[continued from previous message]   
      
   in the 1988 movie “Scrooged” as the taxicab-driving Ghost of Christmas   
   Past. It was his most prominent role in an acting career that encompassed   
   dozens of movies and TV shows.   
      
      
   It was around this time that Mr. Johansen began cultivating the stage   
   persona Buster Poindexter, a tuxedo-wearing crooner who specialized in   
   jump blues and R&B party songs. Mr. Johansen made four albums as Buster   
   Poindexter between 1987 and 1997, including the Latin-tinged “Buster’s   
   Spanish Rocketship.” As Jon Pareles wrote in The Times in 1994, “What had   
   seemed a sideline became his public musical face, often brilliant in the   
   songs he personalized but sometimes verging on minstrelsy when he mimicked   
   Black performers like Louis Armstrong.”   
      
   His signature cover of “Hot Hot Hot,” originally recorded by the soca   
   musician Arrow, became a party anthem and a minor hit, peaking at No. 45   
   on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1987.   
      
   He had always displayed good taste in covers, dating back to the Dolls’   
   versions of Bo Diddley’s “Pills” and Archie Bell & the Drells’   
   “(There’s   
   Gonna Be a) Showdown.” After he retired the Buster persona, he started a   
   new group, David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, which performed songs   
   drawn from Harry Smith’s 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music” and   
   released albums in 2000 and 2002.   
      
   In 2004, Morrissey induced the surviving New York Dolls — Mr. Johansen,   
   Mr. Sylvain and Mr. Kane — to reunite for two shows in London. Feeling   
   unwell a few weeks later, Mr. Kane checked into a hospital, was diagnosed   
   with leukemia and died within hours. Nevertheless, Mr. Johansen and Mr.   
   Sylvain made three more New York Dolls albums together between 2006 and   
   2011. Mr. Sylvain died in 2021, leaving Mr. Johansen as the last original   
   Doll.   
      
   In addition to Ms. Hennessey, his stepdaughter, Mr. Johansen is survived   
   by his wife, Mara Hennessey, a visual artist he married in 2013, who   
   produced and designed many of his live shows, and five siblings: Michael,   
   Christopher, Elizabeth and Mary Ellen Johansen and Karen Holman. He was   
   previously married to the actress and publicist Cyrinda Foxe from 1977 to   
   1978 (she left him for Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith) and to   
   the photographer Kate Simon from 1983 to 2011.   
      
   Mr. Johansen was the subject of “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” a   
   2023 documentary directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi centered   
   on a Buster Poindexter show at the Café Carlyle in New York. “Existence is   
   maimed happiness,” he said in the film, paraphrasing the philosopher   
   William James — but he wasn’t able to conceal the joyful spirit and   
   relentless productivity that animated his decades-long career. There was a   
   irrepressible outlook that drove the New York Dolls in their evanescent   
   moment, which Mr. Johansen applied to the rest of his long life.   
      
   “Our total attitude towards art, was, like, get up and do something — quit   
   sitting there whining,” Mr. Johansen told The Times in 2006. “That’s what   
   we stood for, that do-something spirit.”   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)