Tita Cooley; Award-Winning Filmmaker, Activist

Tita Cooley, 65, artist, filmmaker, peace activist and philanthropist whose “Moebius Play” won a prize at the 1985 Tokyo Film Festival. A graduate of Stanford University, Miss Cooley was a mainstay of the Malibu Colony where her community projects included co-founding the Blue Bus, the area’s first public transit system. She was a major supporter of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Daybreak for Abused Women and the Venice Family Clinic. Throughout her life, she assisted Democratic politicians and promising young artists and writers. Her home and storied gardens were offered for myriad charitable events. As a crusader for peace, she worked in the 1985 U.S. Peace March and helped organize the U.S.-Soviet Peace March in Russia in 1987. Her paintings were exhibited in Los Angeles galleries in the 1980s and 1990s, in the same period she was creating films such as the animated short “Moebius Play.” On Oct. 13 in Malibu after a long illness.