Tom Cole, 75, a playwright and screenwriter whose 1985 film “Smooth Talk” won the grand jury prize at what is now the Sundance Film Festival and helped launch a teenage Laura Dern’s career, died last week of multiple myeloma at his home in Roxbury, Conn., said his wife, Joyce Chopra, who directed “Smooth Talk.”
Charles Thomas Cole was born in 1933 in Paterson, N.J. At Harvard University, Cole earned a bachelor’s degree in history and literature in 1954. He then joined the Army, where he learned to speak Russian. After earning a master’s degree in Russian language and literature from Harvard, Cole mainly taught English literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Three short stories he wrote received the O. Henry Award. In 1966, his novella “An End to Chivalry” won the Rosenthal Foundation Award for literary accomplishment given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Wanda Wilk, 88, a philanthropist, musicologist and devoted champion of Polish classical music who co-founded the Polish Music Center at the University of Southern California, died Feb. 18 at her Los Angeles home, according to the Polish Music Center at USC’s Thornton School of Music.
With her husband, Dr. Stefan P. Wilk, she endowed the Polish Music Center in 1984, and it opened a year later.
With its focus on contemporary composers, it has become home to the largest public collection of Polish music materials outside Poland.
