In tragedy, artists find inspiration, despair

The least of Jennifer Hudson's concerns is how the slayings of her mother, brother and nephew will affect her career. As an artist, your work springs out of your life. When that life has been forever altered, of course everything changes.

Hudson thus has joined a long, sad line of artists and performers who have confronted tragedy, often at the height of their careers. For some, the loss was reflected in the work that followed. For others, the grief remained intensely private.

• Last year, Kanye West lost his role model and most trusted adviser when his mother, Donda, died of complications from plastic surgery. On his subsequent tour, he dedicated his cover of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" to her, and "Hey Mama," a previously recorded tribute, became an emotional high point.

• Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan retired in 1993 months after his father, James, was murdered at a North Carolina highway rest area. He cited his father's death as influencing his retirement and later stint in professional baseball, his father's longtime dream for his son.

• Johnny Carson's son Richard was pursuing photography when he was killed in a car crash in 1991. The talk-show host dedicated the final minutes of his next show to his son's photographs, accompanied by Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Riviera Paradise."

• Eric Clapton's son Conor, 4, died in an accidental fall from a New York high-rise in early 1991. The singer/guitarist channeled his grief into his music. "Tears in Heaven," released that year, became one of his biggest hits and won a Grammy.

• When Ken Kesey lost his son Jed in a college bus accident in 1984, "his hair turned gray almost overnight," wrote journalist Chip Brown. The author stopped publishing for a time. In 1992 Kesey released the novel "Sailor Song," in which the main character copes with the loss of a child.

• Director Francis Ford Coppola's eldest son, Gian-Carlo, 22, was killed in a 1986 boating accident. Coppola completed making the mournful "Gardens of Stone" before dedicating 1988's "Tucker: The Man and His Dream" to his car-loving son.

• After Paul Newman's son died of a drug overdose in 1978, the actor founded the Scott Newman Center, which was dedicated to "preventing drug abuse through education."

• Director Roman Polanski's pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was among five people in a Hollywood home who were brutally murdered by Charles Manson's "Family" in 1969. Polanski said he gave away all of his possessions, and his ensuing films included an especially violent "Macbeth" and the classic "Chinatown," upon which Polanski imposed a horrifyingly dark ending.

• Actress Carole Lombard was married to Clark Gable when she, her mother and Gable's best man were killed in a plane crash while on a tour to sell war bonds in 1942. Gable continued to work (and drink) heavily and married two more times, but as Esther Williams wrote, "he was never the same."

• Singer/actor Dean Martin's son Dino, a captain in the Air National Guard, died when his F-4 fighter jet smashed into a California mountain on March 20, 1987. "It was bad, but the worst part was the agony of waiting," Martin said that year. "It took four or five days before they could confirm that his body had been found."