Howard Koch,
veteran producer and director, died on Feb. 16 at 84.
His TV credits include the series Maverick,
which he directed and produced, and The Untouchables. He had been president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as head of production at Paramount Pictures. He still had an office at Paramount at the time of his death, the same one he'd had for 35 years. Koch also produced eight Oscar shows.
In 1961, Frank Sinatra asked him to run Sinatra Enterprises, where he was an executive producer on several features. He also worked as an independent producer. His credits include The Odd Couple
and Airplane.
Among his survivors are wife Ruth, son Hawk, daughter Melinda Blinken, five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Boris Goldovsky, a fixture on Saturday-afternoon radio from 1943 to 1990, died Feb. 15 in Brookline, Mass. He was 92.
He was born into a family of musicians in Moscow, fled to Berlin to escape the Russian Revolution and there studied with the great Beethoven interpreter Arthur Schnabel. He made his debut as a pianist with the Berlin Philharmonic at 13. He also attended the Liszt Academy in Budapest.
The man who would become among the century's greatest proponents of opera disliked the form at first but became a devotee after accompanying a student production of La Boheme
at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. His Metropolitan Opera broadcast activities included his own feature, Opera News on the Air, in which he would analyze, play excerpts and make opera accessible to the entire nation via the Texaco opera network. He was also a regular panelist on the Texaco Opera Quiz.
His survivors include his widow, former opera singer Margaret Codd Goldovsky; daughter Marina Stefenescu; sister Irene Goldovsky Wolf; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Gail Fisher, who won an Emmy for her work on Mannix, died in Los Angeles at 65. She studied with Lee Strasberg and worked with Elia Kazan. She appeared in a Lincoln Center production of Danton's Death.
Fisher is survived by two daughters, a sister and a brother.
-Beatrice Williams-Rude
