Milestones Apr. 4, 2005

FILED FOR DIVORCE. JENNIFER ANISTON, citing irreconcilable differences with BRAD PITT; nearly three months after the Hollywood power couple first announced they were separating; in Los Angeles.

FREED. BOBBY FISCHER, 62, vitriolic chess legend; after being detained for eight months in Japan for an alleged passport violation; upon being granted citizenship in Iceland, where he is a hero for his 1972 victory over rival Boris Spassky. Fischer, whose extradition was sought by the U.S. for violating sanctions against the former Yugoslavia by playing a re-match there against Spassky in 1992, flew to Reykjavik and publicly denounced the U.S. as “hypocritical and corrupt.”

DIED. WALTER HOPPS, 72, visionary museum curator and influential advocate of American art, particularly the Los Angeles avant garde; of pneumonia; in Los Angeles. The first to create a museum exhibition for Frank Stella and a retrospective of Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, Hopps opened the Ferus Gallery with artist Ed Kienholz in 1957, which became a pre-eminent launching pad for such artists as Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin.

DIED. BOBBY SHORT, 80, boyishly exuberant cabaret performer who became a symbol of Manhattan sophistication, drawing glitterati from Woody Allen (who featured Short in two movies) to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; in New York City. With a repertoire that included raspy celebrations of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller, Short began his career at age 11 as the Miniature King of Swing and was a fixture at New York City’s Carlyle Hotel for 36 years. After attempting to retire from that job last year, he planned to make this season his last.

DIED. JOHN DELOREAN, 80, flashy, maverick General Motors executive who went on, as head of his own company in Northern Ireland, to develop the DeLorean sports car, now a collector’s item; in Summit, N.J. After making just 8,900 cars, he was arrested for allegedly selling $24 million worth of cocaine to finance his failing company, which quickly collapsed. (He was later acquitted on an entrapment defense.) Although he did not sell many of his stainless-steel two-seaters, whose doors open upward like gulls’ wings, the DeLorean won lasting fame as the time-traveling vehicle in the 1985 film Back to the Future.

DIED. KENZO TANGE, 91, Japan’s most influential postwar architect, who led the rebuilding of Hiroshima with his peace-park design in 1949; in Tokyo. A winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize, he helped re-elevate his country to the world stage with his twin comma-shaped sports arenas for Tokyo’s 1964 Olympics.

DIED. JAMES CALLAGHAN, 92, British Prime Minister whose mild manners came to be viewed as complacency during his three-year tenure, which was beset by a series of labor strikes in the late 1970s, and helped usher rival Margaret Thatcher into office; in East Sussex, south of London.

DIED. PAUL HENNING, 93, creator of the long-running 1960s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies (and its spin-off, Petticoat Junction); in Burbank, Calif. Henning, who composed the show’s theme song, The Ballad of Jed Clampett, based the hit series on locals he encountered during his boyhood camping trips in the Ozarks.