Richard Simmons, the eccentric fitness guru known for his sunny demeanor and positive attitude, died on July 13 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76. His concept of fitness exploded in popularity in the 1980s, along with a nationwide fitness craze that included aerobics and Jazzercise. His videos became some of the most popular videos of the era. He also made regular TV appearances on talk shows. He also hosted his own talk [...]

Audrey Flack, a pioneer of photorealism who became known for oversize still lifes crowded with color and detail, died on June 28 in Southampton, NY. She was 93. In the early 1960s, Ms. Flack began painting from photographs. She went on paint directly over projections. She also bought a square-format Hasselblad camera, turned her bathroom into a darkroom, and learned to paint with an airbrush. In the early 1980s, she switched to sculpture. Her “Leonardo’s [...]

Kinky Friedman, a singer, songwriter, humorist and sometime politician who with his band, the Texas Jewboys, developed an ardent following among alt-country music fans with songs like “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” and whose biting cultural commentary earned him comparisons with Will Rogers and Mark Twain, died on July 27 at his ranch near Austin, Texas. He was 79. He toured widely in the 1970s with his band and solo. When the band [...]

Elaine Schwartz, who in 1982 was a founder of the Center School, a public middle school in Manhattan, as a way to introduce bold classroom innovations, then remained its principal for four decades — long enough to see many of those innovations become common practice in schools nationwide — died on June 24 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 92. Many of her once-radical ideas are today the norm [...]

Soma Golden Behr, a longtime senior editor at The New York Times, died on June 30 in Manhattan. She was 84. In her work, she expressed a lifetime interest in issues involving inequality, poverty, race and class, which resulted in a number of series for the newspaper, each enlisting squads of reporters, photographers and editors for intensive, sometimes yearlong assignments, several earning Pulitzer Prizes for reporting. She was the first woman to lead the newspaper’s [...]

Jon Landau, an Oscar-winning producer who collaborated with the director James Cameron in making three of the highest-grossing films of all time, “Titanic” and the two “Avatar” movies, died on July 5 in Los Angeles. He was 63. Mr. Landau and Mr. Cameron’s decades-long collaboration made box office history. The first film they made together, “Titanic,” became the first movie to gross more than $1 billion globally after its 1997 release. Its record for total [...]

Richard M. Goldstein, a trailblazer in planetary exploration who used ground-based radars to map planets with techniques that scientists now use to measure geographical changes on Earth, including melting glaciers, died on June 22 at his home in La Canada Flintridge, CA. He was 97. In the early 1960s, while a graduate student in electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, he proposed as his thesis project to try to detect echoes from Venus, [...]