Milestones

By Harriet Barovick, Gilbert Cruz, Andrea Ford, Elisabeth Salemme, Tiffany Sharples, M.J. Stephey

DIED

Although he played in one of rock 'n' roll's most influential backing bands for nearly 40 years, Danny Federici hardly reveled in the limelight. The E Street Band keyboardist--he played organ, accordion and glockenspiel, as the situation demanded--would arrive just in time for shows, then duck out as soon as they finished, leading Bruce Springsteen to call him "Phantom Dan." He first played alongside the Boss in clubs on the New Jersey Shore in the 1960s, and his signature sound can be heard on many of Springsteen's hits, notably 1973's 4th of July, Asbury Park and 1980's Hungry Heart. Federici was a "pure natural musician," Springsteen wrote in a message on his website. "I loved him very much ... we grew up together." Federici died at 58 after a long battle with melanoma.

As head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, Colombian-born Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo was a staunch advocate of the Roman Catholic Church's conservative policies, opposing abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage and contraception--at one point calling into question the efficacy of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV. Considered a possible candidate for Pope before Benedict XVI succeeded John Paul II in 2005, Lopez Trujillo was deeply wary of leftist liberation theology and its influence on Latin American Catholicism. "I don't believe that in Latin America, Marxism has any possibilities," he said in the 1970s. "Nor does a capitalism that turns its back on mankind." He was 72.

His documentary on a choir's travels across the U.S. earned director Alex Grasshoff an Oscar in 1969. Yet when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences discovered that The Young Americans was first shown in late 1967, making it ineligible for the awards presented in 1969, the Academy took back his golden statuette--the only revocation in the Academy Awards' 80-year history. Though Grasshoff went on to direct several TV shows and the 1973 documentary Journey to the Outer Limits, he never won another Oscar. He was 79.

Her bright green eyes and red hair made her a pinup favorite, but British actress Hazel Court also attracted a cult following in the 1960s for her piercing shrieks and gory death scenes in horror films like The Curse of Frankenstein and for her appearances in Roger Corman films inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's macabre works, such as The Raven and The Masque of the Red Death. In addition, Court appeared in several TV series, including a British export to the U.S. called Dick and the Duchess, before retiring from show business in the 1970s to pursue a successful career in sculpture. Her autobiography, Hazel Court: Horror Queen, will be published posthumously in June. She was 82.

His sketches of Mother Teresa made a lasting impression at the Vatican and earned portrait artist George Pollard a commission to paint a likeness of John Paul II--just one of the 5,000 portraits Pollard created in his lifetime, many of prominent leaders, athletes and entertainers. The unassuming Wisconsin native painted John F. Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron and Harry S Truman--who quipped upon seeing his portrait, "I think you flattered me just right." Pollard was 88.

When MIT professor and meteorologist Edward Lorenz realized in 1961 that long-term weather-forecasting was all but impossible, the discovery chagrined weathermen. But his underlying idea--that even the most minute aberrations could have vast repercussions on larger systems--gave birth to the modern field of chaos theory. He captured the public's imagination with the elegant concept in a 1972 paper titled "Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" Though Lorenz initially used a seagull as his example, he settled on the more poetic creature, giving rise to the term butterfly effect. He was 90.

Before Frick and Frack entered the English lexicon as a term for an inseparable pair of buffoons, it referred to a popular ice-skating comedy duo. Beginning in the late 1930s, Frick, Werner Groebli, and his partner, Frack, Hans Rudolph Mauch, performed some 15,000 shows incorporating a unique mixture of pantomime, physical comedy and athleticism. "People think our skating is eccentric. It's not so," Groebli told TIME during the pair's first U.S. tour, in 1939. "Any figure skater should be able to do a serious spread eagle"--in which he skates with his body bent backward nearly parallel to the ice--"asleep." He was 92.