Ken Norton

Ken Norton, the former world heavyweight champion who  died aged 70, will always be remembered as the man who broke Muhammad Ali’s jaw on the way to outpointing “The Greatest” in a non-title fight in San Diego in March 1973.

Clash of the Titans: Ken Norton (left) defeats Muhammad Ali in 1973

A formidable opponent who ranked among the best in what can now be viewed as a golden era of heavyweights, the rugged former US Marine reinforced the view that he was Ali’s “bogeyman” by pushing him very close in two subsequent encounters.

In total the two men went 39 rounds together – and every one was closely-fought. While technically inferior to Ali, Norton clearly possessed the style to give him trouble. “I knew what to do and I never listened to his mouth,” he once reflected.

Norton’s other claim to fame was becoming heavyweight champion without throwing a punch. This farcical situation resulted when he was awarded the World Boxing Council crown in March 1978 after the WBC controversially stripped Leon Spinks of the title following his decision to give Ali a rematch. Norton – who had scraped past Jimmy Young on points the previous November – subsequently became their new champion.

Norton’s reign turned out to be one of the briefest in history, however, as he lost a titanic 15-round showdown with Larry Holmes just 72 days later. It proved to be his last great performance and a horrific first-round knockout at the hands of the emerging Gerry Cooney ended his career in 1981.

Born in Jacksonville, Illinois, on August 9 1943, Norton, who came from a stable, middle-class background, showed early promise as an athlete before leaving college to join the US Marines in 1964. Having been introduced to boxing during his service, he turned professional in September 1967 and proceeded to win his first 16 fights.

Norton’s first loss – an eighth-round knockout against Jose Luis Garcia in July 1970 – was attributed to over-confidence and led his trainer Eddie Futch to pin the photo of the knockout to Norton’s locker room door as an enduring warning against complacency.

Standing 6ft 3in and weighing 210 pounds, Norton had all the makings of a heavyweight champion; a fact recognised by Ali’s training camp, who in 1970 employed Norton as a sparring partner. Over the next two years he continued his rise up the rankings, knocking out Californian champion Henry Clark in nine rounds on November 21 1972, to ensure that his next showdown with Ali would be not as partner, but opponent.

A largely unknown 29-year-old, Norton was written off by most observers. Howard Cosell, the veteran fight commentator, even labelled the contest as “the worst mismatch in boxing history”.

Undeterred, Norton gave up his day job and prepared for the fight with a ferocious intensity. When the pair clashed in San Diego on March 31 1973, it was nothing like the routine victory Ali undoubtedly expected. The pair went toe-to-toe for 12 exciting rounds, Norton benefiting from the advice of cornerman Futch, who had first-hand knowledge of Ali’s style and tactics, having worked with Ali’s great nemesis Joe Frazier two years previously.

To the visible shock of many ringside, Norton was awarded a split decision, while Ali – whose jaw was broken in the early rounds – was whisked off to the nearest hospital to have his mouth wired shut.

Six months later, on September 10 1973, the pair met for the North American Boxing Federation title at the Los Angeles Forum. Again the outcome was desperately close with Ali, who had prepared far more diligently on this occasion, getting the nod on a split decision following a last-ditch effort in the final round.

Norton emerged from the defeat with his reputation enhanced, however, and on March 26 1974 he travelled to Caracas, Venezuela, to challenge the fearsome George Foreman – the WBC and World Boxing Association title-holder. Norton – by now without Futch – failed badly on the biggest night of his career. He was floored three times before being stopped in the second and later claimed he was distracted by promotional rows and a threat to kidnap his parents, who had travelled to watch the fight.

The biggest disappointment of Norton’s career was still to come, however. Following seven successive stoppage wins – including a revenge triumph over Garcia and fifth-round knockout of title contender Jerry Quarry – he sealed a third fight with Ali for the WBA and WBC titles at Yankee Stadium on September 28 1976.

Convinced he had Ali’s measure, Norton exuded confidence going into the fight. For 15 rounds the two men again went toe-to-toe, and Norton returned to his corner following the final bell convinced he had outworked the ageing champion. But the decision was a close but unanimous decision in favour of Ali, and Norton was heartbroken. “I was smiling and crying at the same time,” he recalled in his autobiography. “I had accomplished the unthinkable, beaten Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight championship of the world.”

Norton was now 31, but still not finished. On November 5 1977 he returned to face Duane Bobick, a much-touted white hope who had Futch in his corner, at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Bobick was on the cusp of a world title shot and Futch clearly felt Norton was there for the taking; yet Norton turned back the clock to leave the hapless Bobick unconscious after just 58 seconds, effectively ending his career.

“I thought it was a fight Bobick could win,” Futch said plaintively afterwards. “Norton wasn’t a big puncher, except with the uppercut. If you kept him busy he couldn’t get it off.”

After two more victories Norton unexpectedly became WBC champion after Spinks was stripped of the title. Then on June 9 1978, Norton and Holmes staged one of the great heavyweight fights at Caesars Palace, the latter just edging the decision following 15 pulsating rounds. Norton was never able to scale such heights again.

Nine months later the big-hitting Earnie Shavers flattened him inside two minutes, and a draw with the limited Scott LeDoux – in which he was downed twice – should have persuaded Norton he was on the decline.

Instead, he took on future title challenger Randall “Tex” Cobb in Texas on November 7 1980, dropping a split decision. A final bout with Cooney at New York’s Madison Square Garden on November 5 1981 resulted in a gruesome first-round exit after a helpless Norton took dozens of unanswered punches. In all he had won 42 of his 50 bouts, losing seven with one draw.

Norton went on to reinvent himself as a film and television actor, with roles in Mandingo (1975), Drum (1976) and The A-Team (1983), among others. For a time he worked with NBC as a fight analyst, and also formed a management agency.

In 1986 a road accident in Los Angeles left him with brain injuries, but following a long spell in rehabilitation he had recovered sufficiently to open his own gym. His final years were blighted by ill health.

Ken Norton’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Jacqueline, whom he married in 1977, and by five children.

Ken Norton, born August 9 1943, died September 18 2013

Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy, who  died aged 66, was the author of gung-ho techno-military thrillers which generated many millions of dollars, a number of successful films, and a franchise of equally popular – and profitable – video games.

Novelist Tom Clancy during target practice in his private underground pistol range in 1989

In Clancy’s books, Armageddon is always on the horizon. In The Sum of All Fears (1991), the city of Denver is obliterated by a nuclear explosion; in Debt of Honour (1994), which prefigures the events of 9/11, a kamikaze pilot crashes into the Capitol Building, wiping out much of Congress and killing the President.

“As real events always prove, bad things tend to happen,” Clancy once observed. “I write about those possibilities. Now, that doesn’t make me a good fit for the so-called literary establishment. They want to write pretty, complicated things that show off how brilliant they are.” And while he claimed to be merely “a pretty good storyteller”, “what I offer most is verisimilitude, showing my readers what’s real”.

The book which made Clancy’s name was his first, The Hunt for Red October, released in 1984 by a small publisher, the Naval Institute Press. The story turns on the disillusioned captain of a new class of Soviet nuclear submarine who decides to defect to the United States with his boat, Red October, which is equipped with ballistic missiles. The Soviets respond by dispatching the whole of their northern fleet to destroy the submarine before it can reach America; meanwhile, the US Navy — alerted by a spy in the Kremlin — waits to provide assistance.

Despite its rip-roaring plot, the book would almost certainly have languished had not a copy found its way under the White House Christmas Tree. President Ronald Reagan lapped it up as “the perfect yarn”, while his Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger went further, declaring: “The technical detail is vast and accurate, remarkably so for an author who originally had no background or experience.” (At the time of the book’s publication, Clancy was working as an insurance agent and had only a single published article to his name.)

When the Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, read the book, he asked: “Who the hell cleared it?” Clancy claimed that he had had no access to classified material, but had gleaned details of weapons systems simply by researching technical manuals, magazines and reference books. He also drew on the mass market war game Harpoon.

If some critics complained that the characters were one-dimensional, the public did not mind. In the first two years The Hunt for Red October sold more than 300,000 copies in hardback and a further two million in paperback, earning Clancy an estimated $500,000 in royalties and a further $500,000 for the rights to the subsequent film, which starred Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin and grossed $200 million worldwide.

“Reality is fairly simple,” Clancy observed. “My critics say my characters are cardboard, but the people I know and write about tell me I get it all right. The mark of a superior person is to take complexity and find the simplicity in it.”

The success of The Hunt for Red October secured Clancy a $3 million, three-book contract, and the Pentagon took him under its wing, permitting him to spend time in a missile-carrying frigate and a submarine and to drive an M1 tank (“Sixty tons, 1,500 horsepower and a four-inch gun — that’s sex!” Clancy enthused. “That was a ball! The army treats me right... When I was a kid I wanted to be a tanker. With a tank I am death!’’). Meanwhile, in Baltimore harbour he was allowed to go on board a Royal Navy ship to meet Prince Andrew, then serving as a helicopter pilot.

Clancy’s second novel Red Storm Rising — also a bestseller — offered his vision of World War Three, which breaks out after Arab terrorists blow up one third of the Soviet Union’s oilfields, and the Soviets respond by seizing the Gulf States to safeguard their energy needs before invading Western Europe. The war is a hi-tech affair, with no resort to nuclear or chemical weapons. Red Storm Rising was adopted as required reading at America’s Naval War College, and the military historian John Keegan declared that it would take its place in “a long tradition of military futurology” alongside Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and HG Wells’s War of the Worlds.

Patriot Games (1987) addressed the subject of international terrorism and featured Jack Ryan, the CIA analyst who had appeared in The Hunt for Red October, this time attempting to foil a plot by an Irish republican group to kidnap the Prince and Princess of Wales. In 1992 it appeared as a film with Harrison Ford in the starring role.

By now Clancy was a rich man, a turn of events which appeared to cause him little surprise. “In America,” he said, “there ain’t no excuse. You can go out and do anything you damn well please if you try hard enough.” All he had done was to follow his instincts, developing his boyhood fascination with aircraft, ships and tanks. As he once put it: “I’m a technology freak — and the best stuff is in the military.”

Thomas Leo Clancy was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 12 1947, the son of a postman. The family was devoutly Roman Catholic, and after attending a Catholic high school in Baltimore he went on to the city’s Loyola College, a Jesuit institution where he switched from Physics to English Literature. “Ethics [is] what they stress,” he later said of his education. “It’s what ought to be stressed. You’re taught to be accountable, to do the right things instead of the easy things.”

As a student, he enrolled in the US Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, and was itching to serve in Vietnam — an ambition that was sabotaged by his defective eyesight. But he was also determined to become a writer, and was sorely disappointed when a short story he submitted to a science fiction magazine was rejected.

Yet his marriage in 1969, to Wanda Thomas, required him to earn an assured income, so he found work as an insurance agent, first in Baltimore and later in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1973 he moved to the OF Bowen Agency in Maryland, a business owned by his wife’s grandfather; seven years later Clancy and Wanda bought the firm for $125,000, although they were not able to produce all the money until he had achieved success as a novelist.

Clancy claimed he was “a lousy salesman; it was tough basically saying to people, 'Something bad could happen to you, so buy this [policy] from me’.” This was over-modest, since he was soon making about $250,000 a year. Well-off he may have been, but he was also bored — and his literary ambitions persisted. “I’d made my own trap,” he later recalled. “I had kids to support, mortgage payments, and a business to pay off.”

In 1976 he had read a story in the newspapers about a mutiny in a Soviet warship, Storozhevoy, in which some of the crew had tried to defect to Sweden. He now resolved to use the incident for the basis of a novel about a mutiny on board a nuclear submarine. At about the same time, the events of the Falklands conflict caused Clancy to start thinking about the weapons used in modern warfare. The seeds were sown for The Hunt for Red October.

Clancy’s fourth book was The Cardinal of the Kremlin, about espionage and SDI (the “Star Wars” nuclear defence shield proposed by the Reagan White House).

In all Clancy wrote 17 novels, the last of which is Command Authority. Others are Clear and Present Danger (1989); The Sum of All Fears (1991); Rainbow Six (1998); and The Teeth of the Tiger (2003). Several of his books were made into films — the latest, directed by Kenneth Branagh, is due to be released in the United States on Christmas Day.

A keen tabletop wargamer, in 1996 Clancy founded Red Storm Entertainment, which would adapt his complex military themes to computer games. Its first release, a turn-based strategy called Tom Clancy’s Politika, was published in conjunction with a board game and Tom Clancy’s Power Plays novel (penned by a ghostwriter) of the same title.

It had a muted reception, but the company struck gold with its third effort, Rainbow Six, again released in conjunction with a novel. A slew of sequels and four more franchises followed – Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, End War and Air Combat, all under the Clancy name. Championing a new breed of gaming that placed strategy and teamwork above virtual brute force, they none the less excited an inevitable degree of controversy for the uncompromising realism of their on-screen violence.

The game Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas (2006) had the desert city complaining about possible damage to its revenues, while US Army commanders faced a quite different problem: many new recruits stayed up late playing at virtual combat, leaving them too tired for exercises the next morning. Yet in 2001, the Department of Defense had incorporated Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear into its training programme, as a guide to successful military operation in urban settings. Red Storm Entertainment was sold to Ubisoft in 2000, and eight years later Ubisoft acquired all intellectual property rights to the Clancy name in video gaming.

Clancy was a part owner of the American League baseball team the Baltimore Orioles.

Tom Clancy’s marriage to Wanda Thomas, with whom he had a son and three daughters, was dissolved in 1998; the following year he married Alexandra Marie Llewellyn.

Tom Clancy, born April 12 1947, died October 2013

Ray Dolby

Ray Dolby, who has died aged 80, introduced the noise-reducing and surround-sound technology that revolutionised cinema acoustics and ushered in the modern era of high-quality, realistic film sound.

Ray Dolby 

His system of using multiple loudspeakers and multichannel technology — first through his Dolby Stereo, introduced in 1975, and later through Dolby digital surround sound — set new acoustic standards in big screen entertainment. It also made him a fortune, estimated last year at $2.4 billion.

Film makers had striven since the 1950s to improve the clarity and realism of cinema sound, notably by introducing stereophonic soundtracks to replace the old mono or single-source technology. But it was Dolby, who set up his company in Britain in 1965 before returning to his native America, who made the breakthrough.

Beginning in the 1960s with Dolby noise reduction, a form of audio compression and expansion that reduces tape hiss, his company Dolby Laboratories went on to develop a host of groundbreaking technologies, including Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, Dolby Surround, Dolby 3D Digital Cinema and others. Soon the distinctive Dolby logo — two block-letter Ds back-to-back — had become synonymous with audio quality .

By the late 1970s Dolby was delivering surround-sound systems that amazed cinemagoers with their sheer volume, scale, and all-enfolding sensation; at the same time directors could locate individual sounds within the audio spectrum with pinpoint accuracy.

A particular triumph came in 1977, when the young director George Lucas used Dolby’s latest sound system in Star Wars, achieving a louder, more layered, more directional concept of sound.

With its clash of intergalactic forces and stirring, brass-heavy orchestral score, the film was a perfect showcase for the new technology. “Star Wars changed sound forever,” declared Michael Minkler, who helped to mix the film’s soundtrack. At times, he explained, hundreds of tracks were playing in the mix, but without hundreds of tracks’ worth of hiss and rumble, of the sort that had blighted recording media before Dolby arrived on the scene.

By eliminating such problems, and introducing other enhancements, Dolby allowed film makers to use more sophisticated multi-track, surround-sound audio to transport audiences into fantasy worlds. In another 1977 blockbuster, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the director Steven Spielberg also turned to Dolby Stereo technology, investing the sound of the extraterrestrial spaceship with the same emotional intensity as the pictures.

The son of a salesman, Ray Milton Dolby was born on January 18 1933 in Portland, Oregon. His parents moved to California when he was still a boy and he attended high school in San Francisco. Musical and insatiably curious as a child, he later attributed his success to an appetite for learning that was fostered by his parents. He was still at school when he started working part-time for the Ampex tape recorder company.

After military service in the US Army, he graduated in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1957 and moved to Britain, becoming in 1960 the first American to be elected a Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Having been awarded a doctorate in Physics there the following year, he returned to Ampex as chief electronics designer for the first practical videotape recording system.

Phillips introduced pre-recorded cassette tapes in 1964, but the sound was of comparatively poor quality, mainly on account of persistent background hiss. That year, Dolby was on detachment from Cambridge as a Unesco science adviser in India, and it was while working on noise-reduction systems there that he worked out how to eliminate tape hiss.

This involved separating high and low frequencies in order to flush out the unwanted noise. In an interview with Fortune magazine in 1979 he explained that the system “increases the desired tones, suppresses hiss and recombines the cleaned frequencies into very high-fidelity sound”.

Returning to Britain in 1965, Dolby founded his own audio company in London and established Dolby Laboratories. In 1966 Decca equipped their London recording studios with Dolby’s noise-reduction system, which quickly became the industry standard for commercial tapes and tape machines.

The quality of cassettes improved rapidly during the 1970s, but by then Dolby had turned his attention to the cinema. Not only did his noise reduction technology give film sound much greater clarity, it was also comparatively cheap, allowing Dolby systems to be installed in cinemas at minimal cost. Again it became an industry standard.

Dolby chaired his company (which he moved to San Francisco in 1976) from 1965 until his retirement in 2009. He held honorary doctorates from Cambridge (1997) and York (1999), and was a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and, from 2004, of the Royal Academy of Engineers.

He received an Academy Award in 1989 for his “contribution to motion picture sound”, and an Emmy for lifetime achievement in 2003.

He was appointed OBE in 1987.

Dolby held more than 50 American patents, most recently one for his Atmos system, which sends commands to individual speakers, so that sounds — be they raindrops, footsteps or explosions — appear to come from specific places in a cinema.

With his wife, Dolby was an active philanthropist, particularly in the fields of scientific research and health care. The couple donated $36 million to the University of California, San Francisco, to fund stem cell research.

Ray Dolby is survived by his wife, Dagmar Bäumert, whom he met at Cambridge in 1962, and their two sons.

Ray Dolby, born January 18 1933, died September 12 2013

Joan Regan

Joan Regan , who has died aged 85, was a leading light of the 1950s variety performance circuit whose popular singing style drew on the sunny delivery of her American contemporaries and belied her Essex roots and personal dramas.

Joan Regan 

During the difficult post-war years, Joan Regan’s uplifting vocal approach had a comforting echo of Vera Lynn’s croon although, with her blonde hair and broad smile her looks mirrored the matinee glamour of the actress Anna Neagle, one of a number of stars she would later impersonate on stage. Success swiftly followed her signing to Decca Records in 1953 when her debut single, Ricochet, found her backed by the Squadronaires, the RAF orchestra. It reached No 8 in the charts and set her on a path that would result in four albums, her own television programme and international touring engagements.

Her first live performance ended prematurely when the curtain came down on her head, knocking her out. She was, however, to become a regular at the London Palladium during the late 1950s and early 1960s, appearing alongside such artists as Max Bygraves, Cliff Richard and Billy Dainty.

In 1946, when she was 18, Joan Regan had married Dick Howell, with whom she had two sons. The marriage was dissolved in 1951, and six years later she married the Palladium’s Box Office Manager, Harry Claff.

One of her frequent collaborators during her early performing years was the pianist Russ Conway. The pair became close friends. Conway declared that “three women taught me about stagecraft: Joan Regan, Gracie Fields and Dorothy Squires.” It proved to be an ideal professional partnership. “Somehow, he and I completely gelled musically,” she explained in 2004. “He took my music away and then we came back and rehearsed. And it was fantastic. It all seemed like different music.”

The variety life was indeed varied for Joan Regan. She entertained Christmas audiences in pantomime with Frankie Vaughan, shared star billing with Beryl Reid, Tommy Cooper and Morecambe and Wise and, in 1955, was called to perform before the Queen for a Royal Command Performance.

Her onstage smile, however, often hid serious distress. Her marriage to Claff ended when her husband was jailed for fraud, a crisis which led to her suffering a nervous breakdown. And in 1984 a brain haemorrhage left her temporarily paralysed and speechless. Miming to her favourite numbers aided her therapy.

Joan Regan was born on January 19 1928, at Romford, Essex. She was talent spotted by the impresario Bernard Delfont, brother of Lew and Leslie Grade, who helped her get signed by Decca (where she recorded two albums, The Girl Next Door and Just Joan). The label shaped her trademark renditions of stateside standards by Doris Day and Teresa Brewer. She later moved to EMI and then to Pye Records.

She sang on the hit television music show 6.5 Special leading to her own programme, Be My Guest. This ran for four series and attempted to expand her act, and her audience, by combining songs with impressions of stars like Gracie Fields and Judy Garland.

Further television work took her to America and across Europe, where she often sang alongside home-grown stars such as Maurice Chevalier, Eddie Fisher, Perry Como and Johnnie Ray.

After her convalescence from neurosurgery in the 1980s, she was encouraged back onto the stage by her old friend Russ Conway. Her late career on the nostalgia tours of Britain’s regional theatres drew fans that had remained with her for over four decades.

These concerts saw her expand her setlist to include numbers by many of her old friends. In particular, her vocal similarity to Vera Lynn allowed her to step into the shoes of the “Forces sweetheart” for celebratory medleys on anniversaries of V-E Day with the support of the Glenn Miller Orchestra. She performed many of her concerts towards the end of her career in aid of various charities.

Joan Regan remarried in 1968, to Martin Cowan, a doctor, and moved to Florida. The couple later returned to Britain and settled in Kent. Her husband predeceased her, and she is survived by her two sons and by a daughter of her second marriage.

Joan Regan, born January 19 1928, died September 12 2013

Ray Dolby

Ray Dolby, who has died aged 80, introduced the noise-reducing and surround-sound technology that revolutionised cinema acoustics and ushered in the modern era of high-quality, realistic film sound.

Ray Dolby 

His system of using multiple loudspeakers and multichannel technology — first through his Dolby Stereo, introduced in 1975, and later through Dolby digital surround sound — set new acoustic standards in big screen entertainment. It also made him a fortune, estimated last year at $2.4 billion.

Film makers had striven since the 1950s to improve the clarity and realism of cinema sound, notably by introducing stereophonic soundtracks to replace the old mono or single-source technology. But it was Dolby, who set up his company in Britain in 1965 before returning to his native America, who made the breakthrough.

Beginning in the 1960s with Dolby noise reduction, a form of audio compression and expansion that reduces tape hiss, his company Dolby Laboratories went on to develop a host of groundbreaking technologies, including Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, Dolby Surround, Dolby 3D Digital Cinema and others. Soon the distinctive Dolby logo — two block-letter Ds back-to-back — had become synonymous with audio quality .

By the late 1970s Dolby was delivering surround-sound systems that amazed cinemagoers with their sheer volume, scale, and all-enfolding sensation; at the same time directors could locate individual sounds within the audio spectrum with pinpoint accuracy.

A particular triumph came in 1977, when the young director George Lucas used Dolby’s latest sound system in Star Wars, achieving a louder, more layered, more directional concept of sound.

With its clash of intergalactic forces and stirring, brass-heavy orchestral score, the film was a perfect showcase for the new technology. “Star Wars changed sound forever,” declared Michael Minkler, who helped to mix the film’s soundtrack. At times, he explained, hundreds of tracks were playing in the mix, but without hundreds of tracks’ worth of hiss and rumble, of the sort that had blighted recording media before Dolby arrived on the scene.

By eliminating such problems, and introducing other enhancements, Dolby allowed film makers to use more sophisticated multi-track, surround-sound audio to transport audiences into fantasy worlds. In another 1977 blockbuster, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the director Steven Spielberg also turned to Dolby Stereo technology, investing the sound of the extraterrestrial spaceship with the same emotional intensity as the pictures.

The son of a salesman, Ray Milton Dolby was born on January 18 1933 in Portland, Oregon. His parents moved to California when he was still a boy and he attended high school in San Francisco. Musical and insatiably curious as a child, he later attributed his success to an appetite for learning that was fostered by his parents. He was still at school when he started working part-time for the Ampex tape recorder company.

After military service in the US Army, he graduated in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1957 and moved to Britain, becoming in 1960 the first American to be elected a Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Having been awarded a doctorate in Physics there the following year, he returned to Ampex as chief electronics designer for the first practical videotape recording system.

Phillips introduced pre-recorded cassette tapes in 1964, but the sound was of comparatively poor quality, mainly on account of persistent background hiss. That year, Dolby was on detachment from Cambridge as a Unesco science adviser in India, and it was while working on noise-reduction systems there that he worked out how to eliminate tape hiss.

This involved separating high and low frequencies in order to flush out the unwanted noise. In an interview with Fortune magazine in 1979 he explained that the system “increases the desired tones, suppresses hiss and recombines the cleaned frequencies into very high-fidelity sound”.

Returning to Britain in 1965, Dolby founded his own audio company in London and established Dolby Laboratories. In 1966 Decca equipped their London recording studios with Dolby’s noise-reduction system, which quickly became the industry standard for commercial tapes and tape machines.

The quality of cassettes improved rapidly during the 1970s, but by then Dolby had turned his attention to the cinema. Not only did his noise reduction technology give film sound much greater clarity, it was also comparatively cheap, allowing Dolby systems to be installed in cinemas at minimal cost. Again it became an industry standard.

Dolby chaired his company (which he moved to San Francisco in 1976) from 1965 until his retirement in 2009. He held honorary doctorates from Cambridge (1997) and York (1999), and was a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame and, from 2004, of the Royal Academy of Engineers.

He received an Academy Award in 1989 for his “contribution to motion picture sound”, and an Emmy for lifetime achievement in 2003.

He was appointed OBE in 1987.

Dolby held more than 50 American patents, most recently one for his Atmos system, which sends commands to individual speakers, so that sounds — be they raindrops, footsteps or explosions — appear to come from specific places in a cinema.

With his wife, Dolby was an active philanthropist, particularly in the fields of scientific research and health care. The couple donated $36 million to the University of California, San Francisco, to fund stem cell research.

Ray Dolby is survived by his wife, Dagmar Bäumert, whom he met at Cambridge in 1962, and their two sons.

Ray Dolby, born January 18 1933, died September 12 2013

Sir David Frost

Sir David Frost, who has died aged 74, began his career in television satirising the patrician Establishment and ended it with a knighthood, a duke as a father-in-law and a reputation as the television personality politicians on both sides of the Atlantic most wanted to be interviewed by.

Sir David Frost

Frost made his name in the 1960s on the BBC’s late night satirical seriesThat Was The Week That Was. With his sardonic manner, slurred diction, nasal voice and alarming surges in volume, he was the first to show that quirkiness and unnaturalness could work better on television than the “natural” but bland presentation that had been the norm.

He was also one of the first television presenters to recognise instinctively the value of a catchphrase as an indispensable prop in fixing a personality and establishing a rapport with television audiences. His tautological “Hello, good evening (or morning) and welcome” was delivered with a conscious air of self-parody long before he himself became a butt of the satirists.

Although Frost was only the link man to performers like Willie Rushton and John Bird, it was Frost, above all, who reaped the benefits of the programme’s notoriety.

From the early days of The Frost Report in the 1960s, and The Frost Programme in the 1970s, to Frost on Sunday in the 1990s, he was rarely off British television screens, appearing in everything from news and documentaries to chat shows, quiz shows and comedy. In total, Frost presented more than 20 television series, produced nine films, wrote 14 books, won numerous awards, and was a co-founder of London Weekend Television and TV-am. In 1969 a poll revealed that he was, after the Queen and the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, the best-known person in the country.

Frost had a genius for access, and he interviewed nearly everyone who was anyone, including six American Presidents, eight British Prime Ministers, several members of the Royal family and a galaxy of celebrities. He had a phenomenal memory and an instinctive understanding of the value of flattery; most of his interviewees considered themselves personal friends.

“The big names answer the phone to him”, observed an envious colleague. “Nobody else can phone the people he can and get through — and they’re pleased to talk to him.” “Now at last here’s someone I recognise” announced American President George HW Bush across a crowd of leading British public figures held at No 10 Downing Street. At the Frosts’ annual garden party, held in the second week of the Wimbledon championships, leading politicians would rub shoulders with showbusiness personalities, sports stars and minor royals.

Frost also had a Panglossian ability to look on the bright side. Though he had failures that might have sunk a more introspective personality, he was always able to put them behind him.

Both LWT and TV-am began with hopelessly unrealistic programming ambitions and both hit trouble soon after they were launched. Most of his books earned indifferent reviews and several business ventures failed. An attempt to open a chain of steak houses in Japan collapsed after it was calculated that he would need to fill every table six times a day to make it pay.

But unlike television figures such as Michael Parkinson or Russell Harty, Frost was never held in great affection by the British public, possibly because he always seemed so desperate to be liked. Even friends admitted that away from the cameras there was a strange insubstantiality about the man.

Kitty Muggeridge famously remarked that after That Was The Week That Was, Frost was expected to sink without trace; instead, he “rose without trace”. The phrase seemed to encapsulate both the suddenness of Frost’s rise and the lack of any obvious intellectual anchorage in his career.

For Frost never appeared to have any considered views about life. He was never heard to utter a political opinion and never voted in an election. Interviewers asking direct questions about his personal feelings on an issue would be fobbed off with anecdotes about what someone else had said. They were often left with the impression that Frost was not interested in anything other than his own career.

Not even in the lengthy first volume of his autobiography did Frost provide any insights. He knew the rich and famous, but had nothing interesting or original to say about them. He travelled the world, but his most interesting observations were that Americans eat hamburgers and call pavements “sidewalks”.

Christopher Booker, a Cambridge contemporary, saw him as an embodiment of all that was vacuous about the 1960s: “a hollow man in pursuit of fame for its own sake”. His most obvious quality, Booker observed in a savage profile in 1977, “was ambition of an all consuming and extraordinary kind. He simply wanted to be amazingly famous for being David Frost”.

Yet even Booker found him “impossible to dislike”. Though he had an insatiable appetite for celebrity, he was never arrogant or vain. Wholly devoid of rancour, he was never heard to voice a disparaging word about anyone, despite many attempts by interviewers to get him to do so. People in his estimation were usually “wonderful”, “lovely” “or “super”.

One person on whom Frost’s charm failed to work was the satirist and comedian Peter Cook. At Cook’s memorial service in 1995, Stephen Fry recalled an occasion when Frost rang Cook to invite him to dinner with Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson: “big fans ... be super if you could make it — Wednesday the 12th”. “Hang on, I’ll check my diary,” said Cook, riffling through the pages. “Oh dear, I find I’m watching television that night.” Frost, who was in the congregation, laughed with the rest of them. Even for those who turned against him, Frost had only kind words in return.

David Paradine Frost was born on April 7 1939 at Tenterden, Kent, the son of a Methodist minister, the Rev WJ Paradine Frost. As his sisters were 14 and 16 years older, he was raised as an only child. There was no alcohol or swearing in the Frost household, and no Sunday newspapers or television.

The Frost family lived a peripatetic life, moving from Tenterden to Kempston, Bedford, then back to Kent, to Gillingham, then to Raunds, near Wellingborough. David attended Gillingham and Wellingborough grammar schools. His father would have liked him to follow him into the ministry, but David’s talents seemed destined to take him in other directions.

At school he excelled at sports and displayed an early talent for satire, selling his classmates bottles of soapy water labelled “Bill Haley’s Bathwater” and conducting pseudonymous campaigns through the letters column of the local paper, one of which called for all dogs to be shot.

Frost could have been a star striker for Nottingham Forest. A club scout was present when he scored eight goals with eight shots at a school match, and offered to sign him up. But Frost was determined to go to Cambridge, where he arrived in 1958 as an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius.

At Cambridge, Frost got to know Peter Cook, Eleanor Bron, John Bird, Jonathan Miller and other stars of what was to become the Sixties satire industry; but although he edited Granta and became secretary of Footlights, his contemporaries were baffled by his ability to rise above an apparent lack of comic talent and intellectual depth. “What the hell has he got?” Christopher Booker recalled asking.

One thing his contemporaries noticed was Frost’s utter imperviousness to disaster. Peter Cook once recalled seeing him dying on his feet at a club but remaining convinced his performance had been a great success.

Frost’s first screen appearance came during his student days on Anglia Television’s Town And Gown series, on which Frost, according to the local paper, made “unrestrained appearances as an explorer, Professor Nain, Lionel Sope, Goalie Finn and Ron Plindell”. But Frost immediately knew he had found his métier. “The first time I stepped into a television studio,” he recalled later, “it felt like home. It didn’t scare me. Talking to the camera seemed the most natural thing in the world”.

Down from Cambridge, he took job with Associated-Rediffusion, who marked him down as “totally unsuitable” to appear on screen, and supplemented his income by performing in nightclubs. In 1962, Frost was doing an impersonation of the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in a two-month stint at the Blue Angel in Upper Berkeley Street when he was spotted by Ned Sherrin, who was looking for a linkman for his new BBC series That Was The Week That Was, sometimes referred to as TW3. Sherrin decided that Frost was exactly the man to bring satire to the late night mass television audience, and signed him up there and then.

The first TW3 show went out in November 1962, and the series continued for just eight months. Condemned by Mary Whitehouse as “the epitome of what is wrong with the BBC”, by its peak, the show had become a ratings sensation, attracting more than 12 million viewers.

After his early success with TW3, Frost’s career seemed to falter. “David Frost: A short life and a sad decline” announced the Daily Expressgleefully in 1964. But he soon demonstrated his extraordinary talent for bouncing back. In 1966, after being sacked from TW3’s lacklustre successor Not So Much A Programme, More A Way of Life, he sent out invitations to a totally pointless but ostentatious champagne breakfast at the Connaught to which he summoned most of the headline figures of the 1960s. Amazingly, many took the bait, among them Harold Wilson, the Bishop of Woolwich, the philosopher AJ Ayer, Lord Longford, and several newspaper proprietors. It was a brilliant publicity stroke which, while it left his guests baffled, catapulted the 26-year-old Frost from a face in the TW3 line-up to a marketable celebrity.

The following year he orchestrated and secured the franchise for LWT, of which The Frost Programme became a cornerstone. In 1968 he signed a £125,000 contract with an American network for a three-nights-a-week show, the biggest salary ever offered to a British broadcaster. So began three years of transatlantic to-ing and fro-ing, invariably on Concorde. Honours were heaped upon him. In one week in 1969 he was appointed OBE in Britain, made a Doctor of Laws in Boston and given a “Faith and Freedom” award for “communicating the relevance of Judaeo-Christian ethics to 20th century America”. In 1968 he set up his own company, David Paradine Productions, and by 1969 his salary was rumoured to be £500,000.

At the height of his fame during the 1960s, Frost enjoyed a reputation for aggressive and fearless interviewing. He eviscerated Rupert Murdoch on the subject of pornography in an interview so hostile that it was said to have contributed to Murdoch’s decision not to live in Britain. He stood his ground against the formidable Enoch Powell in an interview on the subject of racism.

In 1967 Frost conducted what was perhaps his most notorious interview with the disgraced insurance fraudster Emil Savundra. When Savundra’s trial began a week later, the phrase “trial by television” was used by Savundra’s defending counsel to excoriate Frost.

Frost became a symbol of Sixties glamour, dynamism and irreverence. In his survey of the decade, The Pendulum Years (1970), Bernard Levin anointed him “Man of the Sixties”. Frost, he said, “divined by a remarkable instinct what the age demanded and gave it”. Newspaper diarists delighted in documenting his dalliances with actresses and models He was engaged twice but dumped both times, virtually at the altar; all his girlfriends, he always insisted, were “ terrific” and “wonderful” and most remained friends.

During the Seventies his career seemed to falter again. His output remained copious, but in series such as David Frost Presents the Guinness Book of Records (he bought the television rights to the world’s bestselling book in 1973), he began to lose focus.

His appearances on British television became more sporadic. Then, in 1977, he secured perhaps the biggest coup of his career by signing up the disgraced former American President Richard Nixon to an exclusive contract to give a series of four interviews; it was the first time since his resignation that Nixon had agreed to answer questions on the record.

Deceptively easy-going at first, almost at the end Frost moved in for the kill, and Nixon found himself apologising to the American public for the first time for his role in the Watergate affair. Frost packaged and sold the interviews to nearly every country in the world, and the interviews achieved the largest audience for a news interview in the history of television.

Having established himself again at the centre of world affairs, in 1981 Frost married Lynne Frederick, the widow of the actor Peter Sellers, but the marriage ended in failure 18 months later. In 1984 he married Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. It was, by all accounts, a conspicuously happy union.

Frost was one of the “famous five” who launched TV-am during the early 1980s, but the only one to survive the debacle when the other four were axed in March 1983. “He’s competent, he’s professional and he has the best address book in the world” enthused Bruce Gyngell, who took over as managing director. “ He’s always on the up, he’ll greet you positively and say: ‘Hello Sunshine, how are you going? Lovely to see you.’ He’s quite irresistible.”

In the 1990s Frost could be seen in Britain interviewing heads of state on TV-am’s Frost on Sunday, spying on the rich and not quite famous inThrough the Keyhole, as well as chronicling the bizarre in The Spectacular World of Guinness Records. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, he could be seen quizzing more heads of state on Talking With Frost.

As Frost became more of an Establishment figure, opinions were divided on whether he offered television viewers anything more than the interviewing equivalent of Hello! magazine. “What is the real thing you want to get across?” and “How would you like to be remembered?” were typical of the sort of questions which politicians could expect to be asked. It was hardly surprising that they queued up to be on his shows.

Yet at the same time some politicians were said to view him as the most dangerous inquisitor of them all, a man who would lull the interviewee into a false sense of security before bowling a googly. In 1986, the Conservative Party chairman was coaxed into dismissing a riot at a boxing match as mere “exuberance”, undermining his government’s “get tough” policy on hooligans.

In 1987 the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, dropped his guard when asked as a unilateralist whether he would be willing to send “our boys” into battle in an army equipped with short range tactical nuclear weapons. Kinnock thought not, on the whole, because Britain could always put up resistance on the home front. The press seized on this as Kinnock calling for a latter- day Dad’s’ Army to see off the nuclear threat.

Frost himself believed he got more out of his subjects by being nice to them and felt that the impact of interviews was more compelling and sometimes chilling done conversationally than as a courtroom confrontation: “There’s little point weighing into the interviewee from the start. Much better to let him damn himself out of his own mouth, then you’ve got the ammunition you need.”

David Frost was knighted in 1993.

He and his wife had three sons.

Sir David Frost, born April 7 1939, died August 31 2013

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, who has died aged 74, won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, created a bestseller from a translation of Beowulf (1998) and sold more books in Britain than any other living poet; the common charge that he was too easy — “far from unfathomable”, as one critic put it — was a backhanded compliment to his democratic lyrical powers.

Poetry, Heaney remarked, “begins in delight, and ends in self-consciousness” — a very different conception from that school of poetry which begins in misery and ends in existential doubt. The truth of Heaney’s poetry was to be found in finely-observed details — the “mass and majesty of the world” encapsulated in “the small compass of a cast-iron stove-lid”. In its Nobel citation, the Swedish Academy noted the “ethical depth” of works “which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”.

Heaney wrote, of course, in English and in the rooted English poetic tradition of Milton, Wordsworth and Hopkins. His exploration of the language was relentless not only in his own poetry, but also in translations into English of such works as an old Irish version of the Sweeney legend or the 15th-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson. His acclaimed translation of Beowulf took a treasure trove of Anglo-Saxon out of the academic lecture halls and introduced it to a wider audience.

Heaney was taken to British hearts as the country’s leading poet, and his poems became a staple of the school curriculum: poems of childhood from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966) at GCSE, and his more complex Bog poems from Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975) at A-level. Yet he confessed that, when he lectured at Harvard or Oxford, he was tempted to call his lectures “doing English” — almost as though he were a detached spectator and English a foreign tongue.

And so in a sense, it was. Heaney was a poet of Irish Catholic, nationalist experience, a farm boy from Derry; and English, in the mythology of Irish nationalism, is the language of imperialist oppression. It was from the tension between worlds — past and present, Irish and English, farm and academia — that he twisted his poetry. In negotiating what he called the “double reality” of Ireland and England he found an impish delight in subverting cultural nostrums and expectations. In Sweeney Astray, Gaelic pre-Plantation place names are translated into what sound like Protestant Ascendancy place names. His Beowulf has a northern accent.

There was never much doubt about where Heaney’s patriotic sympathies lay. What he called his “off-centre” cultural allegiance led him to rebuff the Laureateship, and in 1982 he objected to his inclusion in a book of British poets with the warning lines: “Be advised, my passport’s green/ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen”, and the emphatic ending “British, no, the name’s not right./ Yours truly, Seamus.”

Yet his political position was, perhaps, more accurately conveyed in the pseudonym “Incertus” (“uncertain”) under which he published his earliest poems. For him the crude certainties of the Republican nationalist narrative were always subverted by the personal and his deep sense of a common humanity.

The eldest of nine children, Seamus Heaney was born on a farm at Mossbawn, Co Derry, Northern Ireland, on April 13 1939 — a time when Roman Catholics were conscious of being politically marginalised in a Unionist state. As his lifelong friend Seamus Deane observed in a profile in 2000, the very act of bestowing the Celticised Christian name on a boy in Northern Ireland was “a signal” that a family “was loyal to the Gaelic, and not the British, account of things”.

Heaney grew up on the family farm, where what counted was skill with a spade or a plough. Poetry came to him through his ears, not from the family’s paltry collection of books — sing-songs and recitations on St Patrick’s Day, the BBC Shipping Forecast, the “enforced poetry” of the Catholic litany, his mother singing Scottish ballads.

It was a life he evoked affectionately in poems such as Sunlight (a vision of his Aunt Mary baking bread), or Clearances, written after his mother Margaret’s death, in which he tenderly remembered “When all the others were away at Mass/ I was all hers as we peeled potatoes”.

Heaney went to the local school, which was attended by both Protestants and Catholics, and while there the 1947 Northern Ireland Education Act was passed, giving increased access to higher education for children of poorer families. He won a scholarship to board at St Columb’s College, a clerical-run school in Derry city, where he became head prefect and where contemporaries included the politician and fellow Nobel Prize winner John Hume, the writer Seamus Deane and the playwright Brian Friel.

At Queen’s University, Belfast, Heaney read English Literature, wrote “a little bit of poetry” and was a star student. When he gained a First he was offered the opportunity to go to Oxford. At the time it seemed a step too far for a country boy from Derry, so he took a job teaching while taking a postgraduate course at Queen’s. But the thought of Oxford had lifted his eyes to a world of new possibilities, and he began writing poetry in earnest, drawing on his own childhood experiences. The deeply moving Mid-Term Break, about the time he was called home from St Columb’s after his four-year-old brother Christopher had been killed by a car, was written at this time.

In the early 1960s his poems began to be published in the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Times, and Heaney became a member of a set of young Belfast poets called The Group, assembled by Philip Hobsbaum, a lecturer at Queen’s who had been taught by Leavis and was an admirer of Ted Hughes. In 1964 he published a slim volume called Eleven Poems; and in 1965 he married Marie Devlin, a fellow-teacher.

Acclamation came almost instantly. His first collection, Death of a Naturalist, published by Faber and Faber in 1966, attracted astonishing reviews for a first collection and inspired the New Review to coin the term “Heaneyesque” to describe the sort of mud-caked verse that Heaney described as “stuff out of Co Derry from childhood”. Digging, the poem that opened the collection, became one of his best-known works and was a remarkable statement of his ambition. In it he celebrated his father’s and grandfather’s expertise with a spade before observing that “I’ve no spade to follow men like them./ Between my finger and thumb/ The squat pen rests./ I’ll dig with that.”

The years following the publication of Death of a Naturalist saw the outbreak of the Troubles and Heaney, who was “necessarily” involved in some of the civil rights marches, found himself in the unwelcome position of being pressurised to take up cudgels for the Republican cause. He avoided the pressure, and detractors accused him of sitting on the fence. Yet not all his poems lacked strong opinions. On the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising he had published Requiem for the Croppies — a romanticised portrait of the Irish rebels of 1798 (“shaking scythes at cannon”).

Revealingly, though, Heaney chose to read the poem (before the Troubles) to an Ulster Protestant audience — to “break the silence”, as he put it (they remained tight-lipped). After the Troubles started he never read it in public, knowing that it would be taken as IRA propaganda. The role of the poet, he argued, was that of a “dutiful contemplative, pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect”.

His best poetry on the issues surrounding the Troubles is imbued with a deep humanity and understanding and communicated through the particular and personal. In The Other Side, he describes a Protestant neighbour gently tapping out a tune with his stick as he waits outside for the Heaney family to finish their rosary before knocking on their door.

Regarded as suspect at best by extreme Republicans and as a “Papist propagandist” by the Ulster Protestant press, in 1972 Heaney decided to move across the border to a cottage in Co Wicklow, where it was, perhaps, easier to remain true to a kind of nationalism which was not corrupted by sectarian bitterness and be “completely at eye-level with life”. His next two collections, Wintering Out and North, inevitably tackled the troubled history of Northern Ireland — North especially (“Men die at hand. In blasted street and home/The gelignite’s a common sound effect”). But he clearly felt oppressed by the weight of expectations on him.

Predictably, perhaps, North was attacked both as an apology for primitive tribalism and as an evasion of the requirement to “take sides”, criticisms which ignored the skilful way in which Heaney had turned shrill public confrontation into a private, internal debate about the conflicting claims of nation and art. It was not poetry’s task to solve contemporary problems, he argued, but to clear a sufficient space to think about them.

Heaney’s acceptance of a teaching post at Harvard in 1982 helped him make the move from parochial to international poet. At Harvard he found himself in the company of poets such as Brodsky and Derek Walcott and in an environment in which language was regarded as a worldwide republic without borders. He taught for 14 years at Harvard and for five at Oxford, where he held the Chair of Poetry from 1989 to 1994.

It was his time in America that led to the Beowulf project, and when he won the Nobel Prize in 1995 (this “Stockholm business”, he called it) he feared it might interrupt progress. The triumphant publication of his translation in 1999 confirmed the wisdom of the Swedish Academy’s choice, and the fact that an Irish farm boy had succeeded brilliantly in refashioning one of the jealously-guarded crown jewels of English literature stirred up all sorts of interesting issues of cultural identity and ownership.

With his crown of untidy white hair, wide face and slightly slanting eyes (he was once described by a fellow poet as resembling “a pissed Eskimo”), Heaney was an easily recognisable figure. Despite his stellar status — in addition to the Nobel, he won, among other awards, the Whitbread Prize (three times), the David Cohen prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature, and the Forward Poetry Prize (for his final collection, Human Chain) — he retained a bluff, farmer’s son homeliness and a talent for likeable self-mockery.

In all, he published 13 collections of poetry, several volumes of essays, and (with Ted Hughes) edited The Rattle Bag and The School Bag, anthologies dedicated to poetry as carnival.

Seamus Heaney and his wife, Marie (née Devlin), had two sons and a daughter.

Seamus Heaney, born April 13 1939, died August 30 2013