He and Ann Peebles made up one of Southern soul’s most accomplished partnerships. He finally broke through as a solo act at 75.

His tales of violence and squalor in his native Ozarks had the timeless quality of fables and inspired several movies.

He reimagined “Once Were Warriors,” a novel about a Maori family, as a film that became a worldwide phenomenon. He went on to direct Hollywood…

He was an architect with no training as an actor whose life was changed by a chance encounter. He inspired rave reviews and a New…

Besides his work with pop stars and jazz greats, he is credited with helping to invent the six-string contrabass guitar.

He and Tommy Boyce formed a hit songwriting duo of the 1960s, and were best known for the unexpectedly popular tunes of a made-for-TV boy…

He surveyed the trash of record companies, haggled with aging photographers and scoured estate sales, building an archive widely seen as unmatched.

He opened Baby’s All Right and three other nightclubs, a restaurant and a record store in a dozen years, helping the city maintain its cultural…

His vision for how to ship packages overnight led to not just a new company, but also a new sector of the world economy and…

He won five Oscars as a makeup artist on movies in which characters transformed, like “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “White Chicks” and many more.