the times | Saturday May 28 2022 83
Democratic candidate who ran a busi-
ness selling car parts, and his wife Mary,
a municipal clerk. When he was three
the family returned to the orphanage
and let him pick a little sister, Linda. It
was the first moment he became cogni-
sant that Alfred and Mary might not be
his real parents.
At Union High School Liotta was a
self-proclaimed “jock”, excelling at all
sports, uninterested in schoolwork.
After a row with his basketball coach he
tried acting when a teacher told him
that if he won a part in the school play
he would not have to take maths. He
majored in acting at the University of
Miami, graduating in 1978.
Liotta still had little sense of thespian
vocation when he arrived in New York
City and started working in a bar. With-
in three days he was spotted by a casting
agent and appeared in a TV advert. He
Email: [email protected]learnt his trade playing Joey Perrini in
the soap opera Another World for three
years. In 1981 he tried his luck in Holly-
wood. After hundreds of fruitless audi-Gahan was addicted to heroin and
“Fletch”, as he was known to band
mates and fans alike, suffered a nervous
breakdown, missing much of their 1994
tour as a result.
All three recovered, and, in sobriety,
so did their friendship. “Fletch had a
true heart of gold and was always there
when you needed support, a lively con-
versation, a good laugh, or a cold pint,”
Gahan and Gore said in a statement on
the news of his death.
He is survived by Grainne, his wife of
almost 30 years, and their children,
Megan and Joe.
Andrew John Leonard Fletcher was
born in 1961 in Nottingham and moved
to Basildon, Essex, with his parents, Joy
and John Fletcher, when he was two.
He described Basildon, one of the eight
New Towns in southeast England built
after the Second World War, as a place
where “everyone steals cars and goes to
church on Sundays”.
He went to school with the singer
Alison Moyet and formed his first band,
No Romance in China, with Vince
Clarke, another schoolfriend. With the
addition of Gore they became Compo-
sition of Sound and when Gahan joined
as lead vocalist he suggested the nameleft, with his daughter Karsen, 2019
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is the real deal
Marriages and engagements
Page 84tions he made his film debut in The
Lonely Lady, in which he began to hone
the saturnine menace so valued by indie
film directors; in one scene he sexually
assaults a woman with a garden hose.
His friend Melanie Griffith helped
him to secure his first big role playing
her violent ex-husband and a convicted
armed robber in Something Wild (1986).
It won his first Golden Globe nomina-
tion. Liotta would never quite lose the tag
of Fifties pin-up with psychotic tenden-
cies, but Dominick and Eugene (1988), in
which he plays a medical student caring
for his disabled brother, demonstrated
character acting versatility.
After Goodfellas he played a high-
minded surgeon in Article 99 (1992) and
gave a touching performance as a jingle
writer and widower who dotes on his
daughter and falls in love with his
housekeeper, played by Whoopi Gold-
berg, in Corrina Corrina (1994). How-
ever, his bankability tended to revert to
type: Liotta played a creepy policeman
who stalks Madeleine Stowe in Unlaw-
ful Entry (1992) and won plaudits for his
portrayal of another corrupt policeman
in Cop Land (1997).
Liotta’s personal life was restless. He
had a relationship with Heidi von Beltz,
a beautiful stuntwoman who had
been paralysed from the neck down.
He later dated Cher and Brooke
Shields, before meeting the actress
Michelle Grace at a baseball game.
They married in 1997 and divorced in- He is survived by their daugh-
ter, Karsen.
Latterly he lived alone in “a nice lit-
tle house” in the San Fernando Valley,
north of Los Angeles. Disdaining “the
game” of Hollywood, he largely avoid-
ed the whirl of parties and premieres,
often returning to New Jersey to hang
out with childhood friends. He enjoyed
playing poker.
Liotta never surpassed Goodfellas,
but had lost out on the Oscar that many
felt he deserved. “Marty [Scorsese]
called me a week after and said, ‘Don’t
worry about it. I feel that it went really
well,’” Liotta recalled. “That to me was
the ultimate in terms of a nomination or
anything else.”
Ray Liotta, actor, was born on December
18, 1954. He died in his sleep on May 26,
2022, aged 67Depeche Mode, taken from a French
fashion magazine.
After Clarke’s departure in 1981 to
form Yazoo with Moyet, they were
joined by Alan Wilder, who remained
with the group until 1995, when he left
complaining that his contribution had
never received the respect it warranted.
Gahan, Gore and Fletcher decided not
to replace him and continued as a trio,
releasing Depeche Mode’s most recent
album, Spirit, in 2017.
The group’s music influenced bands
from Muse to Coldplay, whose lead
singer, Chris Martin, noted that “soni-
cally, Depeche Mode threw away all the
rulebooks”. Their impact on the devel-
opment of techno and synth-pop was
particularly profound and was perhaps
rivalled only by Kraftwerk’s.
“The beauty of using electronic in
music is that you don’t need to get four
people together in some warehouse to
practise,” Fletcher said. “You can do it in
your bedroom, and it’s all down to
ideas.”Andy “Fletch” Fletcher, musician, was
born on July 8, 1961. He died of
undisclosed causes on May 26, 2022,
aged 60Midge Decter
Leading neoconservative writer and editor
Irving Kristol, the right-wing American
journalist, once described a neo-
conservative as “a liberal who has been
mugged by reality”. He might well have
been describing Midge Decter, his close
friend and fellow architect of the
neoconservative movement, which
reached its apotheosis with the US
invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Decter grew up in a Jewish family of
New Deal Democrats but lost faith in
liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s. As a
writer, editor and commentator she
became an outspoken scourge of the
leftist counterculture, and of feminism,
gay rights, affirmative action and anti-
Vietnam war protesters. Liberalism had
veered into a “general assault... against
the way ordinary Americans had come
to live”, she declared as Gore Vidal
labelled her a “virtuoso of hate”.
Decter ultimately abandoned the
Democratic Party over its failure to
confront communism more robustly.
Along with other disaffected liberal
intellectuals, she defected to President
Reagan’s Republicans. They formed the
neoconservative movement, which
championed traditional social values
and a muscular foreign policy. It
achieved peak influence during George
W Bush’s presidency in the early 2000s.
She never held political office
but was an effective political
organiser, acerbic writer
and frequent public
speaker. She also be-
came “the requisite bad
guy on discussion pan-
els”, she wrote in her
2001 memoirs, An Old
Wife’s Tale: My Seven
Decades in Love and
Wa r. Yet she ignored the
labels that her critics hung
on her. “It’s just an attempt to
defame your ideas,” she told The
New York Times. “Long ago, I decided to
live without reference to what people
called me since all those character-
isations are intended to paralyse me, to
shut me up. The only thing I can do is go
on and say what I think.”
Midge Rosenthal was born in St Paul,
Minnesota, in 1927, the third daughter
of a sporting goods shop owner. She
wrote for her high school’s literary
magazine and went on to study at the
University of Minnesota, New York’s
Jewish Theological Seminary and New
York University. She graduated from
none of them, but found a lifelong
home in New York, where she took a job
as a secretary at Commentary, an intel-
lectual magazine published by the
American Jewish Committee. She
stopped work to raise two daughters,
Rachel and Naomi, from her marriage
to Moshe Decter, a writer and Jewish
activist. Rachel, who died in 2013, was a
writer and artist, while Naomi went
into public relations. After Midge and
Moshe divorced in 1954, she returned to
Commentary as secretary to the editor,
and two years later married the maga-
zine’s deputy editor, Norman Podho-
retz, another Jewish liberal who
became Commentary’s editor in 1960.
She had caught his eye when he mis-
quoted TS Eliot and she corrected him.
Thereafter Decter’s career as a writer
and editor took her to Harper’s maga-
zine, the Saturday Review and the Hud-
son Institute, but her intellectual jour-ney took her much further. In the 1950s
and 1960s she and Podhoretz were cen-
tral members of a group of liberal New
York anti-communist intellectuals
loosely grouped around Commentary.
However, they were alarmed by the rise
of the “new left”, with its aversion to tra-
dition and authority. “The refusal to be
bound by rules, any rules, turned child-
ren against their elders, impelled them
to don rags and roam the country simu-
lating poverty, destroy their brains with
drugs, burn books, and rage against the
very idea of responsibility, social, intel-
lectual or personal,” she wrote later.
In the 1970s Decter produced three
books decrying feminists, the sexual re-
volution, lax parenting and the erosion
of traditional American values — The
Liberated Woman and Other Americans,
The New Chastity and Other Arguments
Against Women’s Liberation and Liberal
Parents, Radical Children. Women were
biologically destined to be wives and
mothers, she wrote. Feminists’ “true
grievance” was not that they were “mis-
treated, discriminated against, op-
pressed, enslaved, but that they are —
women”. Birth control had led to “in-
consequential” sex and empty relation-
ships. Permissive parenting had pro-
duced spoilt children. As a staunch
anti-communist, she also grew dis-
mayed by the Democrats’ post-
Vietnam isolationism and
failure to adopt a tougher
line against the Soviet
Union.
In 1972 she co-found-
ed the Coalition for a
Democratic Majority to
try to stiffen the party’s
resolve, but it failed to
wield much influence over
President Carter’s adminis-
tration. By 1980 she and Pod-
horetz had had enough, and they
backed Ronald Reagan in that year’s
presidential election. “There comes a
time when you need to join the side
you’re on,” she quipped.
Her son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, went
to work at the State Department and
was caught up in the Iran-Contra scan-
dal. Her son, John, one of the two child-
ren she had with Podhoretz, became a
speechwriter for both Reagan and Presi-
dent H W Bush; he is now editor of Com-
mentary. Their daughter, Ruthie Blum, is
a conservative columnist based in Israel.
In 1981 Decter co-founded the Com-
mittee for a Free World, a think tank
dedicated to destroying the Soviet
Union. Her co-founders included
Donald Rumsfeld, of whom she later
wrote a biography, Paul Wolfowitz,
Richard Perle and Jeane Kirkpatrick.
When the Soviet Union collapsed a
decade later she proclaimed “mission
accomplished” and disbanded the com-
mittee. Her work was not quite done,
however. In 1997 she became a found-
ing member of the Project for the New
American Century, a think tank to
“promote American global leadership”.
It did much to build support for the Iraq
war within the Bush administration.Midge Decter, author and journalist, was
born on July 25, 1927. She died on May 9,
2022, aged 94olitical
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afrom the group he had a successful
career as a DJ, often playing exclusive
remixes of Depeche Mode during his
sets, and he ran his own label called
Toast Hawaii. He also at one time
owned a restaurant in St John’s Wood,
north London.
Over more than 40 years together in
the same band, there were ups and
downs and at one point in the 1990s the
band were barely on speaking terms,
using separate limousines and dressing
rooms. Gore became an alcoholic,