubaidulina, a composer who defied Soviet censors while presenting her fervent, spiritual music as an antidote to what she called the “staccato of life.”
Hers was an ambition that Pope Francis, perhaps the world’s most prominent spiritual leader, would no doubt have understood. But this Argentine-born prelate, the first Latin American pontiff, focused as much on worldly matters, championing the humanity of migrants and the marginalized, and reminding us of the fragility of the planet’s health.
In Washington, Dick Cheney drew a funeral crowd that no one might have expected during his political heyday, when he served President George W. Bush as possibly the most powerful vice president in American history and, in Bush’s words, “the Darth Vader” of their administration. A remarkably bipartisan assemblage filled the pews, many finding common ground with one another — and with Cheney himself, an otherwise rock-ribbed Republican — in their antipathy toward President Donald Trump.
David Souter’s remains, by contrast, remained far from the capital, as he had wished. For 19 years he sat on the Supreme Court, arriving as a conservative — or so the right wing thought — only to ally himself frequently with its liberal justices. When his tenure was done, he was done with Washington, retreating to the solitude of his beloved New Hampshire.
Athletes are eager for the spotlight, of course, and none basked in it more than George Foreman, a bruising and durable heavyweight champion who competed from the 1960s into the ’90s, battling Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali along the way, and then returned to the ring after a 10-year absence to recapture the crown at age 45.
Another ring — this one for professional wrestling — lost one of its most charismatic stars, the shirt-ripping Hulk Hogan. More than any other member of that sport’s musclebound cast, he transformed a once-low-budget attraction into a multibillion-dollar entertainment juggernaut.
Others figures loomed so large that they will assuredly be enshrined in the pantheons of their various fields.
Architect Frank Gehry enriched the world with stunningly original buildings, many resembling abstract sculpture on a monumental scale.
Giorgio Armani reinvented the men’s (and later women’s) power suit, turning his label into a synonym for sophisticated elegance.
Bill Moyers left Lyndon Johnson’s White House to become one of the most thoughtful interlocutors in public television history.
The fire-and-brimstone televangelist Jimmy Swaggart built an audience of millions before being undone by a sex scandal, acknowledged in a shower of tears.
Jane Goodall gained worldwide celebrity as well, by revealing the astonishingly advanced social lives of chimpanzees in East Africa.
Two abrupt and wrenching deaths spoke pointedly to the present moment in American life.
In April came the death of Virginia Giuffre, the most prominent victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring. Giuffre, suffering from renal failure after a terrible car crash, died by suicide.
Months later, Charlie Kirk, the young, charismatic, hardcore conservative activist at the head of a growing youth movement, was assassinated while speaking to an outdoor campus crowd in Utah. Shock on both sides of the political divide was followed by finger-pointing grief on the right, hastily placing the killing at the feet of the left and leaving an already polarized nation even more so.