Below are some of the people from the theater community who died in 2020, listed alphabetically. Click on any photograph to read the caption.

Roger Berlind, 90, a producer or co-producer of 100 shows on Broadway who won 25 Tony Awards. He was a Wall Street executive who abruptly quit his job after his wife and three of his four children were killed in an airplane crash, then launched his career in the theater, where as a young man he had wanted to be a songwriter.

Patricia Bosworth, 86, biographer of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Jane Fonda and Diane Arbus.”She gave up acting for the writing life, turning her knowledge of the theater into a series of biographies and mining her own extraordinary life for a pair of powerful memoirs….She was admitted to the Actors Studio in its glory days, learning method acting alongside Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. She won some important roles onstage and appeared alongside Audrey Hepburn on film. But she always wanted to write.”

Marge Champion, 101, dancer, actor, choreographer, real-life model for Walt Disney’s Snow White and famous dance partner (and wife) of Gower Champion (They divorced in 1973. He became a celebrated Broadway director, and died in 1980.). She appeared in the Broadway revival of Follies in 2001 at age 81.

Nick Cordero, 41, a Broadway musical theater actor (Waitress, A Bronx Tale, Rock of Ages, Tony nominee for Bullets Over Broadway) whose months-long struggle with COVID-19 was chronicled in painful detail on social media by his wife Amanda Kloots, also a Broadway veteran. He left a one-year-old son named Elvis

Faith Dane, 96, who “starred for many years in a stage show that spanned burlesque, jazz, dance, calypso, comedy and performance art. She hit it big in the Broadway and film productions of “Gypsy,” for which the lyricist Stephen Sondheim created a role based on her long-standing cabaret act. She went on to run for mayor of D.C. nine times

Gerald Freedman, 92, renowned director, artistic director, and educator whose students included Robin Williams and Mandy Patinkin, was a 21-time Broadway veteran, beginning as a directorial assistant to Jerome Robbins on the original Broadway production of “West Side Story.” Among the dozens of shows he directed Off Broadway was the original production of the musical “Hair” at the Public Theater. He went on to become for 21 years the dean of the School of Drama at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, which named its theater after him.

Bernard Gersten, 97, successful longtime theater executive first at The Public Theater (where he persuaded Joseph Papp to produce “A Chorus Line”) then at Lincoln Center Theater. Theater has four elements: a building, artists, money and an audience. “How you mix them, how you adjust them, how you administer them is the secret of success or failure.”

Carl Reiner, 98, comedian, creator of Dick Van Dyke Show, Broadway veteran, starting in the 1940s.His roman a clef “Enter Laughing,” about growing up in the Bronx wanting to be an actor, was turned into a Broadway play, and then a more successful musical. “The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh.”

Diana Rigg, 82, memorable for her performances on Broadway (Medea, My Fair Lady), TV (The Avengers, Game of Thrones) and for her witty book of bad reviews through the ages, “No Turn Unstoned” “The older you get, I have to say, the funnier you find life. That’s the only way to go. If you get serious about yourself as you get old, you are pathetic.”
Also: In Memoriam to New York City’s frontline health workers