Milestones

By Michael D. Lemonick; Harriet Barovick; Elizabeth L. Bland; Daren Fonda; Kate Novack; Richard Corliss

EDWARD TELLER had a longer and more intimate acquaintance with nuclear weapons than any man in history. During World War II, the brilliant, Hungarian-born physicist, fearful that Hitler was building an A-bomb, was among those who got Albert Einstein to nudge F.D.R. into starting what became the Manhattan Project. After the war, Teller pushed for the "super"--the H-bomb. The rabid anticommunist became a scientific pariah in the 1950s for implying that his former boss, Manhattan Project head J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a security risk. Teller was considered the model for Dr. Strangelove, the bomb-loving scientist in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 movie. In the 1980s, Teller backed Ronald Reagan's nukes-based Star Wars program--a technology so complex that many scientists thought it impossible to build. Even so, the mere threat forced the Soviet Union to try designing its own, a costly decision some analysts believe hastened the U.S.S.R.'s collapse. By the time Teller died in Palo Alto, Calif., last week, at 95, he had few friends in the scientific community. Yet he defended to the end his early backing of the bomb. "What was at stake," he told TIME in 2001, "was the real possibility that the Nazis would govern the world or, a few years later, that the Soviets would." --By Michael D. Lemonick

DIED. ANNA LINDH, 46, popular, energetic Foreign Minister of Sweden and a potential future Prime Minister; after hours of surgery to repair wounds suffered when an unidentified man stabbed the mother of two as she was shopping in a department store; in Stockholm. The motivation for the assault is unknown, but it occurred days before a referendum on whether to adopt the euro, an expensive, controversial proposal Lindh had publicly championed.

DIED. JOHN RITTER, 54, Emmy Award-winning actor who energized the racy (for the 1970s) hit ABC sitcom Three's Company as the goofy, bumbling Jack Tripper, a straight bachelor living platonically with two women; of a coronary-artery tear; in Burbank, Calif., after collapsing on the set of his latest hit show, 8 Simple Rules...for Dating My Teenage Daughter. The son of country-and-western singer and film star Tex Ritter, he worked frequently on TV (his other series included Hooperman and Hearts Afire) and had roles in the 1996 film Sling Blade and on Broadway in 2000 in Neil Simon's comedy The Dinner Party.

DIED. WARREN ZEVON, 56, morbidly witty rock-'n'-roll poet; of lung cancer; in Los Angeles. A reformed hard drinker whose vivid musical tales were likened to mini-screenplays, Zevon first made a splash with the 1978 album Excitable Boy, featuring a novelty hit, Werewolves of London, about beasts who mutilate old ladies and then drink pina coladas at Trader Vic's. He went on to show his skill at tender ballads, true-crime tales and bluesy odes to doom and death in more than a dozen albums. After he went public with his cancer diagnosis last year, he produced, with the help of admirers like Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris and Tom Petty, a goodbye album, The Wind, which was released last month to critical and commercial success. Appearing with David Letterman, a big fan, on the Late Show last October, he offered some departing words of advice: "Enjoy every sandwich."

DIED. WARREN KREMER, 82, lead cartoonist for Harvey Comics who, with the company's editor and publisher, created Richie Rich, the "poor little rich boy" introduced in 1953 who became Harvey's most popular character; in Glen Ridge, N.J. During his 35 years at Harvey, Kremer painted countless comic-book covers and helped develop such other characters as Hot Stuff and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

LENI RIEFENSTAHL might be remembered as cinema's greatest woman director or as its most gifted documentary filmmaker, whose two-part Olympia, a record of the 1936 Summer Games, pioneered techniques and attitudes copied in virtually all TV sports coverage. Instead, she is vilified as the venal genius who glamorized the Hitler myth in 1935's Triumph of the Will. This record of a Nazi Party Congress rally in Nuremberg still sickens with its close-up view of the spellbinding Fuhrer (this was the original Springtime for Hitler), still enthralls with the artful precision of its editing craft. A wily 101 at her death, Riefenstahl outlived most of her critics but not her reputation; for 60 years, she was blackballed from the medium she helped define. Last year she completed a new movie, Underwater Impressions. It has yet to be shown at any major film festival. --By Richard Corliss