Bernie Brillstein, 77, a Hollywood manager and producer who helped mold the shape of television with his contributions to series like "Saturday Night Live" and "The Muppet Show," died of chronic pulmonary disease Thursday night. In a 52-year show business career, Brillstein represented entertainers from singer Frankie Laine to a later generation of comic rebels that included John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Lorne Michaels, Martin Short and others.

Beginning in 1985, Brillstein worked closely with Brad Grey, a protege who is now chairman of the Paramount Motion Picture Group. The two were allied in what evolved into one of the most influential management and production companies in Hollywood, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. "Bernie meant more to me than I could ever describe to you," Grey said of Brillstein, a large, rough-hewn operator who took as much pride in wrangling a deal as his clients took in the creative work that resulted. "He was my mentor, my friend and a father."

Simon Gray, 71, a celebrated British playwright known as much for his lacerating dark comedies as his outrageously self-castigating memoirs, died of lung cancer Wednesday in London.

Gray began smoking heavily at 7 and for much of his life sustained a whiskey and three-bottle-a-day champagne habit that he said "somehow liberated" his writing. He quit drinking in 1997, he said, after passing out during a toast.

His behavior informed the rumpled restlessness of his characters. He created memorable sketches of decay and self-absorption in such plays as "Butley" (1971), "Otherwise Engaged" (1975) and "Quartermaine's Terms" (1981). He enjoyed fruitful professional partnerships with actor Alan Bates and fellow dramatist Harold Pinter, who directed many of Gray's plays.

Anthony J. Russo, 71, a shaggy-haired, countercultural, unemployed policy wonk when he teamed up with Daniel Ellsberg, a more buttoned-down antiwar figure, to leak the voluminous, top-secret government history of the Vietnam War called the Pentagon Papers, died Wednesday in Suffolk, Va.

Ellsberg announced the death on a website, antiwar.com. Russo chafed at being called the "Xerox aide" because of his role in finding a copying machine and working long nights to reproduce the 7,000-page study. In fact, it was Russo's words -- after weeks of conversations -- that had definitively started the enterprise: "Let's do it!" he said, according to Ellsberg's book "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers."

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