Famous In Life, Noted In Passing

Michelangelo Antonioni, 94 Even in the '60s, his enigmatic films caused controversy. "L'Avventura"—a slow-paced study in alienation—was booed at Cannes, then embraced by critics. In his first English film, "Blowup" (1966), a London photographer believes a picture he shot contains the clue to a murder. But it's the final tennis scene that will blow your mind.

Ingmar Bergman, 89 With Federico Fellini, he was the 1950s' great pioneer of European art film. The Italian was a freewheeling romantic; the Swede showed his stark elegance in such films as "The Seventh Seal" (1957), with its chess match for mortal stakes. Such later films as "Cries and Whispers" (1972) seem nearly unendurable in their pain and intensity. Yet his adaptation of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" (1975) is a sunny artifice Fellini himself might have loved.

Bowie Kuhn, 80 During his 15 years as commissioner of baseball, Kuhn tussled, for one reason or another, with Mantle, Mays and Aaron—he even suspended George Steinbrenner. Yet he presided over a great period of growth in the sport, ushering in divisional playoffs, night games in the World Series and free-agency. Lots of home runs, and nary a steroid in sight.

Don Ho, 76 Ho wrote lush, lulling pop songs that became as much a symbol for Hawaiian indulgence as roast suckling pig. Best-known was his 1966 hit "Tiny Bubbles": he often opened and closed shows with it, as if to say aloha: hello and goodbye.

Boris Yeltsin, 76 The beefy, sybaritic Siberian left a mixed legacy—the communist boss who finally smashed the Party, yet left an unstable Russia, prey for oligarchs, quagmired in Chechnya. But he allowed the press and business to operate freely, and in 1991, he climbed on top of a tank to stare down communists threatening a coup of President Mikhail Gorbachev—perhaps single-handedly saving the country's fledgling reformation. In 1999, he became the first Russian to relinquish power voluntarily. Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin's hard-line, hand-picked successor, says he'll do the same. We'll see.

© 2007