Iris Apfel, a New York society matron and interior designer who invaded the fashion world with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute Couture, died on March 1 at her home in Palm Beach, FL. She was 102. Calling herself a “geriatric starlet,” Ms. Apfel in her 80s and 90s set trends with irreverent ensembles: a boxy, multicolored Bill Blass jacket with tinted Hopi dancing skirt and hairy goatskin boots; a fluffy [...]

Ellen Bernstein, a river guide turned rabbi who blazed a spiritual trail in the environmental movement by connecting nature to the Hebrew Bible, died on Feb. 27 in Philadelphia. She was 70. In 1988, Rabbi Bernstein founded Shomrei Adamah, Keepers of the Earth, which she described as the first national Jewish environmental organization. “The Creation story, Jewish law, the cycle of holidays, prayers, mitzvot, and neighborly relations all reflect a reverence for land and a [...]

Steve Lawrence, the nightclub, television and recording star who, with his wife Eydie Gorme, kept pop standards in vogue on musical walks down memory lane for a half-century, died on March 8 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88. Besides playing concerts and tours with his wife, Mr. Lawrence starred in Broadway musicals, acted on television and in movies, produced TV specials, recorded scores of albums with Ms. Gorme, and more than 60 [...]

Howard H. Hiatt, a physician, scientist and academic who reshaped the field of public health, steering it away from the narrow study of infectious diseases toward big-picture issues of fiscal and societal accountability in medicine, died on March 2 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 98. Harvard Public Health, a magazine published by the Harvard School of Public Health, where Dr. Hiatt was dean for 12 years, wrote in 2013 that Dr. Hiatt [...]

Gerald M. Levin, a media executive who ran the world’s largest media company, Time Warner, and who became an architect of its merger with America online, the world’s largest internet company, then headed by Steve Case, died on March 13. He was 84. The merger was widely considered the worst corporate marriage in American history. AOL’s stock price slid more than 30 percent between the deal’s announcement in January and its approval that December by [...]

Len Sirowitz, an award-winning advertising art director whose creative work in the 1960s included memorable print ads for the Volkswagen Beetle — like one declaring, “Ugly is only skin-deep” — and a campaign for Sara Lee, which introduced “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee,  died on March 4 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91. “It was quite early in my career that I began to realize that my message needed to not only be [...]

Josette Molland, a French Resistance fighter during WWII, eventually captured by the Nazis, who deported her to concentration camps for women, died Feb. 17 at a nursing home in Nice. The horrors she endured took a visual form in the retelling. Many years after her liberation and return to France, she was worried that the story wouldn’t be told. She began to make a series of paintings depicting her life at Ravensbruck and Holleischen. “I [...]

David Seidler, a screenwriter whose Oscar-winning script for “The King’s Speech” — about King George VI conquering a stutter to rally Britain at the outset of WWII — drew on his own painful experience with a childhood stammer, died on March 16 on a fly-fishing trip in New Zealand. He was 86 and lived in Santa Fe, NM. On winning the Academy Award for best original screenplay for “The King’s Speech” (2010), Mr. Seidler said [...]

Ben Stern, a survivor of nine concentration camps, who spearheaded a defiance against a rally organized by a band of Nazis in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, died on Feb. 28, at his home in Berkeley, CA, where he had moved from his residence in Illinois. He was 102.           The threat of Nazis rallying in his midst was intolerable to him, to many of his fellow Skokie residents, and to local government leaders. Efforts to [...]