Stanley Fischer, an economist and central banker whose expertise helped guide global economic policies and defuse financial crises for decades, died on April 30 at his home in Lexington, MA. He was 81.

Mr. Fischer served as head of Israel’s central bank from 2005 to 2013, as vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board from 2014 to 2017, and as the No. 2 officer at the International Monetary Fund from 1994 to 2001, when that agency was struggling to contain financial panics in Mexico, Russia, Asia and Latin America, The New York Times said.

As a professor at M.I.T., he was a thesis adviser to an extraordinary range of future leaders, including Ben S. Bernanke, later chairman of the Fed; Mario Draghi, president of the European central bank; and Kazuo Ueda, governor of the Bank of Japan. His former students also included Christina D. Romer and N. Gregory Mankiw, who served as chairs of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors, and Lawrence H. Summers, who served as secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard University.

Pierre Nova, a French scholar whose ideas about the role of memory and identity in the writing of history gained prominence both in France and abroad, and who became a kingpin in his country’s intellectual community through his influence over publishing, died on June 2 in Paris. He was 93.

Mr. Nora’s major contribution to historiography was the concept of “lieux de mémoire” (sites of memory), a term he coined to describe elements of the past that a community chooses to remember and which become symbolic of a shared identity. Examples would be Joan of Arc, the national anthem “La Marseillaise,” and the rooster — “le coq gaulois” — as an unofficial icon of France.

Joel Shapiro, a celebrated American sculptor whose works imbued life-size stick figures with a surprising depth of feeling, died June 14 in Manhattan. He was 83.

From one piece to the next, his figures appear to leap with joy, dance balletically, fall backward, topple onto their heads, or collapse onto the floor into a tangle of arms and legs.

He executed more than 30 large-scale commissions, most notably “Loss and Regeneration,” commissioned for the plaza of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993.

In 1982, at age 41, Mr. Shapiro was honored with a much-praised midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was also well regarded for his works on paper, especially his abstract compositions in chalk and charcoal.

Harris Yulin, a character actor who for more than six decades portrayed unsympathetic, menacing, corrupt and glowering guys on stage and on screen, died on June 10 in Manhattan. He was 87.

Mr. Yulin never became a marquee name, but to many audiences, he was instantly recognizable. He portrayed J. Edgar Hoover, Hamlet and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Other roles ranged from crooked cops and politicians to a lecherous television anchorman.

Mr. Yulin never stopped working. At his death, he was preparing for a role in the TV series “American Classic,” with Kevin Kline and Laura Linney. The director said of him in a statement after his death, “His marriage of immense technique with an always fresh sense of discovery gave his work an immediacy and vitality and purity I’ve experienced nowhere else.”

Leonard A. Lauder, the art patron and philanthropist who with his mother, Estée Lauder, built a family cosmetics business into a worldwide organization of brands, died on June 7 at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 92.

While best known for his business enterprises, Mr. Lauder was also one of America’s most influential philanthropists and art patrons. He gave hundreds of millions to museums, medical institutions and breast cancer and Alzheimer’s research, as well as to other cultural, scientific and social causes.

In 2013, he pledged the most significant gift in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a trove of nearly 80 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures by Picasso, Braque, Léger and Gris. Scholars put the value of the gift at $1 billion and said its quality rivaled or surpassed that of the collections of the MOMA in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Estée Lauder’s sales, which hovered around $800,000 a year when Mr. Lauder joined the company, soared to more than $16 billion for fiscal 2021. Mr. Lauder’s personal fortune has been estimated at about 10.1 billion, according to Forbes, making him one of the 100 richest Americans.

For all his contributions to various causes, Mr. Lauder regarded himself as a frugal man with an eye on the bottom line. “I use slivers of soap, I reuse paperclips, I use the backside of memos,” he told The New York Times in 2004. “You can take the child out of the Depression, but you can’t take the Depression out of the child.”

Paul Marantz, a prominent architectural lighting designer who illuminated discos and skylines, libraries and hotels, museums and embassies, died on May 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

His projects included new buildings, including the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and renovations of Carnegie Hall, Grand Central Terminal, the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library, and David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. Also Studio 54, the Palladium, and Times Square for New Year’s Eve in 1999.

It has been said that shoemakers’ children often go barefoot. Years ago, when the daughter of a family friend returned home after babysitting at the Marantz home, according to The New York Times, she told her parents, “I thought he was in the lighting business. I couldn’t find a good place to read.”

Marthe Cohn was barely 25 on April 11, 1945, and Jewish, but being blond and blue-eyed, she could pass for an Aryan. She was French, from northeastern Alsace, but spoke German fluently. She was a nurse and 4 feet 11 inches tall. She was also a spy, working with the French resistance to Nazi occupiers in WWII. She died on May 20 at her home in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA, where she had settled with her American husband, long after her wartime exploits. Her husband found out about her experiences after they were married, and her children only recently. She was 105.

Early on, to escape the Nazis, a non-Jewish colleague provided false papers, she told The Southern New England Ledger in 2015. As she led her mother and maternal grandmother to safety, she feared that local peasants would report them to the authorities for a reward. One old man in work clothes stared at the three women. “Without saying a word,” she said, he suddenly dropped onto one knee and, hand on his chest, lowered his head in prayer. Next to him, his wife knelt on both knees in the dirt and made the sign of the cross.”

“I could hardly believe my eyes,” she added. “It was so beautiful, the humanity of it. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I nodded my head in silent thanks.”

Ms. Cohn was named a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 2004, and awarded the Order of Merit of Germany in 2014. “If you are thrown into certain circumstances, you are going to go through what you never thought you could do,” she said.