Simms Taback, 79, a children's book illustrator and author who won the Caldecott Medal in 2000 for his adaptation of the nonsensical Yiddish folktale "Joseph Had a Little Overcoat," died Dec. 25 of panceratic cancer at his home in Ventura, Calif.
He was one of a new breed of commercial illustrators who in the 1960s rejected realistic trends in favor of expressionistic and comic visual storytelling.
Known for a wry naif style, he enjoyed using snappy colors and playful cut-and-paste imagery to create whimsical characterizations of people, barnyard animals and jungle beasts.
Robert Easton, 81, a character actor turned accent coach to the stars who transformed Al Pacino into Scarface and Gregory Peck first into Josef Mengele and later into Abraham Lincoln, among other feats of articulatory alchemy, died on Dec. 16 at his home in Los Angeles.
He reigned for more than 40 years as the entertainment industry's dean of dialects, sought after by actors needing to lose or gain an accent, sometimes in the few frantic hours before a critical audition.
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