Meat Loaf

The death of the singer and actor Meat Loaf at the age of seventy-four may not have been wholly unforeseen, but it has nonetheless led to great sadness. The artiste born Marvin Lee Aday engendered enormous affection from both his peers and his millions of admirers. His music and outsized stage persona had a heroically go-for-broke quality that was mirrored in his offstage existence by bankruptcies and a rollercoaster career. But his records sold millions, and, almost as an afterthought, he appeared in some of the major cult films of the twentieth century. A music journalist once christened him "the uncoolest man in the universe" for releasing the album Bat Out Of Hell, a collaboration with Jim Steinman, in 1977.