newsmakers

newsmakers

Oscar-winning cameraman dies at 93

LOS ANGELES

Haskell Wexler, the two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer and prominent social activist, has died at age 93.

Wexler’s son, Oscar-nominated sound director Jeff Wexler, told The Associated Press his father died Sunday.

Wexler’s innovative approach to film helped him win Academy Awards for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and the Woody Guthrie biopic “Bound for Glory.”

Wexler also photographed some of the most politicized and influential films of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Jane Fonda-Jon Voight anti-war classic “Coming Home,” and the racial drama “In the Heat of the Night,” as well as the Oscar-winning adaptation of Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

He was the rare cinematographer known enough to the general public to receive a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

Knight reacts to death of Pips member

LOS ANGELES

Gladys Knight is asking God to look after one of her beloved band members who has died.

Knight and her brother, Merald “Bubba” Knight, released a statement Sunday about Pips member William Guest, who died last week at 74 of congestive heart failure.

“We have lost many along the way; Edward Patten, Eleanor Guest, and now William Guest,” Gladys Knight said. “We tried using our gifts of music in a way that would be pleasing to God. Please, take care of their journeys home and I say thank you Lord for a long and wonderful ride.”

Merald Knight said Guest was “more like a ‘big’ brother to me than a distant cousin.”

“From day one, when the Pips were formed, we were two Road Warriors, succeeding against the odds of the show business,” Knight said.

Associated Press