Obituaries - May 22, 1999

* Norman Rossington; British Comic Actor

Norman Rossington, 70, a comic actor who was a veteran of dozens of movies and British television shows. Probably best known to American audiences as the Beatles’ manager in the movie “A Hard Day’s Night,” Rossington had been working up till November in a London stage production of “Beauty and the Beast,” playing the role of Maurice. But he bowed out of the production after taking a fall onstage. His stage career included stints with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Laurence Olivier’s pre-National Theater Company at Chichester, England. Although he liked stage work, he once lamented that “if you’re not on the box [television], people think you’re retired or dead.” In film, he played Sean Connery’s comic sidekick in “The Longest Day,” and Albert Finney’s best friend in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.” He also appeared in “Lawrence of Arabia.” On Friday in Manchester, England, of cancer.

* Jerome J. Wolken; Devised Lens for the Blind

Jerome J. Wolken, 82, scientist who devised a lens that enabled some blind people to see. A biophysicist of vision, Wolken, who worked at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, adapted the vision structures of deep-sea creatures and worms to develop a pear-shaped lens for humans that was 10 times more sensitive to light than a camera lens. He called it the Light Concentrating Lens System, which gave some legally blind people, such as those suffering from cataracts, the chance to see. Born in Pittsburgh of Lithuanian immigrants, Wolken earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees at the University of Pittsburgh and joined its faculty in the 1950s. In 1964, he moved to Carnegie Mellon, where he worked to duplicate in his laboratory some of the features found in the double lens system of the copilia, a rare, primitive creature found in the Mediterranean Sea. More than half of its body is its special optic system, which enables it to see in the murky depths 500 feet below sea level. Wolken’s system used two lenses, made of glass or plastic: a normal magnification lens in front of a rounder fisheye lens designed to collect as much light as possible. Wolken designed the system for eyeglasses or implants. “It’s an unusual lens,” he said in 1988, when he announced the successful results of preliminary clinical tests of the lens system, “but this work is just a sidelight to my main interest,” tracing the evolution of the eye. On May 10 at his home in Pittsburgh.