Obituaries

Mr Becker was a theatre critic and financier who acquired Janus Films with a partner in 1965, expanding its catalogue of art-house and Hollywood classics and eventually broadening their distribution to university audiences and home viewers on DVD. Founded in the mid-1950s by two former Harvard students, Janus originally prospered by exposing American filmgoers to the avant-garde work of ground-breaking but largely unfamiliar post-World War II European and Japanese directors, including Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson and Kenji Mizoguchi. After acquiring the company, Mr. Becker and Saul J. Turell, a documentary producer and television pioneer, secured the rights to a vast trove of international films, including Jean Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” and Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” as well as vanguard American works like Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” and the original “King Kong.”

From 1968 to 1970 Mr Smith served as the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, as the poet laureate’s post was then known. He was the author of many volumes of poems throughout his life, as well as criticism, memoirs, translations of poetry from a spate of European languages and children’s verse. At his death he was an Emeritus Professor of English at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. Mr Smith’s poems for adults were praised for their diction and thematic variety. They ranged over the natural world, love, the experience of war, his Choctaw ancestry and many other subjects.

Justice Mercer spent one year at Queen’s University Law school before winning the Rhodes Scholarship, and then completed his law degree at Oxford, where he took a B.A. in Jurisprudence in 1969 followed by the graduate BCL degree in 1970. Upon his call to the Newfoundland Bar in 1971, he practiced law with the firm Mercer, Spracklin and Mercer for three years. In 1974 he joined the Department of Justice and quickly rose to the rank of Assistant Deputy Minister and then Associate Deputy Minister. In 1992, he was appointed a justice of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland, Trial Division.

Dr Linda Fletcher graduated with a BA from Vanderbilt University, Nashville and was awarded an Msc Physiology at Oxford whilst a Rhodes Scholar. Subsequently, she received a medical degree specialising in radiology at Harvard Medical School. Linda worked as a radiologist at the Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center, Plains Township.

Practiced law before joining ESSO, where he worked in the marketing department before becoming Managing Director and working in Africa, Geneva and London.

One of Australia's leading public intellectuals, Professor Stretton was a social reformer. After his Rhodes Scholarship he was appointed as a tutor in modern history at Balliol College before joining the University of Adelaide to become professor of history. He was 30, the youngest professor in an Australian university. His 1974 Boyer Lectures, Housing and Government, argued the virtues of a mixed private and public housing system. Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment (1976) analysed the possibilities for democratic socialist reform in capitalist democracies. Urban Planning in Rich and Poor Countries (1978) considered urban planning worldwide. As deputy chairman of the South Australian Housing Trust, Professor Stretton saw many of his ideas put into practice.

After graduating from Hendrix College, Mr Warren studied philosophy at Columbia University in New York and was then awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. On completion of his Masters degree at Oxford University, he did doctoral work at the University of Nuremburg and then began a long and career as a writer and adventurer, travelling extensively throughout the world. He had a strong scholarly interest in philosophy and history.

At Oxford, McNeill played basketball for an unofficial team he started.

While in the United Kingdom, he worked for the Daily Mail. After returning home to Canada, McNeill began working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He was the CBC's correspondent in Washington, D.C. and worked for Newsmagazine. He reported on the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the Iranian Revolution for the CBC. McNeill later moved to the United States, where he worked for CBS News until 1987. He was the CBS News correspondent in Moscow. He later worked for Christian Science Monitor Television.

He got a Rhodes Scholarship in 1958 and a Nieman Fellowship in 1981. In 1984, he won the George Polk Award for Network Television Reporting for his "unusual glimpses of Soviet life". He was nominated for the 1988 News & Documentary Emmy Award for "Outstanding Interview/Interviewers - For Programs" as a producer and correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor Reports. He won the 1990 News and Documentary Emmy Award for "Outstanding Informational, Cultural or Historical Programming (segments)" as a correspondent of a World Monitor segment on the Soviet Union.

He was a journalism teacher at Boston University.

Oxford Rugby and Boxing blue, and also played rugby for Wales. Later worked in commercial development and web marketing.