Dolly Dawn, 86, a big-band vocalist whose honey-sweet voice each noon, six days a week, bounced invitingly across America in the late 1930s and early '40s, died Dec. 11 at a nursing home in Englewood, N.J.
She was one of the first vocalists to become the sole focus of a band, at a time when bands and musicians were still the main draw. Ella Fitzgerald called Ms. Dawn an influence on her own singing.
Born Theresa Maria Stabile, the daughter of Italian immigrants, she grew up in Montclair, N.J. Her cousin was the bandleader Dick Stabile. At 14, she won an amateur contest that orchestra leader George Hall held in Newark. He shook her hand, but had forgotten her a year or two later when she showed up at the Taft Hotel in Manhattan, where his band regularly played.
With the regular female vocalist about to leave, Ms. Dawn auditioned and got the job. She was known at the time as Billie Starr. Mr. Hall and Harriet Mencken, a writer on The New York Journal-American, came up with Dolly Dawn.
She sang with a group carved out of the band, Dolly Dawn and Her Dawn Patrol, and later played clubs, dance halls and fairs across the nation.
But she dropped out of the limelight and became known mainly to a cult following in scattered club appearances in the 1970s and '80s, and after the release of a two-disk album of her records with Mr. Hall on the RCA Bluebird label in 1976. There was another revival of interest after Sony's reissue of some of her hits, most recently a collection, You're a Sweetheart, last year. Paper dolls of her are sold on eBay.
She received almost no royalties for her reissued recordings, obtained only minimal Social Security and suffered in recent years from diabetes and kidney failure. She had lived in a transient hotel in Manhattan before being given an apartment and other assistance by the Actors' Fund there, and moved to the Actors' Fund Nursing Home and Assisted Living Care Facility in Englewood this year.
Wayne Owens, 65, a former Utah congressman, was found dead yesterday on a beach in Tel Aviv, Israel, apparently from natural causes, the State Department reported.
A Democrat, he represented the Salt Lake County area for four terms and helped launch the Washington-based Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation.
In Congress, Mr. Owens fought to protect Utah wildlands, sponsoring a bill in each session of Congress to designate more than 5 million acres of the state as wilderness, riling many Utah conservatives. He also used his seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee to advocate for peace in the Middle East and direct negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
James Hazeldine, 55, an admired stage and television actor who had just taken on a new role at the Royal National Theatre, died Tuesday in London. No cause was given, but he had fallen ill Dec. 10, four days after beginning performances in the new Christopher Hampton play The Talking Cure at the National, in which he played Sigmund Freud.
He had major roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and made his Broadway debut in 1984 as Sam Evans in Strange Interlude with Glenda Jackson. Film appearances included Emma in 1996.