Alice Schiller was a bit of a prude who didn't swear, drink or smoke, much less endorse women disrobing for entertainment. So when her husband told her he wanted to turn his struggling Hollywood nightclub into a striptease house, she cried. But once she dried her tears, she got down to business, transforming an erstwhile Latin dance and jazz club on a rundown stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard into a Los Angeles landmark: the Pink Pussycat. Opened in 1961, it was pink through and through, just like the inside of Schiller's house and her entire wardrobe. For the next 20 years, Schiller was the club's hostess extraordinaire who took pride in marketing burlesque to fit mainstream tastes. She also invented unique stage names for the strippers, including Fran Sinatra, Samya Davis Jr. and Dina Martin. Schiller died in her sleep Dec. 19 in Washington, D.C. She was 95.

South African poet and former political prisoner Dennis Brutus, 85, who fought apartheid in words and deeds and remained an activist well after the fall of his country's racist system, died Saturday at his home in Cape Town. Brutus was an anti-apartheid activist jailed at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela in the mid-1960s. He helped persuade Olympic officials to ban South Africa from competition from 1964 until apartheid ended nearly 30 years later.

Dr. Edwin Krebs, 91, the University of Washington Nobel laureate who co-discovered the mechanism by which a wide variety of processes are turned on and off within the cell and thereby led to an explosion of knowledge about how cells grow, change, divide and die, died Dec. 21 in Seattle.

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