GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – British satiric artist and cartoonist Ronald Searle died, age 91, in his sleep at the home in the south of France where he had lived since 1961. Searle was best known for his cartoon gothic girls’ school, St Trinians, where murder and mayhem reigned. His dark side is often attributed to his harrowing second world war experience as a prisoner of the Japanese, but his body of work was far-ranging. He illustrated for a number of major publications, including Punch, The New Yorker and Le Monde, and he had a significant influence on a number of other important illustrators and cartoonists, from Ralph Steadman to Walt Disney and Matt Groening.
Links to other sites: Independent, New York Times
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, died Wednesday, age 56. The news was announced by Apple in a brief tribute on the company’s home page: “Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”
Jobs died of a rare form of pancreatic cancer. He had been ill for months and in August he resigned as CEO of the company he started with Steve Wozniak in 1976. His up-and-down relationship with the company he founded turned around in 1997 when he re-joined the company after 12 years away, and turned it into one of the most valuable companies in US business.
Tributes to Jobs, the man who turned Apple into the world’s largest technology company, are appearing in media around the world, but the most overwhelming public praise has come from China, where more than 35 million tributes were posted online in just hours early Thursday.
Links to other sites: Economic Times, India, Gizmodo Australia, Hindustan Times, PC World, Reuters Canada, the Wirecutter (on Gizmodo’s theft of iPhone 4 and relationship with Jobs), Xinhuanet
Mike Smith (photo: ISO, Geneva)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Michael Smith, a well-known figure in the international community in Geneva, died suddenly 25 September, while attending meetings in New Delhi, India. Smith, who had recently announced that he would retire later this year as (International Organization for Standardization) Secretary of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) Technical Management Board had worked for ISO for 32 years. One week earlier he had been given a gift by colleagues, of mementos and photos from his time with the organization.
Roland Petit, 2009
ZURICH / GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Two notable foreigners have died in Switzerland. Roland Petit, notable French choreographer whose erotic “Carmen” in 1949 had a major impact on the ballet world, died Sunday 10 July, age 87, in Geneva, where he had lived for more than 10 years according to the New York Times. The arts section of the paper carries a lengthy obituary.
The BBC reports that he is credited with having created more than 100 ballets in his career. He is survived by his wife, the dancer Zizi Jeannemaire, who played his Carmen, and their daughter, Valentine Petit.
Sri Lankan political candidate and Swiss citizen Aminath ‘Ainthu’ Arif died in hospital in Zurich shortly before she was scheduled to have a major skin grafting surgery, after being anesthetized and treated for a month in Sri Lanka following a barbecue fire. The fire broke out at her home in Machangoalhi Meraanage in Sri Lanka.
A man also died of his injuries from the fire and a third victim is being treated in Sri Lanka.
She is survived by three children, reports Haveeru.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Hans Baer, scion of the Baer banking family in Zurich died Monday 21 March, age 83, the family announced Tuesday, and with him disappeared a period in Swiss banking history. He was the father of Raymond Baer, chairman of the Board of the Julius Baer Group.
Hans Baer ruled over the family business, one of Switzerland’s most successful private banks, for nearly 30 of the 50 years he worked for the firm, as president of the Executive Board and then chairman before his retirement in 1996. He oversaw the bank’s opening of offices in New York and London. He also oversaw the first public offering of shares, not a surprise given that years earlier, in 1983 when I, as a young reporter working for Time Magazine interviewed “Papa Baer” (and he looked the part, charming and warm and larger than life), he told me that this was where the future of his bank would lie.
The bank later went public and is now listed on the Swiss Stock Exchange as a member of the SMI group of top 20 companies. It is Switzerland’s third largest bank.
Hans Baer was also well known for his active involvement in the arts and for his dynamic contributions to his hometown of Zurich. He was the founding president of the Zurich Festival, among his many projects.
English composer John Barry, who won five Oscars during his almost 50-year-career and was widely recognized for his contributions to several James Bond movies died in New York City on 30 January.
Barry who was born in York in 1933, is survived by his wife of 33 years, Laurie, his four children and five grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements will be private; a memorial service will be held later this year in the UK, said his family.
R Sargent Shriver died, age 95, died in Bethesda, Maryland, USA Tuesday 18 January. The Los Angeles Times describes him as “a lawyer who served as the social conscience of two administrations, launching the Peace Corps for his brother-in-law, President Kennedy, and leading the “war on poverty” for President Johnson”. His Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago Wednesday was awarded one of 11 prestigious and valuable MacArthur Foundation prizes for excellence.
He also represented a world of clan politics in the US. His wife was Eunice Kennedy, sister to John and Robert, who founded the Special Olympics. Maria Shriver, a well-known television personality in the US is also known as the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California until recently. Shriver himself shelved some of his own political ambitions to follow Kennedy family plans.
Eunice died in 2009, age 88. The couple had been married for 56 years. Her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2003 and Shriver’s appearance before Congress in 2009 to testify about the disease made a strong impact.
New York Times obituary
Video, AP
Elisabeth Edwards, the estranged wife of former US vice-presidential candidate and presidential hopeful John Edwards, died Tuesday 7 December of breast cancer at the family home in North Carolina, in the US. John Edwards campaigned at the side of John Kerry in 2004. Elizabeth Edwards, she later said, knew before the campaign she might have cancer, but hid that possibility from her husband until the diagnosis, after the Edwards/Kerry team lost. She received treatment for the cancer, which went into remission, but returned in 2007, about the time her husband began a presidential campaign in 2008, but bowed out when it became clear he could not compete with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Elisabeth Edwards was diagnosed at that point with a treatable but not curable cancer. The couple later became estranged over revelations that he had had an affair, and then that he had fathered a child, allegations he initially vehemently denied but later acknowledged. Elisabeth Edwards, a lawyer, turned her attention to working as an advocate for the poor and fighting for health care reform.
Dame Joan Sutherland, 1926-2010
(Video) Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Dame Joan Sutherland, one of Australia’s music greats and a long-time star in the international word of opera, died Monday 11 October at her home in Les Avants, near Geneva. She was 83.
The opera singer, who became known particularly for her bel canto repertoire “made Donizetti, Handel and Verdi sound as new, through her fearless technique and formidable range,” writes The Age in its obituary.
Her career was launched in 1959 when she sang Lucia di Lammermoor at the Royal Opera House in London and tributes to her extraordinary voice poured in. For the next 30 years she sang at the world’s major opera houses, performed with the opera world’s best and made scores of recordings.
Bloomberg’s Manuela Hoelterhoff summarized her career thus:
Philippe Braunschweig, founder, Prix de Lausanne
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Philippe Braunschweig, who, with his wife Elvire Kremis Braunschweig, founded the Prix de Lausanne in 1973, died Saturday 3 April of cancer. The Prix de Lausanne has become one of the world’s most prestigious dance competitions for students ages 15-19.
Braunschweig, age 82, was one of the heirs to a Swiss watchmaking firm in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and he eventually became the head of Portescap, the family business. He studied dance on the side, in France, and married a dancer. The couple lived in La Maison Turque, a house by Corbusier, in Vevey.
He is survived by a daughter and son, and their children and grandchildren.
Links to other sites: Le Prix de Lausanne, Le Temps (Fre), New York Times
Philippe de Weck (photo: UBS)
Fribourg, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Philippe de Weck, who was the managing director of Swiss bank UBS from 1966-1976 and then head of the board for another four years, has died, age 90, in Fribourg. De Weck was the only head of the bank who has come from the French-speaking part of Switzerland. He remained a member of the board until 1988, after stepping down as chairman in 1980.
De Weck was one of a trio of experts called in to investigate the l’Instituto per le Opere Religiose, the Vatican’s bank, when it was faced with the Banco Ambrosiano scandal in 1982. He also served on the boards of several large Swiss companies, including Nestle and SGS.
He was born into a family that was part of Fribourg’s social set, a strongly Catholic society. His marriage to Alix de Saussure in 194 linked him to one of Geneva’s most notable Protestant families. He studied law in Fribourg and after working briefly in a law firm joined the family bank, Weck, Aeby & Cie, later bought out by Union Bank of Switzerland, which in turn merged with Swiss Bank Corporation to become UBS. The de Weck family is still active in banking today, with several members of the family involved in Geneva banks. Roger de Weck, his son, heads the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
The funeral will be Tuesday 15 December at the St Nicolas Cathedral in Fribourg.
Francis Blanchard, former ILO director-general
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Francis Blanchard, a French citizen who was director-general of the ILO (International Labour Office) from 1974 to 1989, died Wednesday 9 December 2009, at the age of 93.
He joined the ILO in 1951, where his first assignment was as deputy chief of the manpower division. He was appointed deputy director-general in 1968 with responsibility for technical cooperation and regional activities.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver, 88, died in Hyannis Port, Massachussetts, in the US. She came to fame as part of one of America’s best-known families, with three brothers who served as a US president, a US attorney general and a notable senator, but she made her own mark by founding the Special Olympics movement. She was also often in the news as the mother of Maria Shriver, who married Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California. Tributes: New York Times, Special Olympics.
Also see: Swiss Special Olympics site
John Updike, 76, has died of lung cancer in Massachusettes. The prolific Amnerican writer was perhaps best known for his character, Harry Anstrom, known as Rabbit, who appeared in several books, but Updike, who won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, has been called a chronicler of his generation. Reuters
