Maudie Hopkins, Confederate widow

Maudie White Hopkins, who grew up during the Depression in the hardscrabble Ozarks and married a Confederate army veteran 67 years her senior, has died. She was 93.

Hopkins, the mother of three children from a second marriage who loved to make fried peach pies and applesauce cakes, died last Sunday at a hospital in Helena-West Helena, Ark.

Other Confederate widows are still living, but they don’t want any publicity, said Martha Boltz, of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Hopkins grew up in a family of 10 children, did laundry and cleaned house for William M. Cantrell, an elderly Confederate veteran in Baxter County whose wife had died years earlier.

When he offered to leave his land and home to her if she would marry him and care for him in his later years, she said yes. She was 19; he was 86.

“After Mr. Cantrell died I took a little old mule he had and plowed me a vegetable garden and had plenty of vegetables to eat. It was hard times; you had to work to eat,” she said in 2004.

Hopkins later married Winfred White and started a family. In all, she was married four times.

Manny Farber, film critic, artist

Manny Farber, an influential film critic whose essays and reviews punctured the self-serious veil of art-house favorites – Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut and Michelangelo Antonioni – while celebrating the less-studied, but more-entertaining work of Laurel and Hardy, Howard Hawks and John Wayne, has died.

Farber, 91, who also had a long career as an artist, died of bone cancer Monday at his home in the San Diego suburb of Leucadia.

Farber drew admirers for his fierce opinions and muscular, irreverent voice. Susan Sontag called Farber “the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced,” adding that his “mind and eye change the way you see.”

Farber’s credo was best expressed in his essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” published in the journal Film Culture in 1962. He offered a high-spirited attack on pretentiousness in movies whose style he described as “reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago.”

Farber traced his structuralist roots to his training as a carpenter in the 1930s, but they were perhaps most fully expressed in his paintings, which began absorbing most of his time and energy in the mid-1970s.

Much of his later work, done in collaboration with his third wife, Patricia Patterson, featured train tracks and rebar, as well as quotidian desk items (paper clips, pushpins, tape). Farber taught art at the University of California at San Diego from 1970 to 1987, when he retired.

Paul Starr, makeup expert

Celebrity makeup artist Paul Starr, 51, who has worked with Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Garner and Sophia Loren, among other Hollywood stars, was found dead Tuesday in his home in Los Angeles.

An autopsy is pending.

Starr’s client roster includes old and new Hollywood: Michelle Pfeiffer, Jane Fonda, Scarlett Johansson, Cameron Diaz and Jessica Alba. He was a founding beauty editor of Flaunt magazine from 1998 to 2001, and in 2005 he released a book, “Paul Starr on Beauty: Conversations with Thirty Celebrated Women.”

From wire reports