WORLD: The Team We Lost This Year

PHIL DAVISON of The Scotsman, Edinburgh looks back at the lives of some of those we lost in 2007. AT THE end of the year, we look forward to the new one with hope for good health. But not before we bid farewell to the old one, recalling those who shuffled off this mortal coil during the past 12 months. As it turned out, this year started and drew to a close with the deaths, both in Edinburgh, of two great Scots. On 2 January, we lost Professor John Boag, the Elgin-born research scientist, a lifelong pacifist and former head of the Institute of Cancer Research, who spent most of his life campaigning for the peaceful uses of scientific research. On 2 December, Professor Thomas Torrance, one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century and a former Moderator of the Church of Scotland's General Assembly, drew his last breath. In between, the world bade goodbye to many famous names. ____________________________________________________________ On 7 January, it was the turn of Magnus Magnusson, who, although he was born in Iceland, was a true son of Scotland all his life and became a legend throughout the British Isles as the host of television's Mastermind. On 17 January, Art Buchwald, the United States columnist known to most Europeans via the International Herald Tribune, passed on at the age of 81. February was to deprive us of two Americans who were at least a couple of generations apart – first, on 6 February, the balladeer Frankie Laine, 93, followed by Anna Nicole Smith, the flamboyant, voluptuous blonde model, actress and former Playboy centrefold who was found dead in a hotel room on 8 February, aged only 39. On 24 April, even Scots were saddened to learn of the death of Alan Ball, the youngest member of England's 1966 World Cup winning side, after a heart attack at the age of 61. On 30 November, Evel Knievel, the world's most famous stuntman, made his final leap. Of those who passed away this year, we look atthe ten who were the best-known worldwide and Bob Taylor, the one Scot who is best known for his out -of-this-world experiences. COLIN MCRAE (15 September) FOR those Scots' motorsport fans old enough, hearing the news of Colin McRae's death was akin to learning that Jimmy Clark, our national Formula One idol, had been killed in 1968. The air was thumped out of our lungs. McRae's death was perhaps even harder to take as he had not died in action, at the wheel, but at the controls of a helicopter close to his own home, and that his son Johnny, five, and two family friends had perished with him. McRae had crashed many times in cars but had always walked away – broken bones notwithstanding. This was the very last way the former world rally champion would have wanted to go. McRae grabbed the imagination of this nation, of the UK and of the motorsports' world in general when he became the first Briton to win the World Rally Championship in 1995, in a Subaru. His win vastly increased the sport's popularity, and its TV coverage, in the British Isles, not to mention selling a lot of Subarus to would-be boy racers. He wasn't the tidiest, usually he was the slidiest, but his win-or-bust attitude and boyish good-looks made him a superstar in the world of motorsports. His move to Ford in 1999, for an estimated salary of £3 million a year, made him by far the highest-paid rally driver in history, up there with the more-celebrated F1 boys. The money bought dream homes in Monaco, Switzerland and Majorca, but he was happiest with his family on the Jerviswood estate near his birthplace of Lanark, where he died. Ironically, he may be remembered by coming generations more for a computer video game, PlayStation's hot-selling Colin McRae's Rally than for his driving on, often above and sometimes off, real roads. KURT VONNEGUT ( 11 April) WITH the black, moral humour of such classic novels as Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut both reflected and influenced the mood of Americans, Europeans and others during after the Second World War, in which he served. He was in many ways a Mark Twain, a century on. Particularly during the Vietnam war, which inspired him to attack what he considered its absurdity. Beer-stained, beaten-up copies of his paperbacks were as common on university campuses in the English-speaking world as posters of Ché Guevara. Most popular was Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which he based on his experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Nazis in Dresden. He survived the all-out allied fire bombing of the city in February 1945 because he was in the slaughterhouse deep underground, after which he named the book. Vonnegut's novels consistently posed the basic questions as to who we are, why we are here, is there a point to it all and, if so, why is so there much disaster and suffering in the world? On the day he died, after a fall at home aged 84, his official website homepage carried no tributes, just a drawing of an empty birdcage with its door wide open. It still does. BORIS YELTSIN (23 April) HE WAS erratic and allegedly sometimes tiddly on vodka, but Boris Yeltsin was a key figure in breaking the stranglehold of communism and bringing democracy to Russia and largely to its former Soviet satellite states. For almost a decade after he became the first freely-elected president of the Russian Federation in 1991, he helped to open up his suppressed and depressed nation to the world before handing the reins to Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, in 1999. While Mikhail Gorbachev received worldwide credit for Soviet glasnost (opening up) and perestroika (economic restructuring), it was the burly, ruddy-faced Yeltsin, famously riding a tank outside the Moscow parliament building to fight a coup attempt, who galvanised Russians into ousting communist hardliners and crushing the party he had served most of his life. Although he cultivated the image of the peasant and working man's politician, and eliminated censorship and allowed a free market economy, his legacy is seen as flawed. He had a tendency to see himself more as czar than president, as demonstrated by his bloody campaign to silence Chechen separatists. MSTISLAV ROSTOPOVICH (27 April) AS A CELLIST, "Slava" Rostropovich, as he was widely known in the classical music world, also became one of the world's most sought-after conductors. However, he won as much fame and praise outside the music world for his stand against Soviet communist authoritarianism. From 1977-94, he was the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC and he was a regular guest conductor with the London Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras. While his mastery of the cello was unquestionable, however, his work with the baton was often criticised. Rostropovich was gaining international fame when he and his wife, the acclaimed soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, were forced into exile in 1974 for supporting Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the dissident Soviet writer. Rostropovich received an honorary knighthood in 1987 for his services to British music. INGMAR BERGMAN (30 July) INGMAR Bergman was considered one of the greatest directors in the history of motion pictures, bringing a new gravity as well as existentialism to film in the 1950s. He died on the small island of Faro, in his native Sweden, aged 89, leaving behind three Oscars for best foreign film and countless other awards. Often locked up in an unlit cupboard as a child, that darkness permeated most of the 40-plus films Bergman made, but was often balanced by humour or hope as his lens became a window into the human condition. For many of his disciples, including Woody Allen, "he was probably the greatest film artist since the invention of the motion picture camera". Most of Bergman's work explored the relationship between man and woman, or between mankind and God. Perhaps his most famous was Seventh Seal (1957), in which a knight, memorably played by Max von Sydow, plays chess with Death against a terrifying backdrop of plague. His 1975 take on Mozart's The Magic Flute is considered by many critics to be the best film version of an opera ever made. Another great director, the Italian Michelangelo Antonioni died within hours of Bergman, aged 94. The leading Italian producer Carlo Ponti, husband of Sophia Loren, had died on 10 January, also at 94. LUCIANO PAVAROTTI (6 September) LUCIANO Pavarotti may not have been the best operatic tenor ever – Caruso would be most critics' choice – but he was certainly the best-known, the highest-paid and probably the best-loved despite his odd tantrum. When he died of pancreatic cancer in his Italian hometown of Modena, aged 71, a collective sigh of sadness was almost audible around the world. The larger-than-life singer, with his white handkerchief as prop and, in later years, his hair and beard dyed impossibly black, could claim to be the first to take opera where it had never gone before: to the masses. Although he had been stunning opera goers for nearly 30 years beforehand, gaining the nickname "King of the High Cs", it was his appearance as one of "The Three Tenors" at the 1990 World Cup in Italy that made him a household name and eventually a world superstar. Football fans and others around the world began singing Nessun Dorma, seeking out his concerts, buying his albums and following with curiosity tabloid reports about his love life and his battle with his famous pasta-padded bulge. DAME ANITA RODDICK (10 September) ANITA Roddick, a human dynamo who changed the face of business in the UK and, eventually, around much of the world. Starting with her first Body Shop in 1976, she ushered in a "New Age" of business practice, organic and ethical, balancing human rights against profits, which forced others, even the massive multinational oil companies to "think green", or at least talk it. Her initial idea, of selling naturally-produced cosmetic, toilet or hair-care items such as fruit-based bath oils and Brazil nut conditioner, spurning anything that involved animal experiments, was tailor-made for the incoming times. When she died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage aged 64, she had sold Body Shop – at its peak with more than 2,100 branches in 55 countries – to L'Oréal for no less than £625 million. Her stated ambition was to give everything she had to worthwhile causes. After the sale of her empire, she dedicated herself even further to a myriad of causes, actively and financially supporting Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Shelter, the CND and Friends of the Earth. She was the driving force behind the launch of the Big Issue magazine to help the homeless. After her death, her husband, Gordon, said: "She left us far too soon. We can all imagine her aged 94 marching to 10 Downing Street to demand the decommissioning of Trident." MARCEL MARCEAU (22 September) MARCEL Marceau was a man of few words. None in fact. With his white face, white gloves and battered hat with a red rose, he became what he himself called "the Picasso of mime". His aim was to "make people laugh through their tears" and, thanks to his films, he will undoubtedly do that for generations to come. Harlequins and pierrots had popularised mime in the 19th century, but it was Marceau who breathed new life into the genre during the second half of the 20th century. Most famous for his stage and film character Bip, he often compared himself to a ballet dancer, whose body movement was his art. Himself inspired by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Marceau in turn had a huge influence. Michael Jackson acknowledged that he'd borrowed his famous "moon walk" from a Marceau sketch, "walking against the wind". Born Marcel Mangel to a Jewish family, Marceau had been lucky to avoid the Holocaust, during which his father died in Auschwitz. Offstage or off-camera, he was far from silent. "Never get a mime talking," he once said. "He won't stop." DEBORAH KERR (16 October) ALTHOUGH the actress Deborah Kerr was considered by Hollywood the epitome of the "English rose", she was born in Helensburgh, Scotland. After retiring in the mid-1980s, she lived in Klosters, Switzerland, but returned in recent years to England after suffering from Parkinson's disease and died at her Suffolk home aged 86. Kerr (who insisted it be pronounced Karr) was nominated, unsuccessfully, six times for an Oscar, notably for her steamy, romp-in-the-surf role opposite Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity (1953) and as governess to the King of Siam's (Yul Brynner) children in The King and I (1956). She finally got her Oscar, an honorary one in 1994. Educated in Bristol, she had a successful career as an actress in Britain before seeking to launch a career in Hollywood in 1946. Kerr's husband of 47 years, the screenwriter Peter Viertel, died less than three weeks after she did. NORMAN MAILER (10 November) NORMAN Mailer, and his ego, towered over American literature during the latter half of the 20th century. He was its bad boy and published more than 30 books and countless articles, winning two Pulitzer prizes – for The Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song (1979) – but became equally known as a brash celebrity on American talk shows. Mailer had an opinion on everything. He liked to see himself as a street fighter at heart – he once head-butted fellow writer Gore Vidal, bit off part of the ear of the aptly-named actor Rip Torn, and famously got arrested for stabbing his wife. But still he kept writing, up to his death of acute renal failure in a Manhattan hospital at the age of 84. His first best-seller was The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, a novel based on his experiences as a soldier during the Second World War. His last work, published this year, was The Castle in the Forest, a novel about Adolf Hitler. He found the time to marry six times. BOB TAYLOR (14 March) SCOT Bob Taylor, who died on 14 March, was also world-famous – but only to Ufologists, the folks who watch out for unidentified flying objects. Bob was the man who was "beaten up" by aliens after he stumbled upon their spacecraft on a hill in Livingston in 1979. Bob was a 61-year-old forestry worker, a Second World War veteran, a Dunkirk evacuee, a stable family man who had never made anything up in his life. He had the bruises and police found weird tracks from some kind of vehicle that could only have come from the sky. They launched the only criminal inquiry in the world into an alleged assault by aliens. It remains unsolved. Source: The Scotsman © 2007 Johnston Press Digital Publishing