Lives in Brief

This week: a great young chef, the original star of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and a radical African politician

THE chef Darren Simpson, pictured, who has died aged 39, was just 21 years old when he became Britain's youngest ever Young Chef of the Year

Children's television actress Carol Lee Scott, best known as Grotbags the witch, has died aged 74.

The entertainer appeared in several children's programmes in the 1980s and early 1990s, including the Rod Hull hit Emu's World.

Scott's death was announced by relatives on social media, leading to an outpouring of nostalgic tributes by fans.

Among those remembering the performer was comedian Rufus Hound, who said she was "an icon for folk of my generation".

Many warmly remembered Scott's Grotbags character, with one fan tweeting: "Rest in peace #grotbags, another part of my childhood heaven bound".

The Somerset-born actress's early career saw stints as a cabaret performer touring clubs in the north of England, a London pub singer and as a Pontins Blue Coat.

She spent 19 years working for the holiday park company before collaborating with Hull on a series of programmes in the 1980s.

The pair created Grotbags while performing a summer season in Cleethorpes, with the character first appearing in Emu's World in the 1980s before going it alone.

Also starring puppeteer Richard Coombs, Grotbags ran on ITV for three series between 1991 and 1993, with each episode following the antics of the green witch and her minions at her Gloomy Fortress.

Scott and Hull remained friends until his death in 1999.

Her niece Gina Mear wrote on Facebook on Wednesday: "My dear aunty Carol lost her brave fight against cancer yesterday. To many of you she was Grotbags - a legend! To me she was just aunty Carol. I shall miss her hugely, rest in peace Carol xxx."

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Daniil Granin, a Russian author who wrote a chronicle of the Nazi siege of Leningrad and several popular novels, has died at the age of 98.

Granin, a Second World War veteran whose writings made him a moral authority for many in Russia, died in hospital in St Petersburg, Russian news reports said.

President Vladimir Putin offered condolences to his family, praising Granin as a "great thinker" and a "man of great spiritual strength".

Granin, who was trained as an industrial engineer, joined the Red Army when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and fought until the end of the war.

He published his first work in 1949 and wrote several novels inspired by his experience as an engineer, describing scientists fighting for their inventions against stolid bureaucracy.

Several of Granin's books were turned into movies, earning him wider popularity.

In the 1970s, he published A Book Of The Blockade, containing horrifying accounts by survivors of the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev launched his openness campaign, Granin won acclaim with a 1987 biography of genetic scientist Nikolai Timofeev-Resovsky, who had faced repression under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's rule.

In 2014, Granin - 95 at the time - made a powerful, widely quoted speech about the siege of Leningrad at the German parliament on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

City authorities said Granin is to be buried on Saturday at the Komarovo cemetery outside St Petersburg.

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Joachim Meisner, the former archbishop of Cologne and a prominent conservative voice in the German church, has died aged 83.

The Cologne archdiocese said he died on Wednesday while on holiday in Bad Fuessing, near the Austrian border.

Born on Christmas Day in 1933 in the eastern German city of Breslau, which is today the Polish city of Wroclaw, Meisner's family fled to the state of Thuringia in 1945 ahead of the advancing Red Army at the end of the Second World War.

He studied theology in the city of Erfurt, and was ordained in 1962.

After advancing up the Catholic hierarchy, he became the Archbishop of Cologne in 1989 and served in that role until 2014, staying five years past the retirement age of 75 at the request of Pope Benedict XVI.

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He was an outspoken and sometimes controversial conservative figure in liberal-minded Germany.

He opposed plans to build a large mosque in Cologne and once urged Chancellor Angela Merkel to apologise for criticising the Vatican's handling of the case of a Holocaust-denying bishop.

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Mexican painter Jose Luis Cuevas, who made his mark by breaking with the hyper-nationalist tradition of the country's muralists of the 1930s and 1940s, has died aged 83.

President Enrique Pena Nieto announced that Cuevas had died on Monday.

Muralists of that time like Diego Rivera idealised the working class, peasants and Mexico's indigenous past. But Cuevas was known for his twisted, distorted depictions of the human form, both in painting and sculpture.

Cuevas was best known for his 1950s manifesto The Nopal Curtain, and a "temporary" mural he erected on a billboard in 1967, and took down a month later.

Both were a reaction to the somewhat ponderous, stereotyped images that prevailed in Mexico's school of mural painting.

Mr Pena Nieto said that Cuevas "will always be remembered as a synonym of universality, freedom, creation".

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Paolo Villaggio, a comic actor whose invented workplace characters interpreted Italians' foibles, has died in Rome aged 84.

His children said Villaggio had been debilitated by complications of diabetes for some time.

Widely popular in Italy, Villaggio expressed his comic qualities through slapstick, satire and irony.

Fellow comic actor Roberto Benigni says Villaggio's iconic character, accountant Ugo Fantozzi, "represented us all". Villaggio invented the Fantozzi character, first in a book, then as the main character in 10 films.

"He was a pitiless child, revolutionary and liberating" and the "greatest clown of his generation," Benigni said of Villaggio's most celebrated roles.

Fantozzi interpreted Italians' worst fears about making fools of themselves in the workplace. The character also allowed them to laugh at themselves as Italians entertaining fantasies about obtaining a job for life, said to be every parent's dream for their child, at least during the economic boom years of the 1960s and 1970s.

Another popular character he invented was timid office worker Giandomenico Fracchia.

Villaggio, a cabaret, TV and film actor, appeared along with Benigni in Federico Fellini's last movie, La Voce della Luna in 1990. Villaggio acted in films by some of Italy's top directors, including Lina Wertmuller, Mario Monicelli and Ermanno Olmi.

In 1992, he became the first comic to win the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion career award.

The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, reporting his death, said Villaggio "knew how to marry, like no other in Italy, Italian comedy's social analysis to the perfect rhythms of slapstick, also known as physical comedy".

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Famed Chicago-based theatrical producer Libby Adler Mages has died at the age of 93.

Her daughter Wendy Mages said her mother died of a heart attack Sunday at the city's Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that during Mages' long career she won a Tony Award for her show Thoroughly Modern Millie, as well a Pulitzer Prize for Three Tall Women.

Tony-winning producer Mick Leavitt praised Mages for all the support she gave to him and others at the beginning of their careers in the theatre.

Mages' daughter, Mari Stuart, says that Mages had a life-long love affair with the theatre and kept working in the business until the day she died.

Besides her daughters, Mages is survived by son-in-law Jeb Stuart and three grandchildren.

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