In 1989 she appeared in a television version of A Raisin in the Sun.In 1990 she became the first woman to receive the NAACP’s Civil Rights Leadership Award for her work improving the image of blacks.Esther Rolle, actress: born Pompano Beach, Florida 8 November 1922; married (marriage dissolved); died Los Angeles 18 November 1998.. PATRICK J. FRAWLEY Jnr was a high-school dropout who went on to make his fortune from pens that would not leak and razors that did not rust, with the companies Paper Mate and Schick, then devoted himself to anti-Communist causes and made it his business to combat alcohol and drug addiction. An independent-minded entrepreneur who saw opportunity where others saw difficulty, Frawley may have inherited his entrepreneurial zeal from his father, who was an Irish-born professor of literature; he went to Nicaragua for his health and variously became a banker, import-exporter and dealer in heavy equipment.
At the age of 18, just two years after dropping out of school in San Francisco, and returning to Nicaragua to work with his father, Frawley junior had learnt how to wheel and deal so well that he arranged for the sale of $300,000 worth of tyres to the Panamanian government.He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War and, at the end of the war, married a Canadian and settled in San Francisco. There he became engaged in a series of small-time business ventures that eventually landed him in possession of a failed manufacturer of parts for ball-point pens. Taking advantage of an improved new ink, Frawley turned the company into Paper Mate.By extolling the Paper Mate pen’s leak-proof properties, the company became a runaway success and in 1955, aged 32, Frawley sold it to Gillette for $15.1m.New opportunity presented itself in the form of Eversharp Inc, makers of Schick razors, and Technicolor Inc, a Los Angeles-based film processing company.

Although the latter company, which developed film-cartridge systems, failed, Schick’s introduction of stainless-steel razor blades made it an industry giant.Following Fidel Castro’s Communist takeover of a Schick plant in Cuba in 1958, Frawley discovered that he was not simply an apolitical businessman, but an idealist. He became a stalwart of the American right, financing an array of conservative organisations. Once, when ABC News broadcast a documentary in which Alger Hiss attacked Richard Nixon, Frawley tried to cancel $3m worth of scheduled Schick advertising. However, the network declined to let him out of the contract.A man of obsessive enthusiasms, Frawley found the source of his next crusade closer to home, in his own alcoholism. While attending the Shadel Hospital in Seattle to treat his drinking problem, he became so enamoured of its negative- reinforcement therapy programme that he bought the hospital for Schick, and renamed it Schick Shadel.After he sold Schick to Warner Lambert in 1970, he retained the hospital for himself. He expanded it into a flourishing chain of treatment centres until a squeeze on medical insurance in the late 1980s forced a sharp retrenchment.But Frawley was also doing well with his personal property investments. In the 1950s he had moved into Bing Crosby’s old house on South Mapleton Drive in Los Angeles and in 1984 sold the house to the television producer Aaron Spelling for $10.25m.

Four years later, he sold a smaller place across the street for $11m.Patrick J. Frawley, businessman: born Len, Nicaragua 1923; married (two sons, five daughters); died Santa Monica, California 3 November 1998.. GERARD GRISEY was one of the most original composers of the generation which followed Pierre Boulez. An initiator of so-called “spectral” composition, a new style of music developed mainly in France from the detailed study of the acoustical life of sounds, Grisey produced a large and varied output of colourful works, often laced with unexpected touches of humour and caprice. He was also an influential teacher, whose numerous pupils included such prominent figures as Magnus Lindberg.
Born in Belfort, France, in 1946, Grisey initially studied in Germany at the Trossingen Conservatoire, later returning to his native country to study with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire and Henry Dutilleux at the Ecole Normale. From both his teachers Grisey inherited a sensitivity to sound, harmony and instrumentation, and he shared with Messiaen an almost naive freshness and sense of wonder in his attitude towards culture in general.Grisey’s fascination with Oriental and African music was matched by an unusually catholic taste in Western music – he was one of the few French composers to love the music of Jancek and Sibelius, for example.

Grisey also attended the Darmstadt Summer School for New Music where he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose 1968 work Stimmung was a crucial influence.Grisey won the coveted Prix de Rome, and stayed at the Villa Medici between 1972 and 1974. He remembered this as one of the most exciting periods of his life: he struck up a friendship with a fellow composer, Tristan Murail, with whom he founded the ensemble L’Itineraire; and composed his first mature work, the orchestral Derives.Grisey had been a keen student of acoustics during his Paris years, and his personal style emerged through investigating sound and exploring the nature of human perception. For instance, Periodes for seven instruments, from 1974, was based around sections of regularity and consonance, distorted into chaotic and unpredictable textures, which in their turn transform back into simple harmonies.It was a characteristically simple yet expressive idea, which Grisey also used the following year in the Partiels for 18 players. These two works became the centre of a vast cycle of six pieces, ranging from a viola solo to music for large orchestra, entitled Les Espaces Acoustiques (“Acoustic Spaces”, finally completed in 1985), lasting over an hour and a half.Each can be played on its own, or connected to any adjacent work in the cycle – the ending of the first piece is the beginning of the second, and so forth.