Kathryn Joosten, 72: Character actress best known as the crotchety, nosey Karen McCluskey on “Desperate Housewives” — for which she won two Emmy awards — and the president’s secretary on “The West Wing.” Died of lung cancer Saturday in Los Angeles.

Earl Shorris, 75: Social critic and author whose interviews with prison inmates for a book inspired him to found the Clemente Course in the Humanities, now a nationally recognized educational program that introduces the poor and the unschooled to Plato, Kant and Tolstoy. Died of complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma on May 27 in New York.

Kaneto Shindo, 100: Venerable director of nearly 50 pictures — his most recent, the World War II melodrama “Postcard,” was released in 2010 — and the oldest active filmmaker in Japan, whose work was haunted by the wartime devastation of his native Hiroshima. Died Tuesday at his home in Tokyo.

Dudley Clendinen, 67: Courtly Southern journalist and author who wrote for The St. Petersburg Times and The New York Times, and was a senior editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Baltimore Sun. He wrote lyrically about civil rights, aging in America and his own approaching death as a victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Died Wednesday in a hospice in Baltimore.

Andrew Huxley, 94: British physiologist and half-brother of writer Aldous Huxley who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize with two other scientists for research on how nerve impulses are transmitted. Died May 30 at age 94; Britain’s University of Cambridge, where he spent much of his academic life, announced his death but released no other details.