Famous In Life, Noted In Passing

Madeleine L'Engle, 88 She was in her 40s when her 1963 children's sci-fi novel, "A Wrinkle in Time," enabled her to quit running her general store in Connecticut. Rejected by 26 publishers, it won the Newbery Medal and hasn't stopped selling since. Nor have fundamentalists stopped protesting its Jungian-Einsteinian Christianity and its tendency to involve young readers in fantasy—for her, the job description.

Michael Deaver, 69 If Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator, Deaver was the Great Lighting Director. As presidential adviser, he masterminded those stunning photo ops: remember Reagan standing on a cliff overlooking the English Channel during the 40th anniversary of D-Day? Deaver even orchestrated Reagan's funeral, with the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean just as the ceremony ended.

Luciano Pavarotti, 71 The Italian tenor lived large in every sense, and his showmanship matched the rare beauty of his voice. Though it was said he couldn't read music, he stormed the opera stage, then barreled far beyond it. The King of the High Cs became a pop star with his Three Tenors gig; he sang with Bono, Sting and even the Spice Girls for charity. No one did more to popularize opera—while selling 50 million of his own albums worldwide.

Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, 65 Those eyelashes were her trademark when she and televangelist husband Jim Bakker hosted the "PTL Club" in the '70s and '80s. They shed mascara when the Bakkers tearfully revealed he'd had sex with a young (perhaps unwilling) church secretary. And she wore them still, on "Larry King Live," the day before she died of cancer.

Jane Wyman, 90 Wyman made 86 films and 350 television shows in her long career, and won a 1948 Oscar for playing the deaf girl who's raped in "Johnny Belinda." The movie that made her the toast of Hollywood came out the same year she split from her husband, an actor named Ronald Reagan. Coincidence?

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., 89 The first president that Schlesinger wrote a book about was Andrew Jackson; the last was George W. Bush. The bow-tied historian didn't get to every heavyweight of the intervening 175 years, but almost: Kennedy (John, for whom he was an aide, and Robert), FDR (three volumes)—20 books in all, with a 1in-10 Pulitzer Prize percentage. His 1973 book on Nixon, "The Imperial Presidency," gave us an enduring term— and an enduring case of the willies.