This week’s passages

Garth Hudson, 87, whose intricate swirls of Lowrey organ helped elevate the Band from rollicking juke-joint refugees into one of the most resonant and influential rock groups of the 1960s and ’70s, died Tuesday at a nursing home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was the last surviving original member of the group.

Hudson did far more than play the organ. A musical polymath whose workroom at home included arcana like sheet music for century-old standards and hymns, he played almost anything — saxophone, accordion, synthesizers, trumpet, French horn, violin — and in endless styles that could at various times be at home in a conservatory, church, carnival or roadhouse.

He was the one who set up, installed and maintained the recording equipment in the pink ranch house in Saugerties, N.Y., where Bob Dylan and the Band recorded more than 100 songs that came to be known as the basement tapes.

Ginny Ruffner, 72, the pioneering Seattle artist and innovator who helped put Seattle on the map as a national hub for glass art, died Monday in her Ballard home.

Known for intricate glass and metal sculptures that fused art with science and technology — as well as her wit, joyful personality and wild salt-and-pepper curls, which mirrored her exuberant glass pieces — Ruffner was perpetually curious about art, science and life. Her favorite project, she liked to say, was whatever was next.

Ruffner reinvented both herself and the glass art genre throughout her career by reclaiming “decorative” techniques and later incorporating cutting-edge technology like virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Ruffner made her way to the top of her field as well as major institutions like the Seattle Art Museum, the Corning Museum of Glass and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others.

Ruffner defied the odds. First, by transforming lampworking — a glass-torching technique (rather than glassblowing) long dismissed to the realm of tchotchkes — into a contemporary art form. Then in the ’80s, by rising to the top of the male-dominated glass art field. And, by surviving a near-fatal car crash in 1991, she surpassed doctors’ expectations with a quasi-complete recovery and found a renewed vigor for creating ever-larger and more complex artworks.

She championed other artists, especially other women. In 2016, she founded SOLA — short for “Support for Old Lady Artists” — to encourage women to exhibit more, increase visibility with grants, and help with career support and digital archiving. She wanted to ensure that other women of her age and talent could achieve a similar level of success, according to Seattle artist and educator Marge Levy.

Cecile Richards, 67, the dynamic former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and one of the country’s most well-known defenders of abortion rights, died Monday at her home in New York City. She was diagnosed in 2023 with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, her family said in a statement. A former political organizer, Richards was a daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards.

Cecile Richards was the president of Planned Parenthood from 2006 to 2018, overseeing the country’s largest provider of reproductive health care and sex education during a period in which the organization was under sharp attack by conservatives, particularly under the Republican administration of President George W. Bush and President Donald Trump’s first. She helped fend off a raft of attempts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass laws to restrict access to abortion or to cut funding for it.

“If I have one regret from my time leading Planned Parenthood, it is that we believed that providing vital health care, with public opinion on our side, would be enough to overcome the political onslaught,” Richards wrote in an opinion essay in The New York Times in 2022. “I underestimated the callousness of the Republican Party and its willingness to trade off the rights of women for political expediency.”

André Soltner, 92, a chef whose reverence for classic French cooking and the homey specialties of his native Alsace helped make Lutèce, in midtown Manhattan, one of the most celebrated restaurants in the United States, died Jan. 18 in Charlottesville, Va.

Soltner took his place behind the stove at Lutèce on Feb. 16, 1961, the restaurant’s opening day, and stayed there for 33 years. As a partner in the restaurant and eventually the sole owner, he delivered haute-cuisine standards in an intimate setting that became an extension of his personality.

At a time when fresh ingredients could be hard to obtain, Soltner insisted on having Dover sole, Scottish salmon and Mediterranean rouget flown in overnight. He struck deals with farmers to supply shallots and girolle mushrooms. Impeccable ingredients, flawless technique and a modern-minded approach to French style put Lutèce in a class by itself and sent critics scrambling for superlatives. Soltner always resisted such accolades. “Basically, I am a cook,” he told Nation’s Restaurant News in 1987. “We are not stars. It’s nice to be recognized, but let’s draw the line.”

Susan F. Wood, 66, a prominent policymaker and champion of women’s health who resigned from the Food and Drug Administration in 2005 to protest what she saw as the agency’s politically motivated delay in expanding access to Plan B, an emergency contraceptive, died Jan. 17 at her home in London. The cause was glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer.

Wood was trained as a biologist and biochemist but spent nearly her entire career in health policy. She served for five years as a science adviser to the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues before joining the Office on Women’s Health within the Health and Human Services Department in 1995. She was widely credited with helping to correct the long-standing underrepresentation of female participants in clinical studies — a flaw that obscured the particular effects of heart disease in women, for example, or the ways a given drug may work differently in women than in men.

She rose to greatest prominence during the long and charged debate over Plan B, a drug often referred to as the “morning-after pill.” Approval of over-the-counter sale was recommended by an FDA advisory committee, regulatory officials and the chief of the FDA’s drug center. But the approval was held by the George W. Bush administration. Days later, Wood resigned, saying she could “no longer serve as staff when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overruled.”

Jules Feiffer, 95, an artist whose creative instincts and political passions could not be confined to one medium, died Jan. 17 at his home in Richfield Springs, N.Y., west of Albany. The cause was congestive heart failure.

Feiffer was primarily known as a cartoonist. His syndicated black-and-white comic strip, “Feiffer,” which astringently articulated the cynical, neurotic, aggrieved and ardently left-wing sensibilities of postwar Greenwich Village, began in The Village Voice in 1956 and ran for more than 40 years. But his career also encompassed novels, plays, screenplays, animation and children’s books. A recurrent element in much of his work was his acerbic view of human nature.

Joan Plowright, 95, a British actor who brought an innate dignity to her characters, whether she was playing an elegant, name-dropping dowager or a working-class teenager, died Jan. 16 in Northwood, England, at a retirement home for people in the theater.

Although she will always be associated with her 28-year marriage to Laurence Olivier, one of Britain’s most revered actors, Plowright had more than her share of shining moments.

She won a Tony Award for “A Taste of Honey” (1960), in which she played a teenage girl who becomes pregnant from a casual fling with a sailor (played by Billy Dee Williams). Three decades later, she earned an Oscar nomination for “Enchanted April” (1991), in which she played an upper-class 1920s Englishwoman who knew all the best Victorians. In 1993, Plowright had a two-trophy night at the Golden Globes, winning two awards for best featured actress — for “Enchanted April,” and for her portrayal of Josef Stalin’s disapproving mother-in-law in the 1992 HBO movie “Stalin.”

Melba Montgomery, 86, one of the most distinctive country singers of her generation and an electrifying — and witty — duet partner for George Jones, Gene Pitney and Charlie Louvin, died Jan. 15 in Nashville, Tenn., in a memory care facility.

Montgomery was known to her fans and others as “the female George Jones” for her unreconstructedly down-home phrasing and her gift for bending notes in the tradition of her native Appalachia. Her thrilling high harmonies put an emotional charge into duets like “We Must Have Been Out of Our Minds,” a Top 10 country hit she recorded with Jones in 1963.

As both a solo artist and a duet partner, Montgomery placed 30 singles on the country chart from 1963 to 1986. Her recording of “No Charge,” a touching ode to motherhood written by Harlan Howard, rose to No. 1 in 1974 and crossed over to the pop Top 40.

Nancy Leftenant-Colon, 104, the first Black woman to join the U.S. Army Nurse Corps after the military was desegregated in 1948, died Jan. 8, in Amityville, N.Y. By the time she retired, she was a major who was remembered for quietly breaking down racial barriers during her long military career.

Leftenant-Colon initially joined the all-Black 332nd Fighter Group as a nurse. She then joined the U.S. Air Force after the 332nd Fighter Group was disbanded, supporting the Korean and Vietnam wars. She set up hospital wards in Japan, helped evacuate French Legionnaires from Vietnam and was on the first medical evacuation flight into Dien Bien Phu, where more than 70 years ago the French colonial army was defeated by Vietnamese troops.