Raymond Briggs, 88, the children’s author whose cheeky illustrations dignified workaday British life and an audacious breadth of emotions, most prominently in the wordless escapades of “The Snowman,” died Tuesday in Brighton, England.

Olivia Newton-John, 73, who sang some of the biggest hits of the 1970s and ’80s while recasting her image as the virginal girl next door into a spandex-clad vixen — a transformation reflected in miniature by her starring role in “Grease,” one of the most popular movie musicals of its era — died on Monday, at her ranch in Southern California. The cause was cancer.

Lamont Dozier, 81, the prolific songwriter and producer who was crucial to the success of Motown Records as one-third of the Holland-Dozier-Holland team, died Monday in Arizona. In collaboration with the brothers Brian and Eddie Holland, Dozier wrote songs for dozens of musical acts, but the trio worked most often with Martha and the Vandellas (“Heat Wave,” “Jimmy Mack”), the Four Tops (“Bernadette,” “I Can’t Help Myself”) and especially the Supremes (“You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Baby Love”). Between 1963 and 1972, the Holland-Dozier-Holland team was responsible for more than 80 singles that hit the Top 40 of the pop or R&B charts, including 15 songs that reached No. 1.

Zofia Posmysz, 98, a Polish World War II-era resistance fighter who survived the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps and later became a journalist and novelist, died Monday in a hospice in Oswiecim, the southern Polish town where Auschwitz was located during Nazi Germany’s wartime occupation of Poland. Her most famous work was titled “The Passenger,” a novel about an Auschwitz survivor who meets her former guard on a ship voyage, and was the basis of a film and an opera.

David McCullough, 89, who was known to millions as an award-winning, bestselling author and an appealing television host and narrator with a rare gift for re-creating the great events and characters of America’s past, died Aug. 7 at his home in Hingham, Massachusetts, southeast of Boston. McCullough won Pulitzer Prizes for two presidential biographies, “Truman” (1992) and “John Adams” (2001). He received National Book Awards for “The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal” (1977) and “Mornings on Horseback” (1981), about the young Theodore Roosevelt and his family.

Issey Miyake, 84, one of the first Japanese designers to show in Paris, whose pleated style of clothing allowed for freedom of movement and whose name became a global byword for cutting-edge fashion in the 1980s, died Aug. 5 in Tokyo. His death was announced Tuesday by the Miyake Design Studio, which said the cause was liver cancer. He was part of a revolutionary wave of designers that brought Japanese fashion to the rest of the world, eventually opening the door for contemporaries like Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo.

Judith Durham, 79, the lead vocalist of the 1960s Australian folk-pop band the Seekers, whose shimmering soprano voice and wholesome image propelled singles like “Georgy Girl” and “I’ll Never Find Another You” to the top of the pop charts, died Aug. 5 in a hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Her death was caused by bronchiectasis, a lung disease that she had battled since childhood, according to a post from Universal Music Australia and the Musicoast record label on the Seekers’ Facebook page.

Marcus Eliason, 75, an international journalist whose insightful reporting, sparkling prose and skillful editing graced Associated Press news wires for almost a half-century, died Aug. 5 in a New York hospital. The cause was pneumonia. From Israel and the 1967 Six-Day War to apartheid-era South Africa and on to Afghan battlegrounds, bloody Belfast, the Iron Curtain’s fall and the handover of Hong Kong, Eliason witnessed and reported on some of the great world events of the 20th century’s final decades.

Melissa Bank, 61, a witty, acerbic writer whose first book, “The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing,” became a global publishing phenomenon in 1999, died Aug. 2 at her home in East Hampton, New York. Bank’s success was not exactly an overnight one. She spent 12 years writing the book, a collection of stories, in part because a bicycle accident had left her temporarily unable to write. A day job as a copywriter for a big advertising firm kept her busy as well.

Gary C. Schroen, 80, a veteran CIA operative who, just weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led the first team of agents into Afghanistan to prepare for an invasion and begin the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, died after a fall in Alexandria, Virginia, on Aug. 1, one day after a U.S. missile killed one of the last of those men, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Dee Hock, 93, a banker with a junior college degree who shaped the Visa credit card into a global financial behemoth, died July 16 at his home in Olympia.

At the time, the business was beset by bad debts and fraud, and the cards themselves were primitive: They lacked the magnetic stripes that would later encode customer information; transactions that required bank authorizations took a long time; and the embossed information on them — customer name, card number, expiration date — was awkwardly copied onto receipts with a heavy imprinter.

Hock became the leader of a committee of bankers whose institutions licensed the BankAmericard, which was first issued in 1958. The committee’s solution was to create a new company, National BankAmericard, to be separate from Bank of America and to be controlled by the banks that issued the card. Hock was named president and chief executive. In 1976, the company was renamed Visa. As chief executive, he oversaw the development of the first electronic authorization system and the first interbank electronic clearing and settlement system.