Milestones

By Harriet Barovick, Gilbert Cruz, Randy James, Belinda Luscombe, Tim McGirk, Elisabeth Salemme, Carolyn Sayre, Tiffany Sharples, Alexandra Silver, MARK THOMPSON, Nathan Thornburgh

DIED

His massive bronze A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling II--a gorilla contemplating its severed arm on the floor--captured "the moment when self-consciousness dawns," Angus Fairhurst once explained. One of the so-called Young British Artists who debuted in the 1990s, Fairhurst worked in media ranging from photography to painting and collaborated with his more confrontational art-school classmates Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas--most notably in the landmark 2004 Tate Britain show "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." He took his own life at age 41.

"The killing fields" is how Cambodian-born photojournalist Dith Pran described the grim heaps of human remains strewn across his homeland by the Khmer Rouge--a name later given to the 1984 Academy Award--winning film that depicted his 4 1/2 year struggle to survive as a prisoner of the brutal communist regime. A photographer and an interpreter for New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg, whose work was the basis for the film, Dith was captured after staying in Phnom Penh to help document the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. When he escaped in 1979, he moved to New York City to continue working as a photojournalist for the Times. A dedicated advocate for the prevention of genocide, he also founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project in 1994. He was 65.

His dedication often manifested as stubbornness, but that was only because screenwriter Abby Mann believed it was his duty to contribute to the betterment of mankind. His works tackled complex social issues: the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the challenges faced by mentally disabled children and, in his best-known screenplay, 1961's Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg, the accountability of those who worked with the Nazis. He was known to recall his works if he didn't like the way they had been adapted, often out of concern that they would lose their social relevance. "A great screenwriter should be given the same consideration as a great playwright," he once said. He was 80.

A voracious consumer of puzzles and a brilliant mathematician, University of California professor David Gale was so passionate about math that he dreamed of creating an interactive museum dedicated to the subject. But he is best known for the matching algorithm he created with colleague Lloyd Shapley that was first applied to romantic pairs: an elegant method to determine couples in which both partners prefer each other to other members of a group. Among several applications, the algorithm has since been used to match students to high schools and helped establish the protocol still used to assign new doctors to hospital-residency programs. He was 86.

Victims of mental illness have Frank Ayd to thank for his pioneering work in psychopharmacology: his discovery that chlorpromazine, also known as Thorazine, could be used to treat schizophrenia provided an alternative for those who otherwise might have been subjected to the trauma of a lobotomy. While Ayd recognized the power of antipsychotic medications, he also believed they could never replace other forms of care. As he told TIME in 1957, the drugs were "not a substitute for compassion, understanding, patience [or] an attentive ear." He was 87.

For many, his visage evoked the cackling, maniacal villain Tommy Udo pushing an old woman tied to a wheelchair downstairs, in the 1947 film Kiss of Death. But offscreen, Richard Widmark played the true gentleman. Over his career, the chiseled, unconventionally handsome actor portrayed a vast array of characters--from frontiersman Jim Bowie in The Alamo to the head of a psychiatric institution in Cobweb to the corruptible boxing promoter Harry Fabian, one of his most memorable roles, in Jules Dassin's Night and the City. He was 93.

If he had directed nothing but the 1955 French jewel-heist flick Rififi, his cinematic reputation would have been secure. But in addition to taut capers like Rififi and 1964's Topkapi, American director and screenwriter Jules Dassin, who was blacklisted from Hollywood after being identified before Congress as a former communist, was also a master of film noir--exemplified in movies such as 1948's police thriller The Naked City and 1950's Night and the City. Among all his solid works, though, it was Rififi--with its masterly 30-min. dialogue- and music-free robbery sequence as a centerpiece--that remained his most influential film. Dassin was 96.