Lottery winner's mixed fortunes

BEEN AND GONE
By Andrew Walker
BBC News Profiles Unit

Film-maker Joan Root and Mexican rebel leader, Comandante Ramona

Our regular column covering the passing of significant - but lesser-reported - characters of the past month.

William "Bud" Post who has died aged 66, won $16.2m on the Pennsylvania state lottery in 1988, after pawning a $40 ring to buy the tickets. But the dream soon turned sour.

His landlady, who helped to buy the tickets, successfully sued Post for a third of his winnings, his brother hired a hitman to kill him and he filed for bankruptcy in 1996. With the lottery win paid in yearly instalments of $500,000, Post found himself $500,000 in debt within three months. He leaves his seventh wife and an estimated nine children.

Another person for whom the American Dream was not what they had expected was Phyllis Gates. In November 1955, she married Hollywood's most eligible bachelor, the film star Rock Hudson, only to discover that her husband was gay.

Ms Gates, who swapped life as a secretary to hob-nob with Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and Nöel Coward, divorced her husband in 1958. Mr Hudson, who died of an Aids-related illness in 1985, reportedly said he had loved only two people in his life. One of them was Ms Gates. She never remarried.

Across the Atlantic, the death was announced of Michael Wharton, the decidedly British satirical journalist whose Peter Simple column graced the pages of the Daily Telegraph for nearly five decades.

Characters like Alderman Foodbotham, "the 25-stone, crag-visaged, iron watch-chained, firm-booted perpetual chairman of Bradford City Tramways and Fine Arts Committee" and Mrs Dutt-Pauker, left-wing chatelaine of the Highgate mansion, "Marxmount", poked fun at the British post-war political consensus which Wharton despised. Thrown out of Oxford, Wharton worked at the BBC before joining the Telegraph in his mid-40s. He was 92.

Coin collector

Also quintessentially British, if of a more left-leaning persuasion, Professor Philip Grierson, the Cambridge medievalist, has died aged 95. A resident fellow at Gonville and Caius College for 70 years, Grierson was a world expert on medieval coinage and, despite his modest salary, built up a coin collection valued at between £5m and £10m.

A communist sympathiser during the 1930s, he helped Jewish academics escape from Nazi Germany. Besides this, Grierson was also a passionate sci-fi fan, loved pizzas and could pilot a plane but could not drive a car.

Termite castles

Joan Root, the pioneering wildlife film-maker, was murdered at her home in Kenya. She was 69. With her former husband, Alan, she made a number of highly-regarded natural history documentaries. One of their films, Mysterious Castles of Clay, a highly-entertaining look at the inner workings of a termite mound, received an Academy Award nomination.

No stranger to danger, Root almost died while shooting Mzima: Portrait of a Spring when a male hippo's tusk punctured her diving mask. An active conservationist, she transformed her 88-acre property into a noted animal sanctuary.

Rebel leader

Another intrepid female, the Mexican Zapatista rebel leader Comandante Ramona, has died after a long struggle with kidney disease. She was believed to have been 47.

A familiar - if often visibly frail - figure, her face usually covered by a black ski mask, she was a prominent advocate of women's rights and a promoter of traditional crafts. Little is known about her life, other than that she was a Tzotzil Indian who joined the rebel movement before its January 1994 armed uprising and rose to prominence in its ranks.

Others who have died this month include Lord Mishcon, lawyer to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, the former German President Johannes Rau, (see full obituary) British Muslim cleric Zaki Badawi, (see full obituary) London's whale, actors Chris Penn,(see full obituary) Tony Franciosa and John Woodnutt, actresses Shelley Winters (see full obituary) and Anne Meacham, singers Janette Carter, Lou Rawls (see full obituary) and Wilson Pickett, (see full obituary) physicist Richard Dalitz, horticulturalist Christopher Lloyd (see full obituary) and British politicians Tony Banks (see full obituary) and Lord Merlyn-Rees (see full obituary).