Departures: M*A*S*H star dead at 87

Loretta Swit

An Emmy Award–­winning actress who starred in one of TV’s most iconic series, Swit died May 30. She was 87. The New Jersey native and aspiring actress moved to Hollywood in 1969 where she found bit roles before earning her big break. In 1972, Swit was cast as Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the CBS television adaptation of M*A*S*H. The dark comedy, set during the Korean War, featured Swit in the leading female role alongside co-star Alan Alda. She appeared in nearly all 256 episodes of the series, which ran from 1972 until its record-setting finale in 1983. For bringing depth to what had originally been a flat character, Swit earned Emmys in 1980 and 1982. She also guest starred in The Love Boat, among others.

Charlie Rangel

A fixture of New York City politics for decades and a co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rangel died May 26. He was 94. An Army artilleryman during the Korean War, Rangel won a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his service. After dabbling in law and politics, Rangel beat embattled House of Representatives icon Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in the 1970 Democratic primary. Rangel embarked on a 46-year stint in the House, where he served as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. He relinquished the chairmanship in 2010 amid a House ethics committee investigation that later found him guilty of 11 ethics violations. They included failure to pay rental income taxes, which he called an oversight.

Phil Robertson

A former football star who parlayed his love of hunting into the formation of a multi-­million-dollar duck call enterprise as well as a popular reality television series, Robertson died May 25. He was 79. Robertson started as quarterback ahead of future Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw while at Louisiana Tech during the 1960s. But Robertson gave up the sport because, he said, it interfered with his first love: hunting. By 1973, Robertson had founded Duck Commander selling duck calls. His flamboyant style and colorful stories enticed A&E producers to give him and his family a reality series titled Duck Dynasty, although his Christian beliefs and conservative politics sometimes sparked public controversy. The program ran from 2012 until 2017.

Alasdair MacIntyre

One of the great moral philosophers of the 20th century whose best-known book After Virtue encouraged thinkers to look backward to medieval and classical thought, MacIntyre died May 21. He was 96. During his long public career, the Scotland native meandered from Marxism in his youth toward Roman Catholicism in his later years. He was praised both in the Marxist magazine Jacobin and in First Things, a journal popular among Catholic thinkers. After Virtue, which sold more than 100,000 copies, criticized liberal individualism as a failed Enlightenment-era experiment and urged thinkers to return to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. MacIntyre taught at Oxford, Vanderbilt, and Duke before finishing his career at Notre Dame.

Kay Arthur

A Christian author whose Bible studies became mainstays on the shelves of Christian bookstores around the world, Arthur died May 20 at the age of 91. Arthur and her husband Jack Arthur founded the Tennessee-based Reach Out Ranch in 1970 to write and teach Bible studies for local youths. By the early 1980s, the Arthurs’ organization had taken the name Precept Ministries International. Then in 1996, the couple began producing a syndicated Bible study television program called Precepts for Life, which the organization said reached more than 75 million households during its 23-year run. Arthur also won four Gold Medallion Book Awards from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.