Also noted

Ron Moody, 91, the British character actor who rose to prominence in the role of Fagin, Dickens' guru of thievery, in "Oliver!," the stage and movie versions of "Oliver Twist," died Thursday.

His wife, Therese Blackbourn, confirmed his death to Variety. Moody was a spindly, long-faced man with a prominent nose and often, in performance, an effervescent sparkle, as those who recall his Fagin will attest.

He wanted to be an actor from an early age and was always the class joker, he said in interviews, but he came into acting late; he had planned on becoming a sociologist and studied at the London School of Economics.

But while writing a thesis, he took time off to perform in a musical comedy revue and was asked afterward if he would care to pursue such a thing for a living. He would, he said. His first professional stage appearance, in a revue called "Intimacy at Eight," came in 1952. He was 28.

Moody became a revue regular in London but did not appear in a full-fledged theatrical musical until 1959, when he took the role of the governor of Buenos Aires in the first West End production of Leonard Bernstein's "Candide." The show was not a hit in London. But the next year he landed the role of Fagin, and everything changed.

He would never find another character that earned him anywhere near the attention that Fagin did, although from then on he was able to work in television, in movies and on the stage on both sides of the Atlantic. "Oliver!," based on Dickens' rags-to-riches tale of an orphan boy who escapes the hardscrabble life of the street, was adapted for the musical stage by Lionel Bart without many of the darker, more threatening elements of the 1830s novel. Moody's Fagin, as a misguiding underworld mentor to the young hero, was delivered in that cheerier spirit. Instead of villainy, he projected curmudgeonliness; instead of wickedness, raffishness.

In musical numbers like "You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two" and "Reviewing the Situation," Moody's revue background was evident. He was physically deft, vocally supple and charismatically self-deprecating — a scenery-chewing audience pleaser.

A writer, composer and lyricist as well as an actor, he was the author of four novels and a handful of stage shows.

Horst Brandstaetter, 81, owner of the company whose finger-high Playmobil figures can be found in playrooms around the world and who brought the Hula-Hoop to Europe in the 1950s, died June 3.

His company, the Brandstaetter Group, announced his death.

Brandstaetter epitomized one of Germany's most successful business types: the so-called Mittelstaendler, who own the thousands of small and medium-size family-run enterprises on which much of Germany's engineering, technical and design acumen is based. In Brandstaetter's case, the decision to enter the family firm came at age 19, as an apprentice, after a scattershot childhood marred by the death of his father when the son was just 6 and by World War II.

Brandstaetter repeatedly adapted his company to the changing conditions of global manufacturing, switching from metal to plastic toys in the 1950s. Like many Germans of his generation, he got ideas from the United States, which helped rebuild West Germany as a democracy and a flourishing market economy after World War II. It was after a visit to the United States that, in 1958, he introduced the Hula-Hoop to Germany and then to the rest of Europe.

Mindful of his cash flow as the world oil crisis drove up the cost of plastics in the 1970s, Brandstaetter summoned his chief designer, Hans Beck, and asked him to come up with toys that would use less plastic than Hula-Hoops and other large toys.

Beck came up with Playmobil, whose miniature models and environments are said to have been inspired by children's drawings and the figurines of traditional Christmas crèches. The first three models were scarcely a hit when introduced at a national toy fair in the 1974. But children across the globe embraced them. There are 2.8 billion Playmobil toys in circulation worldwide, the company said.

Ludvik Vaculik, 88, a leading Czech writer, dissident and intellectual, whose calls for human rights and trenchant critique of Communism helped foster a short-lived period of freedom that culminated in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, has died. He was 88.

Vaculik was a key figure in the underground publishing world in the 1970s and '80s, helping to give voice to other dissident writers who were banned by the government. He was censored for more than two decades, but still managed to write a series of influential articles, books and novels, including "The Guinea Pigs" (1970), "The Czech Dreambook" (1980) and "A Cup of Coffee With My Interrogator" (1987).

Perhaps most notable was a political manifesto in 1968 called "Two Thousand Words," in which he critiqued the moral, economic and political decay wrought by the Communist state. The document helped buttress the democratic changes that were being promulgated by Alexander Dubcek, the Czechoslovak leader at the time, whose call for "socialism with a human face" led to a momentary "Prague Spring."