obituaries

Obituaries from page 68

Raiders' Renegade

Top Woman

NFL owner had huge impact on game. Actress specialized in authority figures.

JTA

ix

1 Davis,
whose nearly
50 years with
the Oakland Raiders as
coach and later owner
was marked by storms,
Super Bowls, lawsuits,
feuds and a fierce
devotion to his play-
ers and the game of
football, died at home
in Oakland, Calif., at
Al Davis
82 on Oct. 8, 2011, Yom
Kippur.
Davis was entered into the NFL's Pro
Football Hall of Fame in 1992 and was
cited as the only person to serve as a
personnel assistant, scout, assistant
coach, head coach, general manager,
commissioner and owner.
He was called a "renegade,""mav-
erick,""controversial and combative"
and "a genius contrarian" among other
descriptions in articles after his death.

Over the years, he
sued the NFL and was
sued by it over his
moving the Raiders out
of Oakland and then
back into the city from
Los Angeles. He was
AFL commissioner at
a time when the fledg-
ling football league was
fighting with the larger,
more established NFL,
and saw the leagues
move toward merger
over his objections.
Under his watch, the Raiders were
the first NFL franchise in the modern
era to have a Latino head coach (Tom
Flores), a black head coach (Art Shell)
and a female chief executive (Amy
Trask).
"All my life, all I wanted to do was
coach and lead men," Davis said in a
2010 TV documentary.
He is survived by his wife, Carol,
and son, Mark. I

JTA

C

haracter
actress
Dorothy
Belack, whose stern
demeanor earned
her numerous roles
as a judge, mayor,
physician and other
authority figures on
TV and in movies,
died Oct. 9, 2011, in
Dorothy Belack
New York at age 85.
Her death came four months after that of
her husband, noted Broadway producer
Philip Rose.
Belack's most notable recurring role in
legal robes was as Judge Margaret Barry,
on several versions of the Law & Order
series in the 1990s, but she also appeared
as a judge on Family Ties, Cosby and
Lifestory: Families in Crisis. She portrayed
Capt. Florence Baker, the lead character,
in the short-lived 1982 New York police
drama, Baker's Dozen.

She initiated the role of
Anna Wolek, on the daytime
soap opera One Life to Live
when it premiered in July
1968. Other TV series in
which she performed includ-
ed, The Patty Duke Show, The
Defenders and Barney Miller.
One of her most-praised
roles, "for the comic lightness
with which she reinforced the
film's feminist themes:' was
as Rita Marshall, the "tough-
minded TV producer" in the
1982 film Tootsie who unwittingly cast
Dustin Hoffman, disguised in women's
clothes, in a woman's role in a soap
opera.
She also voiced characters in the video
games, "True Crime: New York City" and
"Grand Theft Auto IV"
"With her long, saturnine face and
hard dark eyes, Ms. Belack was adept
at portraying tough, skeptical charac-
ters, often with an edge of humor:' the
Broadway magazine Playbill wrote.

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Obituaries