PASSINGS: Bill Millin, Yvonne Lenart

Bill Millin

Bagpiper played at D-day invasion

Bill Millin, 88, a Scottish bagpiper who defied enemy fire as he led comrades into battle at the 1944 D-day landings in Normandy, France, died Wednesday at a hospital in Torbay, England, after a short illness, his family announced.

Despite being unarmed, and with friends falling around him, Millin led British troops ashore on Sword Beach, continuing to play his “Highland Laddie” tune.

His commanding officer, Lord Lovat, had asked him to ignore rules banning the playing of bagpipes in battle and requested that he play to rally his comrades. Millin was 21 at the time.

“When you’re young, you do things you wouldn’t dream of doing when you’re older. I enjoyed playing the pipes, but I didn’t notice I was being shot at,” he said in a 2006 interview with the BBC.

Millin, who was born July 14, 1922, in Glasgow, Scotland, became known as Piper Bill. His actions were portrayed in the 1962 film “The Longest Day.”

After the war, he played the bagpipes in a traveling theater troupe and later became a nurse who cared for mental patients in Glasgow.

Yvonne Lenart

LACMA trustee and benefactor

Yvonne Lenart, 95, a longtime member of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees and a prominent supporter of arts programs at UCLA, died Aug. 10 at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica. She had congestive heart failure.

Lenart, a Brentwood resident for 60 years, and her late husband, Harry, collected contemporary art and art from South and Southeast Asia and were major benefactors of LACMA. Her husband was a museum trustee from 1975 until his death in 1984. Lenart was elected to the board in 1985.

The couple donated many of their bronze, stone, wood and terra cotta sculptures from India, Southeast Asia and Indonesia to LACMA, which now has a preeminent collection of those works. After her husband’s death, Lenart continued to provide financial support to the museum’s capital campaigns and helped fund such projects as the museum’s information system and its educational and special exhibition programs. Of particular note was her gift to provide buses for local schoolchildren to visit the museum.

At UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History, the Harry and Yvonne Lenart Auditorium is named for the couple. She established the Yvonne Lenart Public Programs Fund that helps pay for art exhibits at UCLA, and she funded scholarships for UCLA graduate students to study the humanities abroad.

Lenart also was an early supporter of Planned Parenthood’s Los Angeles chapter.

She was born April 18, 1915, into a French-Canadian family in Nova Scotia and moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s. Her father was an artist and art appraiser, and she inherited his artistic talent. Her husband’s success as a real estate investor allowed them to begin collecting art.

— Times staff and wire reports

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