PASSINGS

Anna Manahan

Irish actress won a Tony

Anna Manahan, 84, a leading Irish actress who won a Tony Award in 1998 for her role as the nasty mother Mag in “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” on Broadway, died Sunday in her hometown of Waterford, Ireland, after a long illness, Irish newspapers reported.

Thirty years before winning that best actress Tony in Martin McDonagh’s play, Manahan had been nominated for her acting in a 1968 Broadway staging of “Lovers” by another Irish playwright, Brian Friel.

In recent years she had gained prominence as an advocate for the elderly, criticizing the Irish government’s plans to trim health benefits for senior citizens.

Born Oct. 18, 1924, the daughter of a Waterford comedian, Manahan trained at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin and began appearing on stage in the 1940s.

She married Colm O’Kelly, a Dublin stage manager, in 1955, but less than a year later he died of polio. She never remarried or had children.

Her acting career flourished under impresarios Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammoir at Dublin’s Gate Theatre, and she came to be known as an exact interpreter of such Irish playwrights as J.M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Seldom without a role to play, she appeared in stage productions throughout Ireland as well as in London and on and off Broadway.

Primarily a stage actress, Manahan also had many film credits, including “A Man of No Importance” (1994) and “Hear My Song” (1991), and appeared in Irish TV series.

Of acting, Manahan told the Irish Times in 1995, “It’s my vocation, my way of life, the only one I’ve ever known.”

Ernest Trova

Artist did series on ‘Falling Man’

Ernest Trova, 82, an acclaimed St. Louis artist best known for his “Falling Man” series of works about man at his most imperfect, died Sunday at his home in suburban Richmond Heights, Mo., of congestive heart failure, family spokesman Matt Strauss said.

Trova became prominent in the 1960s with his “Falling Man” paintings, prints and sculpture. The armless human figure, a Chicago Tribune critic wrote in 1978, “is simple but not simple-minded. It can be radically transported and transformed while retaining its essential character -- the character of an anonymous 20th century man alone in his environment.”

Created in bronze and stainless steel, the sculptures came to be viewed by many critics as gleaming pop-culture icons rather than successful expressions of contemporary art.

Born Feb. 19, 1927, in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, Mo., Trova was a self-taught artist. He worked as a decorator and window dresser for a St. Louis department store until an art collector whose family owned the store began buying Trova’s paintings.

A one-person exhibition of Trova’s artwork in 1963 inaugurated the Pace Gallery in New York, where he continued to exhibit for more than 20 years.

In 1975, he co-founded Laumeier Sculpture Park with a gift of more than 40 large-scale artworks to St. Louis County.

His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Tate Gallery, among others.

Flemming Flindt

Danish dancer, choreographer

Flemming Flindt, 72, a Danish dancer and choreographer perhaps best known for bringing elements of modern dance into the Royal Danish Ballet, died Tuesday of complications from a stroke at his home in Sarasota, Fla.

Flindt, who also was the former artistic director of the Dallas Ballet and choreographed works for Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley in California, was born in Copenhagen on Sept. 30, 1936.

He started studying dance at the Royal Danish Ballet school in 1946 and became a member of the ballet in 1955. That same year, he went to London and became a principal dancer with the Festival Ballet. He later performed with the Bolshoi Ballet and Paris Opera Ballet.

He became director of the Royal Danish Ballet in 1966 and continued in that post until 1978. Writing in “The International Encyclopedia of Dance,” Eric Aschengreen called him “the foremost Danish choreographer after Harald Lander.”

Flindt created several ballets based on the plays of Eugene Ionesco, including “The Lesson,” “A Young Man Must Marry” and “The Triumph of Death,” which became something of a sensation because some of its scenes were danced in the nude, which had never been done by the Royal Danish Ballet.

His version of “Salome,” produced in 1978, also featured nudity with his then-wife Vivi Flindt in the title role.

Aschengreen called Flindt “a man of the theater and a showman more than an original choreographer.”

Much of his later years were spent as a free-lance choreographer creating works for Rudolph Nureyev (“The Overcoat” and “Death in Venice”). For Ballet San Jose of Silicon Valley, he created “Out of Africa,” an adaptation of the Isak Dinesen book.

-- times staff and wire reports

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