Lives in Brief

Three elder sisters danced with the famous Ziegfeld Follies revues, and Eaton played the Dauphin in the 1921 edition, with W. C. Fields as Le Duc de Chateau Briand. When he left to appear in Forever, a film version of George de Maurier’s novel Peter Ibbetson, his brother Joe took the role of Dauphin.

Back on Broadway he appeared in A Royal Fandango (1923), a short-lived drama remarkable only for a cast that included Ethel Barrymore, Edward G. Robinson, and Spencer Tracy in his first credited Broadway performance. In the 1928 play Skidding he introduced the character of Andy Hardy, a role made famous in a series of films by Mickey Rooney.

The following year he appeared in The Ghost Talks, a comedy that was one of Fox’s first talkies, and is now believed to be lost. He alternated spells on Broadway and in Hollywood, before moving to England in the late Thirties, where he made half a dozen films, including Who Goes Next?, with Jack Hawkins, and Sons of the Sea, with Leslie Banks. The latter was to prove his swansong.

During the war Eaton served as a major in the US Army Air Corps. On returning to civilian life, he worked at his sister Doris’s dance studio. He specialised in Latin dances and even taught at a studio in Havana. Doris’s business expanded into a string of studios, but she closed them in the Sixties, and Eaton never worked again. He struggled with alcoholism for years and eventually moved in with Doris at her ranch in Oklahoma. This year they appeared on Broadway at an Aids benefit show. He is survived by Doris, who was 100 in March.

David Fairlamb, financial journalist, was born on February 2, 1951. He died on September 1, 2004, aged 53.

David Fairlamb, who worked for Institutional Investor magazine in London before joining BusinessWeek’s Frankfurt bureau in 1999, was known for his huge list of contacts in the European banking world, which he covered for 25 years. Fluent in Russian, he also covered Eastern Europe; most recently he wrote a cover story on Poland when that country joined the European Union.

Stephen B. Shepard, the editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek, once remarked: “I’ve never read a David Fairlamb story that I didn’t learn something from.”

At the magazine Fairlamb was known for his productivity, his willingness to help colleagues and younger journalists, and for his tenacity — he was once chased by a pack of dogs while investigating an illegal liquor warehouse in Calais.

“He was just about the most generous and prolific journalist the publication ever employed,” said Bob Dowling, managing editor of BusinessWeek International.

Fairlamb grew up near Newcastle upon Tyne and graduating from Newcastle University in 1972. He then studied Russian at Birmingham, and in 1973-1975 lectured on the 19th-century Russian novel at Kingsgate College in Kent. He started in journalism in 1979 at Banker magazine. He won many awards, including three from the New York-based Overseas Press Club and, in 2003, the German Marshall Fund’s Peter R. Weitz Prize.

Fairlamb is survived by his second wife, Irina Nikolsklaya, who lives in Moscow, and by his six children by his first wife.

Neal Fredericks, cinematographer, was born on July 24, 1969. He was killed in a plane crash on August 14, 2004, aged 35.

Neal Fredericks met Eduardo Sanchez when they were students on a television course at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, in the Eighties. They subsequently worked together on a string of school assignments and no-budget films, one of which was to surprise them and the entire industry by becoming the most profitable movie of all time, altering industry perceptions of budgets, video technology and the internet as a marketing tool.

As director of photography, Fredericks was responsible for the atmospheric hand-held camerawork on The Blair Witch Project, which was written and directed by Sanchez and Daniel Myrick. It supposedly cost as little as $35,000 to make, but grossed $240 million in cinemas worldwide.

Neal Leslie Fredericks was born in Newport Beach, California, in 1999, where his father was employed by the Navy. He spent much of his childhood abroad and developed an early interest in cinema.

The Blair Witch Project purported to be a documentary about spooky goings-on in Maryland woods. The film was supposedly found after the disappearance of the film-makers. The internet was used to whip up the rumours, develop a whole back-story about the Blair Witch and create a huge demand to see the film, which in reality was a clever horror drama pretending to be a documentary.

The hand-held camera and use of video added to the feel of reality. Writing about Fredericks’ contribution on his website, Sanchez said: “Blair Witch didn’t need to be lit, so he didn’t light it. It didn’t need a camera operator, so he didn’t operate. What he did do was make sure those actors knew everything they could and had everything they needed to keep shooting, to keep getting those images into the camera.”

Perhaps because it was so naturalistic, his work on The Blair Witch Project did not lead to the big Hollywood offers Fredericks had wanted, though he worked steadily following its release in 1999.

He was cinematographer on the television spin-off projects, The Burkittsville 7 and Shadow of the Blair Witch the following year, but many of the films in which he was involved went straight to video or remain unreleased.

He was married to the Chinese-born writer-director Ann Lu, with whom he worked on Dreamers (1999) and Erosion (2004). They divorced last year.

He was shooting a low-budget pirate horror film, Cross Bones, off Key West when his plane crashed into the sea. Four others were rescued, but he was trapped and his body recovered a day later.