Obituaries

Maxine Stuart, 94, a stage, film and TV actress whose long career included memorable guest appearances on "The Twilight Zone" and "The Wonder Years," died Thursday of natural causes at her Beverly Hills home, according to her daughter, Chris Ann Maxwell. Stuart began her career in New York theater and had a handful of small movie parts but was best known for her television work. In the early 1950s she appeared in dramatic anthology programs and was a regular on "The Edge of Night" soap opera.

In the modern pantheon of the world's dictators, Moammar Kadafi stood apart. Far apart. Erratic and mercurial, he fancied himself a political philosopher, practiced an unorthodox and deadly diplomacy, and cut a sometimes cartoonish figure in flowing robes and dark sunglasses, surrounded by heavily armed female bodyguards. He ruled Libya with an iron fist for 42 years, bestowing on himself an array of titles, including "king of culture," "king of kings of Africa" and, simply, "leader of the revolution.

The Rev. Will D. Campbell was a poor white boy from Mississippi who preached his first sermon from a pulpit stocked with a Bible from the Ku Klux Klan. But this son of the segregated South - a self-avowed "good ol' boy with crazy ideas" - did not follow the conventional career path for a Southern Baptist minister in the 1950s. He became the only white man admitted to the founding meeting of the seminal Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. That same year, when nine black students attempted to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., he was one of three white ministers who guided them past a fierce white mob. Later, when civil rights workers targeted Nashville lunch counters, he rounded up sympathetic whites to nudge the business owners toward integration.

Elizabeth Taylor, the glamorous queen of American movie stardom, whose achievements as an actress were often overshadowed by her rapturous looks and real-life dramas, has died. She was 79. Hospitalized six weeks ago for congestive heart failure, Taylor died early Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles with her four children at her side, publicist Sally Morrison said. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article said Mickey Rooney played Elizabeth Taylor's trainer in "Lassie Come Home.

Guitarist and ethnomusicologist Bob Brozman, who progressed from an early fascination with the delta blues of the South to a consuming passion for the traditional music of Hawaii and became a leading authority on the National steel guitar, has died. He was 59. Brozman was found dead April 23 at his home in Santa Cruz. His death was ruled a suicide, according to the coroner's office of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department. Brozman emerged in Santa Cruz in the 1970s as a street musician, playing a decidedly uncontemporary American roots style of music ranging from obscure jazz tunes to Hawaiian chanties.

Larry L. King, a writer and playwright whose magazine article about a campaign to close down a popular bordello became the hit Broadway musical "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" and a 1982 movie starring Burt Reynolds, died Thursday. He was 83. King, who had emphysema, died at a retirement home in Washington, D.C., where he had lived for six months, said his wife, Barbara Blaine. He wrote his most famous piece, about the demise of the Chicken Ranch brothel in Texas, in 1974 for Playboy magazine.

Ricardo Legorreta, the architect who introduced Mexican modernism to a global audience and who brought his crisp, brightly colored aesthetic to downtown Los Angeles with a controversial 1993 redesign of Pershing Square, has died. He was 80. Legorreta died Dec. 30 in Mexico City of liver cancer, according to Adriana Ciklik, a principal in the Mexico City-based firm Legorreta and Legorreta, which the architect had run in recent years with his son Victor. Although Legorreta's work featured the clean lines and spare forms of modern design, it also incorporated elements of Mexican vernacular architecture including thick protective walls, spacious courtyards and bold color.

Chuck Muncie, a star running back with the New Orleans Saints and the San Diego Chargers who overcame a cocaine habit that ended his career and then devoted his later life to helping others avoid drug abuse, has died. He was 60. Muncie died Monday of a heart attack at his Los Angeles-area home, his family announced. After a stellar career at UC Berkeley, Muncie played in the National Football League from 1976 to 1984 and was selected to play in three Pro Bowls. He spent more than four years with the Saints before joining the Chargers in the middle of the 1980 season.

Paolo Soleri, an Italian-born architect who created a visionary prototype for a new kind of ecologically sensitive city in the remote Arizona desert four decades ago, only to watch the suburban sprawl he detested begin to creep near it in recent years, has died. He was 93. Soleri died of natural causes Tuesday at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., according to an official with the architect's foundation . PHOTOS: Paolo Soleri | 1919-2013 A onetime apprentice at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West compound on the edge of Scottsdale, Ariz., Soleri founded his own desert settlement, called Arcosanti, in 1970 at a site roughly 70 miles north of downtown Phoenix.

WASHINGTON — Watergate felon and prison reformer Charles W. Colson, who died Saturday at age 80 in northern Virginia, was two people. He was Richard Nixon's "hatchet man," the president's "evil genius," who by his own admission was "ruthless in getting things done" in the Watergate years, when the things that he and others in the White House were getting done would become a national disgrace and send Colson to prison. And he was a born-again Christian, the founder of the world's largest prison ministry, an "unfailingly kind but tremendously courageous" intellectual leader who became the "William F. Buckley" of the evangelical movement.