Danielle Mitterrand

Former first lady of France and human rights campaigner

Danielle Mitterrand in 2005.

In the last interview Danielle Mitterrand gave before her death at the age of 87, the former French first lady recalled berating her friend Fidel Castro for the torturing and killing of Cuban political prisoners. Surprised he did not tell her to shut up or throw her out, she asked why he put up with her nagging. "Because I like you a lot," replied the Cuban president.
Mitterrand was liked and admired by many, as much for her ability to take world leaders to task as for her unwavering support for minority and humanitarian issues, from the death penalty and discrimination to the lack of water or education in impoverished African villages. She was also respected for breaking the first lady mould and refusing to be defined by either her husband's role as head of state or the humiliation he heaped on her through his infidelity.
She was born Danielle Gouze in Verdun, the daughter of two leftwing academics. During the second world war, her father, by then a secondary school headteacher, was sacked by the Vichy administration after refusing to hand over a list of names of Jewish pupils and teachers in his school to the Nazis.
While her family harboured men being hunted by the Gestapo, Danielle joined the French Resistance at the age of 17, with her elder sister Christine, and was later awarded the prestigious Resistance Medal. In 1941, she helped François Mitterrand, a fellow member codenamed Captain Morland on the run from the Gestapo, by pretending to be his girlfriend, and the pair promptly fell in love. They married in 1944. The couple had three sons: Pascal, who died aged two months, Jean-Christophe and Gilbert.
When her husband was elected in 1981 for the first of his two seven-year terms, Danielle, devoted herself to human rights work and humanitarian causes. She became the French Foreign Office's favourite "bête noire", as, armed with good intentions, she rode roughshod over their diplomatic manoeuvres: the plight of the Kurds became a particular obsession. After nearly being blown up in a car bomb in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1992, which killed seven and wounded 17 others in the convoy, she vowed: "I will continue fighting until my death."
Her campaigning was somewhat overshadowed by the publicity that surrounded the many betrayals she suffered at the hands of her husband. When her husband's mistress, installed in a large apartment a stone's throw from the Elysée Palace, gave birth to a daughter, Mazarine, in 1974, Danielle later described it as "neither a discovery, nor a drama". She was, however, deeply shocked in 1994 when the existence of this second family, which was widely known in French political and media circles but protected by an unofficial conspiracy of silence, became public knowledge. At the time, also unknown to her, François had been diagnosed with the prostate cancer that would eventually kill him.
Danielle earned respect for her elegance and dignity, when at her husband's state funeral in January 1996, she allowed Mazarine to stand between her two sons in front of his tricolor-draped coffin. A final humiliation was still to come. Again, unbeknown to her, the former president had asked not to be buried in a joint grave in the Morvan national park in Burgundy, as the couple had planned, but with his family at Cluny in the Saône-et-Loire region.
"There was nothing banal or mediocre," she wrote of their life together. "For all those who loved us, François and Danielle were inseparable," she wrote afterwards.
She showed she had lost none of her fight by supporting anti-globalisation campaigners. "I fight for a new society. Money makes us mad, and yet it is only a tool ... today we are afraid of losing our house, our work, our health, of walking down the street, of meeting our neighbours. We are afraid of everything. And we are wrong. We have to construct a world based on solidarity."
After a spell in hospital in September, Danielle insisted on attending the 25th anniversary of her non-profit making humanitarian organisation France Libertés in October. She is survived by Jean-Christophe and Gilbert.
• Danielle Émilienne Isabelle Gouze, former first lady and human rights activist, born 29 October 1924; died 22 November 2011

Shelagh Delaney

Shelagh Delaney, the playwright, who died on Sunday aged 71, wrote – at the age of 17 – A Taste of Honey (1958), which was to place her at the heart of what became known as the kitchen sink movement in Britain's post-war dramatic revival.

Prompted by her contempt for traditional, decorous West End drawing room dramas about the love lives of well-bred people, Shelagh Delaney spent a fortnight furiously writing a play of such arresting, authentic and seedy social realism that it became one of the most influential works of its generation.

Set in a grimy industrial Lancashire lodging house, the action centres on a gawky, adolescent schoolgirl who is preparing to have a child by a black sailor who promptly abandons her. Other characters include the girl's tarty, devil-may-care mother and her sleazy lover, as well as a gentle, homosexual art student who befriends the girl during the pregnancy.

Staged in distinctive, semi-music hall style by the radical and controversial director Joan Littlewood, of the Theatre Workshop at Stratford, east London, the play created a stir with its strident honesty, emotional integrity, exuberant humour and touches of poetry.

It opened at Stratford just three weeks after John Gielgud's production of Terence Rattigan's Variation On A Theme arrived in the West End. The latter play, about a much-married elegant socialite and a young ballet dancer, had been witnessed by Delaney during its tour of the provinces, driving her to compose A Taste of Honey. The theatrical clash could hardly have been greater.

"Two styles of theatre were at war across London," observed Rattigan's biographer Geoffrey Wansell. "And there was little doubt who would win." Within four months, Variation On A Theme had closed at the Globe, while the following February A Taste Of Honey opened at Wyndham's.

After transferring to the West End and then to Broadway it became, in 1962, a successful film directed by Tony Richardson, with Rita Tushingham as the girl, Dora Bryan as the mother and Murray Melvin as the motherly art student, a part he also played on stage.
What gave A Taste of Honey its theatrical impact was Littlewood's dynamic staging and Shelagh Delaney's sympathetic view of her working-class characters and their predicaments.
Coming from the pen of a Lancashire shop girl who had left school at 16, the play's matter-of-fact defiance of social and sexual convention, its open-minded attitude to racial miscegenation, and its acceptance of the prospect, for unmarried women, of a life without men, were as refreshing and bracing as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger had been two years earlier.
But A Taste of Honey was free of Osborne's rage and rebelliousness. Apart from its sexual politics, the play evoked human relationships with warmth and humour, providing an invigorating contrast to its gloomy theme; the heroine seems to accept the surrounding squalor: "I really do live at the same time as myself, don't I?"
Why Shelagh Delaney, considered the most promising playwright of her time, never wrote anything else of comparable importance for the stage was a mystery. A second play, The Lion in Love (1960), also dealt with an unhappy family, this time composed of market-stall traders. The play again portrayed the relationship between a daughter and her wayward – this time drunken rather than promiscuous – mother, but the daughter was more mature and the mother more central to the play's interest. While not without quality, it was not a notable success.
None the less she remained – at 22 – feted by the public and by the critics. "Surely no dramatist can ever have got farther on a smaller body of work," noted the critic John Russell Taylor.
Shelagh Delaney was born on November 25 1939 into a working-class family in the northern industrial town of Salford, near Manchester. On failing her 11-plus she went to Broughton Secondary School and, while there was talk of her being moved to a grammar school, she left at 16 with no special qualifications.
It was during a stint with an engineering firm that she visited a Manchester theatre to see Variations on a Theme, starring Margaret Leighton. If that was drama, Delaney decided, she could do better herself. She set about A Taste of Honey and sent it to Littlewood, who accepted it for production. After the usual Theatre Workshop process of adaptation and elaboration with the inclusion into its lively northern idiom of nursery rhymes, songs, rhythmical repetitions, jazz and vaudeville gags, the author was summoned to attend a late rehearsal at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, where she failed to notice any changes to the text until they were pointed out.
A Taste of Honey had two separate runs in the East End of London, in 1958 and 1959, before it transferred to Wyndham's for 350 performances. It was celebrated as the epitome of kitchen-sink dramaturgy 10 years before the abolition of official stage censorship. While it won critical respect, Littlewood's jaunty style of musical staging was not universally accepted.
Lindsay Anderson, writing in Encore magazine, called it "a work of complete, exhilarating originality. A real escape from the middlebrow, middle-class vacuum of the West End." To The Spectator's Alan Brien, though, it was no more than "a boozed, exaggerated, late-night anecdote of a play which slithers unsteadily between truth and fantasy, between farce and tragedy, between aphrodisiac and emetic. Each character swells into focus through a different distorting lens.
"The play is written," Brien added, "as if it were a film script with an adolescent contempt for logic or form or practicability upon a stage, and Miss Joan Littlewood has produced it with the knockabout inconsequence of an old-fashioned Living Newspaper tract."
After The Lion in Love, Shelagh Delaney turned to writing scripts for film and television. These included the adaptation of A Taste of Honey for Tony Richardson's film; Albert Finney's Charlie Bubbles, about a writer who learns that professional success is no consolation for a failed emotional life; and Mike Newell's Dance With A Stranger about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.
Among other film credits were The White Bus (1966) for Lindsay Anderson; Winter House (1986); and Love Lessons (1987), from the book by Joan Wyndham. Television credits included Did Your Nanny Come From Bergen? (1970); St Martin's Summer (1974); The House That Jack Built (1977); and Find Me First (1979). The House That Jack Built, adapted from several of her television playlets, was staged on Broadway in 1979.
She also wrote a novel – Sweetly Sings The Donkey (1964) and several radio plays.
Shelagh Delaney had a daughter, who survives her.

Shelagh Delaney, born November 25 1939, died November 20 2011

Jamie Pierre

Jamie Pierre, who has died aged 38, was known as “skiing’s most dangerous man”, “the Gravity Research Skier” or “The King of Big Air” for his delight in skiing off clifftops; his most lunatic escapade saw him fall 255ft, the height of a 24-storey office block.

It was, he admitted, an all-too literally death-defying stunt. Having skied towards the precipice, at Grand Targhee Resort in the Teton mountains of Wyoming, Pierre tucked his skis underneath him in an attempt to remain upright. “I prefer to land in the slouch position so you spread out the impact,” he said afterwards. But about half way through his four-second freefall he lost control, and footage of the jump shows him plunging headfirst into the powder snow at the cliff’s base.

As his support crew rushed to extricate him from the 10ft impact crater, it was unclear whether he was still alive. Then a voice crackled over the radio: Pierre was unscathed but for a cut lip. It had, he admitted, been “way scary landing on my back”, but moments later he was celebrating a world-record breaking feat that – even in the adrenalin-soaked world of extreme sports – won him plaudits for unparalleled daring. His wife Amee, at home with their baby daughter, took a dimmer view, and refused to speak to him for several days.

Matthew Jamison Fredric Marie Pierre was born at Minnetonka, Minnesota, on February 22 1973, the third of eight children of Gerard Pierre, a Frenchman from Aix-en-Provence, and his wife Pam. Always known as Jamie, the boy stared skiing at the age of 10, and immediately displayed a zest for speed and jumping. According to his mother he was “fearless” and, after leaving High School, Pierre pursued life as a “ski-bum” – working casual jobs at resorts in order to fund his increasingly risky adventures on the slopes.

He entered his first extreme skiing competition in 1995, but it was his willingness to throw himself off precipices that marked him out. In 1997 he jumped 50ft. As the drops grew bigger, and Pierre flipped head over heels in front of ever larger cliffs, photographers and sponsors began to take notice. On many occasions he landed on his skis and continued down the mountain as though descending a well-groomed piste.

In 2003 he launched himself off a 165ft cliff in Utah’s Wolverine Cirque. Then, the following year, he took on a 185ft fall in Switzerland. “People thought he was a little unhinged,” said the skiing writer Sam Moulton.

In 2005 Pierre married and this, combined with a new-found Christian faith, inclined him to limit his stunts. But there was still one jump he wanted to make. So, at dawn on January 25 2006, he caught the first chairlift of the day at Grand Targhee, and made his way off-piste. “Everyone’s looking at me like I’m a nut job,” he said, no doubt with some justice, before propelling himself into the void.
With the record under his belt, Pierre settled down a little. “The plan is to ski more, fall out of the sky less,” he said. This did not prevent his taking risks, however, and he was snowboarding off-piste on early season snow on November 13 when he apparently triggered an avalanche. This dragged him across rocks and a small cliff – precisely the kind of dangers over which he had so often soared clear.
Jamie Pierre is survived by his wife and their two daughters.

Jamie Pierre, born February 22 1973, died November 13, 2011

Sir David Jack

Sir David Jack, who has died aged 87, was the scientific brain behind the rise of the pharmaceuticals company Glaxo and credited with the discovery of no fewer than seven highly important drugs, among them salbutamol (marketed as Ventolin), which has saved the lives of millions of asthmatics, and Zantac, used to treat peptic ulcers.

Glaxo is perhaps the greatest success story in post-war British industry. From unglamorous beginnings as a producer of powdered milk for infants ("Glaxo builds bonnie babies"), it transformed itself into one of the world's largest and most profitable manufacturers of prescription medicines. The company's corporate success is often attributed to Sir Paul Girolami, the company's financial controller from 1965, then chief executive and chairman during the 1980s. But he would not have been able to effect the transformation in the company's fortunes without the scientific ingenuity of Jack and his team.

Sir David Jack

 

A Scottish pharmacologist, Jack joined Allen and Hanburys (an old-fashioned druggist, famous for its blackcurrant pastilles, which had been acquired by Glaxo three years earlier) as head of research in 1961. Operating from a small laboratory in Ware, he created and led what proved to be an extraordinarily productive group of research scientists.

Jack's strategy was based on some simple truths: that Glaxo's traditional strategy of licensing foreign products would no longer be enough in an increasingly multinational industry; and that investment would be wasted unless it was directed at the relief of common disorders. His team therefore concentrated on treatments for respiratory, cardiovascular and alimentary tract diseases.

The Ware team embraced all the latest advances in drug "design", especially receptor theory (by which drugs are used to influence the body's chemical messenger system); but they also used well-established techniques and were quite happy to improve upon the work of others.

Their first big success came in 1966 with the development of a new treatment for asthma – the bronchiodilator salbutamol. Launched as Ventolin in 1969, the drug was an instant success, and the product (with its successors) still turns over nearly $1 billion a year for GlaxoSmithKline (as the company subsequently became).

Encouraged by this success, Jack began looking at the market for duodenal and gastric ulcers, which in those days had no treatment but surgery. He made little progress until 1972, when James (later Sir James) Black, another brilliant Scottish-born scientist working for the British arm of the American company Smith Kline and French (SKF), published a paper in Nature that showed how a chemical known as a histamine H2 antagonist could switch off acid secretions in the stomach.
Jack immediately assembled a team of two dozen chemists and pharmacologists to investigate H2 antagonists. But it was a race which SKF appeared to have won when, in 1976, Black (who would win a Nobel Prize for his drug research) came up with the first effective anti-ulcer drug (called cimetidine), which went on to huge commercial success after it was launched as Tagamet in 1978.
In May 1976, however, Jack's team produced a compound that appeared to outperform Tagamet in tests on animals. The compound, known as ranitidine hydrochloride, was taken into development that December and, in just five years, passed through its toxicity and clinical trials, launching in 1981 under the name Zantac.
Helped by a clever marketing strategy that proved especially effective in America, Zantac soon overtook Tagamet and became the first drug to notch up sales of more than $1 billion a year.
Henry Wendt, the then chief executive of Smith Kline and French, was gracious in defeat, later acknowledging that Tagamet had "really lost the advantage to Glaxo in development. Glaxo won regulatory approval for a twice-daily dose of Zantac, in contrast to Tagamet's four-times-a-day dose, and at a lower overall total dose in milligrams. Physicians drew the obvious inference: Zantac appeared to be a more potent and longer-acting agent."
But Jack was equally gracious in victory, admitting that the development of Zantac had not been in the same order of inspired breakthrough as the research which produced Tagamet. Zantac, he explained "was the result of a simple piece of applied medical chemistry. It's not necessary to shake the earth on its axis to make money in this industry. We simply improved on James Black's product by choosing a substance with a cleaner reaction."
The youngest of six children of a coal miner, David Jack was born at the Fife mining village of Markinch on February 22 1924 and educated at Buckhaven Grammar School.
He began his career as an apprentice in pharmacy at Boots the Chemists in Cupar, then took a joint honours degree in Pharmacy and Pharmacology at Glasgow University and the Royal Technical College (now Strathclyde University).
After a brief appointment as an assistant lecturer at Glasgow University, followed by National Service when he taught at the Army School of Health, in 1951 he joined the pharmacy research department of Glaxo at Greenford.
Two years later he moved on to the pharmaceutical company Menley and James, which was later taken over by Smith Kline and French. There he worked on the product development side, formulating waxes used in coating drugs. But a developing interest in chemistry led him to take a part-time PhD at London University, supervised by Professor Arnold Beckett, and in 1961 he was appointed research director of Glaxo's subsidiary Allen and Hanburys.
Jack remained at Glaxo until his official retirement, serving as Glaxo's research and development director from 1978 to 1987.
As well as Ventolin and Zantac, Jack's research team developed several further treatments for asthma and other respiratory ailments, including beclomethasone dipropionate (an anti-inflammatory steroid inhalant launched as Becotide in 1972 – its concurrent use with Ventolin has transformed the treatment of asthma); salmeterol (a version of salbutamol with a longer duration of action, launched as Serevent in 1990); and fluticasone propionate, a synthetic corticosteroid marketed under a variety of names, which is used in inhalant form to treat asthma and hay fever and (as a cream) eczema and psoriasis.
Exploiting developments in receptor theory, Jack's team went on to develop new drugs to treat migraine and the side effects of chemotherapy, notably the anti-emetic ondansetron (launched as Zofran in 1991), which works by reducing the activity of the vagus nerve and blocking certain serotonin receptors, and has proved highly effective in preventing chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting; and sumatriptan (launched in 1991 as Imigran), the first truly specific treatment for migraine which works by activating receptors which cause constriction of the intracranial arteries.
Jack continued to carry out research work after his retirement from Glaxo. In August this year the drug development company Verona Pharma announced that it was seeking commercial licensing agreements for RPL554, a new anti-asthma and hay fever treatment developed by Jack as an alternative to conventional steroids and beta-agonists. The drug has nearly completed a programme of clinical trials.
Jack, who listed his recreations in Who's Who as "asthma therapy, gardening, golf", was appointed CBE in 1982 and knighted in 1993. He won several Queen's Awards for Industry and numerous scientific prizes, including the Royal Society's Mullard Medal. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1992, having been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1978.
David Jack married, in 1952, Lydia Downie Brown, with whom he had two daughters.

Sir David Jack, born February 22 1924, died November 8 2011

Michael Garrick

Michael Garrick, who has died aged 78, was a composer and pianist whose work extended well beyond the usual confines of jazz; in a career spanning more than 50 years he employed techniques from the genre to create music for choirs, string quartets, symphony orchestras, and even the organ of St Paul's Cathedral.

Born in Enfield, Middlesex, on May 30 1933, Michael Garrick took piano lessons as a child but was dropped by his teacher after playing In The Mood at a pupils' concert. In later life he recalled feeling a "magnetic attraction" to jazz as a child, but having "no means of getting near it". As a result he was largely self-taught.

Michael Garrick

 

On leaving school he took a job with the Meteorological Office before being called up for National Service in the RAF. He then read for a degree in English Literature at University College London.

While still a student he formed his first band, a frank imitation of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and secured a few bookings at the Marquee Club as support band to the powerful Jamaican saxophonist Joe Harriott and his quintet. Harriott's bold originality inspired Garrick to abandon imitation and develop a style of his own.

In 1961 he joined the poet and publisher Jeremy Robson in presenting Poetry and Jazz in Concert, a travelling event featuring, at various times, Laurie Lee, Spike Milligan, Dannie Abse, Adrian Mitchell and Vernon Scannell reading their own work. The musical settings were provided by Garrick's trio, plus Harriott and the trumpeter Shake Keane. In this, Garrick was a pioneer of what was about to become a distinctively British subbranch of music: jazz composition inspired by literary works.

During the 1960s Garrick rose to prominence in a remarkable crop of young British jazz composers, which included Mike Westbrook, Neil Ardley, Howard Riley and Mike Taylor. Some of his best work of this period, including Dusk Fire (1965) and Black Marigolds (1966), was written for the Don Rendell-Ian Carr Quintet, with which he was the pianist between 1965 and 1969.

In 1966 he also formed his own, semi-regular band of six or seven musicians, incorporating the vocals of Norma Winstone. At the same time he started writing liturgical works. The first, and still best known, was Jazz Praises (1968), recorded in St Paul's with the sextet, a large choir and Garrick himself at the organ. He always vehemently rejected any suggestion that this work was influenced by Duke Ellington's first Sacred Concert, recorded two years previously, or that he had even heard it when he conceived Jazz Praises.
Some idea of the nature and range of Michael Garrick's music in the years that followed can be gained from the titles of a few miscellaneous works: Mr Smith's Apocalypse (1970); Cantata on the theme of the Silence of God; A Hobbit Suite, or Gemstones (1973); A Zodiac of Angels (1988), for symphony orchestra, jazz soloists and singer, chorus and dancers; Hardy Country (1990); and Green and Pleasant Land (2002), for string quartet.
Garrick took every opportunity to introduce others to the delights of music in general and jazz in particular. Quite early in his career he began taking small bands into schools. This gradually developed into a regular programme, which he called his "Travelling Jazz Faculty" (later "Jazz Academy"), to which were added courses for young players at summer schools and, eventually, formal teaching posts at the Royal Academy of Music and Trinity College of Music. In 1970 he became a student himself, when he took up an open fellowship at Berklee School of Music in Boston. By his own admission, he was perhaps the most hyperactive student in the school's history, attempting to study every subject on the curriculum.
Garrick's discography is enormous, stretching from a vinyl EP recorded in 1959 to Tone Poems, the latest CD by his big band, recorded last year. He continued composing and playing almost to the end.
He was appointed MBE in 2010.
Michael Garrick was married twice. He is survived by a daughter of his first marriage and a son and daughter of his second. He also had three sons with a former partner.

Michael Garrick, born May 30 1933, died November 11 2011

Joe Frazier

Joe Frazier, who has died aged 67, was one of the great heavyweight boxers of his era, and will forever be remembered for his epic trilogy of fights with Muhammad Ali in the 1970s, the third of which — the so-called “Thrilla in Manila” — is widely regarded as the best fight of all time.

Joe Frazier who died from cancer aged 67

Early in the seventh round of the bout — which took place in the Philippines on October 1 1975 – Ali and Frazier went into a clinch during a momentary lull in the breathtaking action. “They told me Joe Frazier was washed up,” murmured Ali through bleeding lips. Frazier, his swollen eyes reduced to mere slits, grinned mirthlessly. “They lied”, he replied — delivering another monstrous hook to the champion’s body.

Known as “Smokin Joe” because of his relentless all-action style, Frazier was not a great knockout artist but wore opponents down with his remorseless attacking approach. The most famous weapon in his arsenal was his feared left hook. It was one such blow which floored Ali in the final round of their first encounter – which itself had become known as “The Fight Of The Century” – at New York’s Madison Square Garden on March 8 1971.

Frazier never forgave Ali for branding him “an Uncle Tom” in the build-up to these contests, nd remained convinced that his time spent in his great foe’s shadow meant he never earned the respect he deserved.

Despite repeated attempts to heal their rift, Frazier’s deep enmity towards Ali frequently resurfaced in later decades. After watching his great rival, by now stricken by a form of Parkinson’s Disease, struggle to light the Olympic flame at the 1996 Atlanta Games, Frazier commented: “I think it was a slap in the face for boxing. He [Ali] was a draft dodger. If they’d asked me, hell, I’d have run all the way up there and lit the flame.” To his obvious disappointment, Frazier had never been asked.

In 1978 Frazier appeared on a This Is Your Life tribute to Ali in which he referred to him as “a great guy”. But Frazier’s autobiography, published in 1996, revealed his true feelings: “People ask me if I feel bad for him,” he wrote. “Fact is, I don’t give a damn.”

The youngest of seven sons born into a poor Baptist family at Beaufort, South Carolina, on January 12 1944, Joe Frazier’s first job was picking vegetables grown by prosperous, white landowners; he had learned to drive a tractor aged seven, and drove a car from the age of eight. Although as a child he was a feared streetfighter, his mother refused to allow him to play American football for fear of his being injured.
Having dropped out of high school and married at 15, he migrated north and was working in a Philadelphia slaughterhouse when he took up boxing in order to lose weight.
Having been spotted by the veteran trainer “Yank” Durham, as an amateur Frazier enjoyed a run of successes which finally came to an end when he was defeated by Buster Mathis in the US Olympic trials of 1964. Mathis broke his thumb, however, so it was Frazier who journeyed to the Tokyo Olympics, where he won the gold medal at heavyweight. Turning professional on his return, he fought his way up the rankings after winning his first 11 fights by knockout. On March 4 1968 he knocked out Mathis to claim New York’s version of the world title.
On the short side for a heavyweight at 5ft 11.5in and 205lb, Frazier was nevertheless sturdily built and relentlessly pressurised opponents for every round, never taking a backward step and hooking viciously with his feared left hand. Stopping the white hope Jerry Quarry in seven rounds in New York in June 1969 enabled Frazier to fight for the undisputed world crown. On February 16 1970 he halted Jimmy Ellis in the fifth round at Madison Square Garden to become champion.
Although Ali had been stripped of the crown following his refusal to undertake military service in Vietnam, he was still widely regarded as the legitimate champion. Frazier’s points victory in the first of their memorable battles at Madison Square Garden the following year suggested that the Philadelphia fighter was destined for a long reign. Watched by a massive worldwide television audience, the first of the Ali-Frazier trilogy was a huge event which changed boxing forever.

Although Ali excelled at psychologically unsettling his opponents, Frazier refused to be cowed. The fight was even in the early rounds, but Ali’s cornermen noted with rising alarm that he was taking more punches than ever before.
A searing Frazier left hook in the 11th signalled that the tide had turned. Four more rounds followed – each more savage than the last. In the final round Frazier downed Ali with arguably the most vicious left hook he had ever delivered. Although Ali beat the count and survived to the final bell, the night was Frazier’s.
“When he went down, we were both dead tired,” said Frazier. “Fifteen rounds; that’s how long we’d been fighting. And the only thing going through my mind when he got up was what was going through my mind all night: throw punches – just throw punches.”
Despite his triumph (after the fight both men were admitted to hospital), Frazier remained the bewildered target of some vitriolic criticism. Derided by Ali’s supporters for his apparent reluctance to defend his titles, Frazier came to be regarded by some as the antithesis of his great rival’s black militancy and anti-war views. Much to Frazier’s fury, Boxing Illustrated even posed the question: “Is Joe Frazier a White Champion in a Black Skin?” The champion subsequently found himself alienated from much of the black community.
Humiliatingly dubbed “a gorilla” in public by Ali on several occasions, Frazier rapidly wearied of playing the unwilling stooge. Some of Ali’s stinging rejoinders hurt him until the day he died. “All I ever wanted that man to do was apologise to me,” Frazier once reflected. “He told my son Marvis that he never meant what he said about me, but he never told me.”
Following a brace of easy title defences, Frazier lost both his crown and his undefeated record in sensational fashion in Kingston, Jamaica, on January 22 1973, when the towering George Foreman knocked him out in two rounds — one of his sledgehammer blows actually knocking the champion off his feet. A rueful Frazier, who was floored six times, later reflected: “I fought a dumb fight. I kept getting up.”
Frazier recaptured his winning ways by outpointing Britain’s Joe Bugner at London’s Earl’s Court six months later, and in the run-up to his second fight with Ali ended up wrestling with his rival on the floor of a television studio. On January 28 1974 Ali emerged a clear points victor of their eagerly anticipated rematch at Madison Square Garden, but Frazier’s subsequent knockout victories over Quarry and Ellis set the stage for the “Thrilla in Manila”.

By now Ali had sensationally reclaimed the world crown from George Foreman at the age of 33. Holding up the belt in front of Frazier at a pre-fight press conference, he announced: “It will be a killa, a chilla and a thrilla when I get the gorilla in Manila.” Frazier did not see the funny side, and later recounted how his children were taunted by the nickname at school.
Following a contest of frightening intensity, Ali clinched the deciding match of the rubber when Eddie Futch, Frazier’s trainer, pulled his battered fighter out after 14 rounds. Ali, who later described the fight as “the closest thing to death”, was ahead on points but seemingly on the brink of collapse at the time of Futch’s humane intervention. “Sit down, son, it’s all over,” Futch famously told Frazier. “But no one will ever forget what you did here today.” Frazier never truly forgave him.
“Of all the men I fought,” Ali would recall, “the roughest and the toughest was Joe Frazier. He brought out the best in me and the best fight we fought was in Manila. Joe Frazier is a good man. I couldn’t have done it without him and he couldn’t have done what he did without me. And if God ever calls me to a holy war, I want Joe Frazier fighting beside me.”
Frazier was unable to reproduce the passion of that heroic losing performance. Eight months later he again took on Foreman — only to end up announcing his retirement after being stopped in round five.
For a time he toured and recorded with a singing group called The Knockouts before launching a brief comeback at 37. On December 3 1981 Frazier fought out a lacklustre 10-round draw against the former convict Floyd “Jumbo” Cummings. It was the final act of a 37-fight career in which he had won 32, drawn one and lost only four.
The former champion later steered his son, Marvis, to an unsuccessful heavyweight title challenge against Larry Holmes, in November 1983.
In June 2001 Frazier Snr attended a much-publicised event dubbed “Ali-Frazier IV” at Verona, New York, when his daughter Jacqui fought Ali’s daughter Laila over eight rounds. Frazier watched from ringside as Ali boxed her way to a narrow points win.
Inducted into boxing’s International Hall of Fame in 1990, Joe Frazier, whose marriage was dissolved, is survived by eight children.

Joe Frazier, born January 12 1944, died November 7 2011