Dorothy Young, 103, a petite dancer who was the last surviving person to share a stage with escape artist and magician Harry Houdini, died March 20 at her home in Tinton Falls, N.J. The cause of death was not reported.
When Houdini took his act to Broadway in 1925, Young, the teenage daughter of a Methodist minister, answered an ad seeking a dancer to join the show. She was the last of 200 women to audition. He invited her to sign a contract.
She traveled with Houdini from New York to cities across the country, leaving the act when her contract expired in the fall of 1926. Houdini died that Halloween of peritonitis.
Young went on to a long career. She had parts in several Broadway productions and appeared in dance scenes in “Flying Down to Rio,” a 1933 musical that first paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Olga Ulyanova, 89, a niece of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin who wrote several books praising her uncle and family, died Friday in Moscow. The cause of death was not given.
Lenin never had any children of his own, and Ulyanova was one of his last known living relatives, according to the government in the Ulyanovsk region, which was named after her family. She was the daughter of Dmitry Ulyanov, Lenin’s younger brother and one of the first members of the Bolshevik party.
Richard Leacock, 89, a documentary filmmaker known as a pioneer of the unobtrusive camera technique cinema verite and seen by some as the grandfather of reality television, died Wednesday in Paris. His daughter, Victoria Leacock Hoffman, said he had been in declining health.
Leacock was the cinematographer on “Primary,” the seminal documentary that followed John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He was among a generation of filmmakers who pioneered using lightweight, hand-held cameras to record scenes as naturally as possible.
Denver Post wire services
