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LOS ANGELES August Coppola, filmmaker's brother
August Coppola, a former literature professor and the father of actor Nicolas Cage and the brother of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire, has died. He was 75.
Coppola died Tuesday in Los Angeles after suffering a heart attack, Cage's publicist, Annett Wolf, said Thursday.
"He was one of the most remarkable characters anybody's going to meet," Cage, who changed his name soon after beginning his acting career, said in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1996. "When I was a kid, the other kids were seeing Disney and he was showing us movies like Fellini's `Juliet of the Spirits.'"
"He was a great older brother to me and always looked out for me," Francis Coppola, the award-winning director of "The Godfather" trilogy and "Apocalypse Now," said in an interview with the cinema journal Film Comment.
Coppola moved to Savannah, Ga., in the mid-'90s because he said he needed to find a quiet place to write.
John Harris Burt, activist bishop
LOS ANGELES John Harris Burt, a retired bishop who advanced a tradition of social activism at Pasadena's All Saints Episcopal Church with his bold support of the civil rights movement when he was rector in the 1960s, died Oct. 20 at his home on Lake Superior outside Marquette, Mich. He was 91.
Burt died after a long illness, said his daughter, Susan Burt.
A friend of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Burt helped organize massive civil rights rallies in Los Angeles, including a 1963 event in South Los Angeles that attracted 30,000 people. He also was a vocal supporter of Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers movement. Los Angeles Times
John O'Quinn, prominent lawyer
HOUSTON Flamboyant lawyer John O'Quinn, who won billions in verdicts against makers of breast implants, pharmaceuticals and tobacco products, died Thursday in a traffic wreck. He was 68.
O'Quinn and a passenger were killed when police say the sport-utility vehicle he was driving skidded across the median of a rain-slicked parkway just outside downtown Houston, went airborne and slammed into a tree.
The 6-foot-4 O'Quinn, one of Houston's best-known trial attorneys, was known as a Texas-sized lawyer with a Texas-sized ego and a wallet to match, lavishly spending on himself, philanthropic causes and Democratic campaigns. Associated Press
