As football began
to rival baseball as
America’s No. 1
sport in the 1950s
and ’60s, Sam Huff emerged as
the NFL’s menacing poster boy.
Playing for the New York Giants,
the handsome and ferocious line-
backer brought the kind of renown
to defense that had once been the
domain of quarterbacks, running
backs, and wide receivers. He was a terror in
“the Greatest Game Ever Played”—the 1958
NFL championship showdown that the Giants
lost in overtime to the Baltimore Colts, 23-17—
forcing a fumble and blocking an attempted
field goal. His fame reached new heights two
years later, when CBS wired him for sound for
a Walter Cronkite–narrated special, The Violent
World of Sam Huff. A radio transmitter in Huff’s
shoulder pads let viewers hear him crunch oppo-
nents and warn a receiver, “Don’t hit me on the
chin with your elbow. Do that again, you’ll get a
broken nose.”
Robert Lee Huff—he had no idea how he came
to be called Sam—was born to a coal miner
father and a homemaker mother in Morgantown,
W.Va., said the New York Daily News. Huff
“stayed out of the coal mines by starring as a
two-way lineman” in high school and as an All-America guard for West Vir ginia
Uni ver sity. Drafted by the Giants
in 1956, Huff “had trouble fitting
in,” said The Wash ing ton Post.
At 6-foot-1 and 230 pounds, he
was too small for the defensive
line and too slow to block. But
when defensive coordinator Tom
Lan dry installed a 4-3 scheme,
with three linebackers, Huff fit in
perfectly as middle linebacker—
the defense’s anchor. “It was like I was born to
play the position,” he said.
Huff had 30 career interceptions, said The
New York Times, but was remembered “for his
head-on duels with two of the game’s greatest
fullbacks: the Cleve land Browns’ Jim Brown
and the Green Bay Packers’ Jim Tay lor.” He was
a key figure in the Giants’ 1956 NFL Cham-
pion ship win, but the team came up short in
five subsequent years, and Huff was traded to
Wash ing ton in 1963. He felt betrayed—and
delighted in Wash ing ton’s 72-41 victory over the
Giants in 1966. “Justice is done,” Huff said. He
retired from playing in 1969, later working as a
radio broadcaster for Wash ing ton games. Huff
bemoaned efforts to make the game less violent.
“When I hit you, I tried to hit you hard enough
to hurt you,” he said in 2002. “That’s the way
the game should be played.”Dean Stockwell
traveled an unlikely
career path. A child
star who appeared
in Hollywood hits such as Anchors
Aweigh (1945) and The Boy With
Green Hair (1948), he became a
brooding leading man in his 20s
and an offbeat character actor in his
late 40s, playing a menacing drug
dealer who lip-syncs to Roy Orbison
in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), a lecherous
mafioso in Married to the Mob (1988), and the
cigar- chomping, wisecracking Adm. Al Calavicci
in the hit sci-fi TV series Quantum Leap (1989–
1993). Along the way, Stockwell took numerous
detours from acting, including stints as an itiner-
ant odd-jobber, a free-loving hippie, and a real
estate agent in Santa Fe. “I never really wanted to
be an actor,” he said. But “I came back each time
because I had no other training.”
“Stockwell was very much a child of Hollywood,”
said the Los Angeles Times. His actor parents
“pushed him into theater at age 7,” and two years
later he signed as a contract player at MGM.
Stockwell appeared on screen with Gene Kelly,
Frank Sinatra, and Errol Flynn but found life as
a child actor miserable. He quit the movies at 16and spent years living “a hobo-
like existence, working in railroad
gangs and picking fruit,” said The
Times (U.K.). When he returned
to Holly wood at age 21, the
“ curly-haired cherub had turned
into a dark, intense, and charis-
matic leading man” who drew
notice for roles in Sons and Lovers
(1960) and Long Day’s Journey
Into Night (1962). Then in the
mid 1960s “he dropped out for a second time,”
moving to the countercultural hot spot Topanga
Canyon, where he got “to live the carefree child-
hood that he had been denied.”
He came back to acting in the 1970s, but “strug-
gled to land roles, appearing in fringe films and
performing in dinner theater,” said The New York
Times. Stockwell quit once more and moved to
New Mexico, but a phone call from actor Harry
Dean Stanton led to his appearance in director
Wim Wenders’ 1984 cult road movie Paris, Texas.
This comeback “would be his most successful,
beginning a decade of his most critically acclaimed
work.” Stockwell shrugged at his career’s up,
down, and sideways movements. “I just take it as
it comes,” he said. “One minute you’re nothing,
and the next minute everything’s going for you.”Obituaries
Dean
Stockwell
1936–2021Ge
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The fierce linebacker who became an NFL icon
The reluctant actor who shone in cult movies
Sam
Huff
1934–2021 Igor Kirillov knowingly played
a part for three decades.
As the chief anchor of the
USSR’s main evening TV
news show Vremya (“Time”),
the former
actor would
inform his
audience of
millions about
the latest Soviet triumphs—
the launch of Sputnik in 1957,
the first manned spaceflight
by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, a
bumper grain harvest seem-
ingly every year—and deliver
communiqués from the
Communist Party and reports
on endless Western aggres-
sion. His steady, sonorous
voice became such a con-
stant in Soviet life that it was
sampled by pop star Sting for
his 1985 hit single “Russians.”
But following the USSR’s
collapse in 1991, Kirillov
admitted that his broadcasts
had been filled with lies and
propaganda. “The hardest
thing of all,” he said in 2011,
“was to believe what I was
reading out.”
Born in Moscow, Kirillov
“briefly had ambitions to
become a cinema director but
switched to theater school,”
said The Times (U.K.). His big
break came in 1957, when he
tried out for an announcer’s
job by singing, playing a
guitar, and reciting from
memory a passage from the
state-run newspaper Pravda.
He got the job, and his “good
looks, pleasant timbre, and
fleeting, restrained smile”
would earn him thousands of
love letters from viewers.
Kirillov was well thought of
even by opponents of the
Soviet regime, said NPR
.org, partly because he never
came across as “a Com-
mu nist Party insider.” He
stepped down from Vremya
in 1989, shortly before the
fall of the Soviet empire, and
would in later years host
broadcasts of special events.
Kirillov was not a fan of mod-
ern TV news, believing the
anchors spoke too fast. “If
TV news goes in one ear and
out the other,” he said, “our
heads will be empty.”Igor
Kirillov
1932–202135
The Soviet news
anchor who told
comforting lies