Obituaries in the News

— Lee Hazlewood

LAS VEGAS (AP) _ Lee Hazlewood, a singer and songwriter best known for writing and producing "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'" for Nancy Sinatra, has died. He was 78.

Barton Lee Hazlewood died at his home in Henderson of kidney cancer on Saturday evening, the Clark County coroner's office said.

Hazlewood was most famous for his work with the daughter of Frank Sinatra, including writing and producing such hits as "Sugartown" and "Some Velvet Morning." He also produced "Something Stupid," a duet Nancy recorded with her father in 1967.

He also produced Duane Eddy and Gram Parsons, and performed on a number of solo albums and with Nancy Sinatra in three "Nancy & Lee" albums.

Hazlewood was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2005 and released his final album, "Cake or Death" in 2006.

___

Florian Pittis

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) _ Actor and folk musician Florian Pittis, who helped popularize Western rock bands in communist Romania, died of cancer Sunday. He was 63.

Pittis, who had several shows on public radio and television, died Sunday in a Bucharest hospital from prostate cancer, officials said Monday.

In the 1960s, he promoted the music from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in Romania.

Romania's public radio said it would rename one of its stations, Radio3Net, after Pittis.

___

Baron Elie Robert de Rothschild

VIENNA, Austria (AP) _ Baron Elie Robert de Rothschild, who helped France's renowned Rothschild winemaking and banking dynasty recover from the ravages of World War II, died Monday while vacationing at his Austrian hunting lodge. He was 90.

Rothschild had been on a hunting trip at his lodge near the alpine village of Scharnitz outside Innsbruck when he suffered a fatal heart attack, police in the province of Tyrol said in a statement.

He had spent the past several days hunting game with friends in the heavily forested area and had planned to return home to France, police said.

He was the second prominent Rothschild to die this year. In June, family patriarch Baron Guy de Rothschild died in Paris.

The family's prestigious Chateau Lafite-Rothschild winery, for whom Elie de Rothschild began working in 1946 after serving as an Allied soldier during World War II, credits him with at least two of the best and most memorable postwar Bordeaux vintages: 1947 and 1949.

Born May 29, 1917, Elie de Rothschild was captured by the Germans near the border with Belgium. He wound up at Luebeck, one of the Nazis' most infamous POW camps.

There, he was reunited with a brother, Alain, and although they were Jews, they were treated as captured officers and avoided execution.

He married his childhood sweetheart, Liliane Fould-Springer, who was one of France's leading patrons of the arts when she died in 2003. Together, the couple acquired works by Picasso, Rembrandt and other masters.

He held a 25 percent stake in the Rothschild banking empire and oversaw the conversion of the former Paris-Lyon-Marseille railway into a travel company of hotels and restaurants.