Jacob Rothschild, a wealthy financier, patron of the arts, philanthropist with close ties to Israel and, who broke with his family’s fabled banking dynasty at a time of change in the world of high finance, has died. He was 87. At the time of his death, he was chairman of the Rothschild Foundation, a British charity. In addition to his career as a high-powered financier, Mr. Rothschild played a role in Israel. He oversaw his [...]

Richard Lewis, the stand-up comedian who parlayed a dark sense of humor into an acting career that included movies and TV, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76. Neurotic and self-deprecating, typically dressed all in black, Mr. Lewis paced the stages of comedy clubs, hanging his head, pulling at his shock of black hair, riffing on his struggles in life and love. He called himself “The Prince of Pain.” [...]

Bruce Newman, a New York antiques dealer and proprietor of his family’s business, Newel Galleries, originally founded as a prop house for theater and film productions, died on Feb. 9 at his home in Beverly Hills, CA. He was 94. During his reign over the business, the building teemed with two centuries’ worth of treasures, most costing upward of five figures — carousel horses, Ruhlmann desks; benches from the Paris Metro; French Victorian dining chairs [...]

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 [...]