MAY

May 3

- Lloyd Brevett, 80, a renowned double bassist who helped carry ska music from Jamaica to the world as a founding member of the hugely influential band the Skalites, in Kingston of complications from a stroke.

May 4

- Adam Yauch, 47, the gravelly-voiced rapper who helped make The Beastie Boys one of the seminal groups in hip-hop of cancer of the salivary gland.

May 5

Carl Johan Bernadotte, 95, a count who lost his Swedish royal title when he married a commoner, in Angelholm, Sweden. The court did not disclose a cause of death.

May 6

— Marika Mitsokakis, 81, the voluble, opinionated wife of a former Greek prime minister whose cooking skills were the stuff of political urban legend, in Athens. No cause of death was given.

May 8

— Maurice Sendak, 83, the children's book author and illustrator who waw the sometimes dark side of childhood in books like "Where the Wild Things Are," in Danbury, Connecticut after suffering a stroke.

— Nicholas Katzenbach, 90, whose eight years in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations helped shape some of the most important events of the 1960s, including desegregation in the South, in Skillman, New Jersey, apparently of natural causes.

— Roman Totenberg, 101, a violin instructor from Poland whose nine-decade career featured concerts before presidents and kings, in Newton, Massachusetts of kidney failure.

— Everett Lily, a bluegrass music legend who played mandolin and fiddle, in Clear Creek, West Virginia. No cause of death was given.

May 9

— Vidal Sassoon, 84, who used his hairstyling shears to free women from beehives and hot rollers and give them wash-and-wear cuts that made him an international name in hair care, in Los Angeles of natural causes.

May 10

— Evelyn Bryan Johnson, 102, a pioneering female pilot and Guinness world record holder known as "Mama Bird," in Morristown, Tennessee.

— Gunnar Soensteby, 94, a World War II resistance fighter who earned Norway's highest military decoration for daring raids against the Nazis, in Oslo. The cause of death was not announced.

— Horst Faas, 79, a Pulitzer Prize-winning combat photographer who carved out new standards for covering war with a camera and became one of the world's legendary photojournalists in nearly half a century with the AP, in Munich. He had been hospitalized with gastric problems.

— Carroll Shelby, 89, the legendary car designer whose fabled Shelby Cobra sports car became an automotive and cultural icon, whose last Mustang Shelby GT500, set records for horsepower and top speed of more than 200 mph (320 kph) in Dallas, apparently of natural causes.

May 13

— Donald "Duck" Dunn, 70, the bassist who helped create the gritty Memphis soul sound at Stax Records in the 1960s as part of the legendary group Booker T. and the MGs and contributed to such classics as "In the Midnight Hour," ''Hold On I'm Coming" and "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay," in Tokyo while on tour. No cause of death was given.

May 15

— Carlos Fuentes, 83, who played a dominant role in Latin America's novel-writing boom by delving into the failed ideals of the Mexican revolution, in Mexico City after a sudden internal hemorrhage.

— Arno Lustiger, 88, a Holocaust survivor and scholar who did research on Jewish resistance to the Nazis and of non-Jews who helped save Jews from the Holocaust, in Berlin. No cause of death was given.

May 16

— Mary Richardson Kennedy, 64, the estranged wife of Robert Kennedy Jr. whose death sent America's great political family into grief again, in Bedford, New York. She had been depressed and committed suicide.

— Herbert Breslin, 87, the hard-driving manager who helped propel Luciano Pavarotti to international fame during the 36 years they worked together, in Nice, France of an apparent heart attack.

May 17

— Donna Summer, 63, who was bestowed a title fitting of musical royalty — the Queen of Disco — as she became the voice and face of the genre with pulsating hits like " I Feel Love" in Naples, Florida of cancer.

— Warda, 72, the Algerian singer whose sultry voice and range helped make her one of the giants of Arab song along with Lebanon's Fayrouz and Egypt's late Umm Kalthoum, in Cairo. No cause of death was given.

May 18

— Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, 86, the renowned German baritone who performed for more than five decades on stages in Berlin, Vienna, London and New York, in the southern German city of Starnberg. No cause of death was given.

May 20

Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, 60, the embodiment of one of modern Libya's darkest chapters — a man synonymous with horrifying scenes of wreckage, broken families and a Pan Am plane that fell out of the sky a generation ago over Lockerbie Scotland, in Tripoli, Libya, of prostate cancer.

— Robin Gibb, 62, who along with his brothers Maurice and Barry, defined the disco era as part of the Bee Gees — short for the Brothers Gibb —with dance floor classics like "Stayin' Alive," ''Jive Talkin'," and "Night Fever," in London of cancer.

May 23

— Paul Fussell, 88, an acclaimed literary scholar who won a U.S. National Book Award in 1976 for "The Great War and Modern Memory," in Medford, Oregon, of natural causes.

May 24

— Klaas Carel Faber, 90, a Dutch native who fled to Germany after being convicted in the Netherlands of Nazi war crimes and subsequently lived in freedom despite several attempts to try or extradite him in Ingolstadt, Germany. No cause of death was given.

May 25

— William Hanley, 80, a Broadway playwright and award-winning screenwriter who scripted a pioneering TV film that dealt with incest, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

May 29

— Doc Watson, 89, the blind, award winning folk musician whose mountain-rooted sound was embraced by generations and whose lightning-fast style of flatpicking influenced guitarists around the world, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina after undergoing abdominal surgery.

News from © The Associated Press, 2013