TIME Magazine TIME People We Lost 2024

B. 1923 Glynis Johns, the veteran British actor with a famously tremulous voice, died January 4 at age 100. She was known as the suffragist Mrs. Banks in Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964), yet her best role was her Tony-winning turn as fading starlet Desiree Armfeldt in Stephen Sondheim’s 1973 Broadway hit A Little Night Music. Johns stunned audiences with her moving rendition of the now-iconic ballad “Send in the Clowns.” Born in South Africa where her parents, both artists, were on tour, Johns worked steadily on stage and screen from a young age. But she regarded “Clowns,” which Sondheim wrote for her at the last minute, during the show’s rehearsals, as “the greatest gift I’ve ever been given in the theater.”…

B. 1943 David Soul shot to fame as cool-headed Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson to Paul Michael Glaser’s fast-talking David Starsky in the ABC cop show Starsky & Hutch (1975-79). His wide-ranging career saw him working as an actor, singer, and director in the U.S. and the U.K., where he moved in 1995. He became a U.K. citizen in 2004. Music was his first love; he had a No.1 hit in 1976 with “Don’t Give Up on Us,” at the height of his Hutch popularity—he even sang it in one episode. Soul struggled with, and eventually overcame, alcoholism and he married five times, but his last marriage to Helen Snell, whom he called his “soulmate,” lasted 14 years until his death January 4 at age 80.…

B. 1937 As executive editor of The New York Times from 1994 to 2001, Joseph Lelyveld shepherded the Gray Lady through journalism’s seismic shift from daily print to 24-hour digital news. He was a steady hand as the paper covered a series of unforgettable events, including the Oklahoma City bombing, O.J. Simpson trial, Unabomber case, and too-close-to-call George W. Bush-Al Gore presidential race. He oversaw an era of uncommon excellence at the paper, with his staff garnering numerous Pulitzer Prizes, while it earned record profits. A gifted writer himself, Lelyveld won a Pulitzer for his 1985 book Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, drawn from his years as a Times correspondent in Johannesburg. He died January 5 at 86.…

B. 1947 Reggie Wells once called himself “a shrink with a makeup case.” Many of the famous women who worked with him, including Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce, Michelle Obama, and Natalie Cole, praised his social skills as much as his transformative talent with a makeup brush. A graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, Wells worked at New York department store makeup counters in the late ’70s before moving to fashion magazines. Because the beauty industry at the time made no products for Black skin tones, Wells remixed and reformulated cosmetics to create glamorous looks for women of color. He met Winfrey during a cover shoot for Essence magazine and became her full-time makeup artist in 1990. He died at 76 on January 8.…

B. 1962 James Kottak, longtime drummer for the German hard rock band Scorpions died January 9 at age 61. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Kottak showed an early aptitude for music and was playing drums professionally at age 14. He later attended the University of Louisville on a music scholarship. He moved to Los Angeles in his mid-20s, where he eventually joined Kingdom Come, another influential German band. He joined Scorpions in 1996 and was their drummer for 20 years before he was forced out because of his continuing struggles with alcoholism. Kottak was married to fellow drummer Athena Lee, sister of Tommy of Motley Crue fame, for 14 years until 2010.…

B. 1922 The only woman on Edward R. Murrow’s CBS documentary team in the late 1940s, Ruth Ashton Taylor was a broadcast pioneer and the first woman to anchor a TV news program in Los Angeles in the 1960s. She died January 11 at 101. Born in Long Beach, California, Taylor got her master’s in journalism at Columbia University in 1944 and started at CBS shortly after graduating. While researching a documentary on atomic science, she appealed repeatedly to Albert Einstein for an interview, but only succeeded when she stopped him on the street outside his house in Princeton, New Jersey. Throughout her career, Taylor resisted calls to cover soft items like department-store openings and instead chased hard news like fires, politics, and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination.…