Frederick

Frederick M. Nicholas, a war hero, attorney and real estate developer who shaped several of Los Angeles’ major arts and public service institutions, died peacefully at his home Saturday. He was 105.

Nicholas led the design and development of major L.A. landmarks, including the Museum of Contemporary Art and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Surprisingly enough, Nicholas discovered his love of the arts in law school at the University of Chicago. “When I went downtown, I saw an art gallery for the first time,” he said in a 2022 YouTube interview with Blake Meidel, a young film creator. “I went inside and I looked at it and I was overwhelmed.”

When he returned to L.A., where he had studied journalism at USC, Nicholas took classes in the visual arts and built a law practice that included representation of artists and galleries. He took on several distinguished roles in the arts community, serving as MOCA’s chairman and vice chairman for a cumulative 11 years and a life trustee for the remainder of his life. Nicholas was instrumental to the development of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

It is little wonder that he was nicknamed “Mr. Downtown Culture.” In the 1980s, Nicholas led the city out of a cultural stasis and turned it into a global cultural and architectural powerhouse.

“Fred, we literally wouldn’t be L.A. without you,” former mayor Eric Garcetti said in a message to Nicholas on his 100th birthday.

Renowned architect Frank Gehry told The Times that Nicholas’ involvement in MOCA “was too good to be true.”

“He is an extremely smart man, and he’s sensitive. He’s been involved in and interested in the arts as a collector,” Gehry said in 1982. “He understands both the architecture and business of development. He knows all the players involved with the museum, and he has their respect. When I heard he was involved I thought it was too good to be true. I know he can pull it off.”

Nicholas negotiated with Giuseppe Panza of Varese, Italy, to acquire the Panza Collection. Including works from Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and others, the art now forms the core of MOCA’s permanent collection.

As chair of the Walt Disney Hall Concert Committee beginning in 1987, Nicholas headed a committee to find an architect (Gehry was eventually hired for the coveted gig), fundraise and plan the building process.

Over 105 years, Nicholas engaged with some of history’s greatest artists. “I met Pablo Picasso and I had dinner with him,” he told Meidel breezily.

Nicholas’ influence in L.A. extended into the realm of public service as well. After an incredibly successful law career, he shifted to pro bono work. “I thought that lawyers should do something to help the poor,” Nicholas told Meidel. Nicholas founded Public Counsel in 1970, which provided legal support to vulnerable people, including veterans and unhoused families, in what is now the largest firm of its kind in the U.S.

“Public Counsel really is his greatest legacy,” Nicholas’ son, Anthony Nicholas, told The Times on Tuesday. “They are still helping people today.”

Nicholas was born on May 30, 1920 in Brooklyn, N.Y. When he was 14, his family moved to L.A. In 1941, Nicholas served in the Army and was discharged five years later.

“One of the things that made me successful in law was that I was always in a hurry. I was always eager to move because I felt that I had lost so much time in the war. I had to make it up,” Nicholas, one of the oldest and most decorated WWII veterans, said in a retrospective on his life and work at age 100.

Nicholas was also adored by his family. Anthony recalled his father’s “beaming smile,” “great, great energy” and “the love he spread around the world.”

Nicholas is survived by his children, Deborah, Jan and Anthony; Anthony’s wife Mona; six grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and sister Helen Devor.

LONDON — Frederick Forsyth, the British author of “The Day of the Jackal” and other bestselling thrillers, has died after a brief illness, his literary agent said. He was 86.

Jonathan Lloyd, his agent, said Forsyth died at home early Monday surrounded by his family.

“We mourn the passing of one of the world’s greatest thriller writers,” Lloyd said.

Born in Kent, in southern England, in 1938, Forsyth served as a Royal Air Force pilot before becoming a foreign correspondent. He covered the attempted assassination of French President Charles de Gaulle in 1962, which provided inspiration for “The Day of the Jackal,” his bestselling political thriller about a professional assassin.

Published in 1971, the book propelled him to global fame. It was made into a film in 1973 starring Edward Fox as the Jackal and more recently a Peacock television series starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch.

In 2015, Forsyth told the BBC that he had also worked for the British intelligence agency MI6 for many years, starting from when he covered a civil war in Nigeria in the 1960s.

Although Forsyth said he did other jobs for the agency, he said he was not paid for his services and “it was hard to say no” to officials seeking information. “The zeitgeist was different,” he told the BBC. “The Cold War was very much on.”

He wrote more than 25 books including “The Afghan,” “The Kill List,” “The Dogs of War” and “The Fist of God” that have sold over 75 million copies, Lloyd said.

His publisher, Bill Scott-Kerr, said that “Revenge of Odessa,” a sequel to the 1974 book “The Odessa File” that Forsyth worked on with fellow thriller author Tony Kent, will be published in August.

“Still read by millions across the world, Freddie’s thrillers define the genre and are still the benchmark to which contemporary writers aspire,” Scott-Kerr said.

Approached by Britain’s MI6 while reporting on Nigeria’s Biafra War, he mined his experiences for literary inspiration.

Best-selling British novelist Frederick Forsyth, author of about 20 spy thrillers, has died at the age of 86.

Forsyth, who was a reporter and informant for Britain’s MI6 spy agency before turning his hand to writing blockbuster novels like The Day of the Jackal, died on Monday at his home in the village of Jordans in Buckinghamshire, said Jonathan Lloyd, his agent.

“We mourn the passing of one of the world’s greatest thriller writers,” Lloyd said of the author, who started writing novels to clear his debts in his early 30s, going on to sell more than 75 million books.

“There are several ways of making quick money, but in the general list, writing a novel rates well below robbing a bank,” he said in his 2015 autobiography, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue.

The gamble paid off after he penned The Day of the Jackal – his story of a fictional assassination attempt on French President Charles de Gaulle by right-wing extremists – in just 35 days.

The novel met immediate success when it came out in 1971. It was later turned into a film and led to Venezuelan revolutionary Illich Ramirez Sanchez being nicknamed Carlos the Jackal.

Forsyth went on to write a string of bestsellers, including The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974). His 18th novel, The Fox, was published in 2018.

Forsyth trained as an air force pilot, but his linguistic talents – he spoke French, German, Spanish and Russian – led him to the Reuters news agency in 1961 with postings in Paris and East Berlin during the Cold War.

He left Reuters for the BBC but soon became disillusioned by its bureaucracy and what he saw as the corporation’s failure to cover Nigeria properly due to the government’s postcolonial views on Africa.

His autobiography revealed how he became a spy, the author recounting that he was approached by “Ronnie” from MI6 in 1968, who wanted “an asset deep inside the Biafran enclave” in Nigeria, where civil war had broken out the year before.

In 1973, Forsyth was asked to conduct a mission for MI6 in communist East Germany, driving his Triumph convertible to Dresden to receive a package from a Russian colonel in the toilets of the Albertinum museum.

The writer said he was never paid by MI6 but in return received help with his book research and submitted draft pages to ensure he was not divulging sensitive information.

In his later years, Forsyth turned his attention to politics, delivering withering, right-wing takes on the modern world in columns for the anti-European Union Daily Express.

Divorced from Carole Cunningham in 1988, he married Sandy Molloy in 1994. He lost a fortune in an investment scam in the 1980s and had to write more novels to support himself.

He had two sons, Stuart and Shane, with his first wife.