Alan Levy

In 1952, at Brown University, he co-authored an original Brownbrokers musical titled Anything Can Be Fixed with Gill Bach and Porter Woods.

Among first personalities he interviewed were W. H. Auden, the Beatles, Fidel Castro, Graham Greene, Václav Havel, Sophia Loren, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Nixon, and Ezra Pound.

They settled in Vienna, Austria, where Levy wrote for the International Herald Tribune, Life, Good Housekeeping, The New York Times Magazine, Cosmopolitan and others.

Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, said: Alan Levy chose to become active in our country during what was for us a very sensitive and important period -- the time of creating a free, open environment for the media.

What is more, I regret him leaving us at a point when a number of Czech media outlets are blurring the limits between serious and tabloid journalism.