They supported each other’s passions for years. Within days, COVID claimed their lives.
Fred and Diane Corlett, high school friends and college sweethearts who supported each other’s passions through five decades together, died this month of COVID-19 — just four days apart.
They both grew up in Raleigh, where they met at Broughton High School, their son, David, said. They were friends first, then dated while attending UNC-Chapel Hill.
Both were drawn to theater while at UNC; with Diane participating in a few shows on campus in her early years before focusing on music as an undergraduate.
Fred went all in, first as an undergrad and then as a grad student, studying acting and directing and learning how to stage a production. While still in school, he won one of the first touring artist grants awarded by the N.C. Arts Council. He used the money to stage productions by his then-roommate Lewis Black, who is now a comedian but in those days was a playwright.
Diane, meanwhile, felt called to ministry. She and Fred married in 1971 and moved together to New York, where she could attend seminary and he could try professional theater.
They lived in Ohio, Colorado and the Charlotte area before arriving with their young son in Raleigh in 1992.
Each could command a crowd
At the time, the Church of the Nativity was a young congregation that had recently built its first building after holding worship services in borrowed school gyms. Diane was called as vicar and became the church’s first rector in 1993.
Fried and Diane could each command a crowd, friends say, he from the stage and she from the pulpit.
“People would remember her sermons,” said David Corlett, who said his mother only required that he attend church on Christmas and Easter but allowed him to decide whether to come the rest of the year.
“She could capture everybody in the audience.”
While she was attentive to her parishioners, Diane was active in her faith beyond the walls of her church. David Corlett said his mother did mission work in Honduras, Cambodia and other countries when he was young. And she was known for her dedication to People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, a non-denominational group launched in Carrboro in 1994 to try to abolish the death penalty in North Carolina and across the country.
Diane served on the group’s board of directors and was a vocal advocate for its mission. She and Steve Dear became friends while he was executive director from the late-1990s until 2015.
“She had a wonderful sense of humor,” Dear said, “but she also had a moral gravitas to her persona. She had a presence.”
Arguing against death penalty
Dear, who now lives in Oregon, said Diane attended at least 10 of the more than two dozen meetings he organized between faith leaders and sitting North Carolina governors over the years to ask for clemency for death row inmates ahead of scheduled executions.
Some of the meetings, he said, were long and emotional.
There was one, he recalled, in 1998 or ‘99 — it might have been when the group was trying to save the life of a young man who had killed another inmate but was suspected of having a mental illness and a very low IQ — when, as their appeals appeared to be failing, Diane Corlett made a plaintive suggestion to then-Gov. James B. Hunt.
“She told him to execute her instead,” Dear said. “She was completely serious. I mean, deadly serious. And I remember being somewhat transformed by that level of commitment, to be able to say that to the governor. That’s who we’re talking about.”
Diane was a regular at the candlelight vigils held outside Raleigh’s Central Prison, too, whenever an execution was planned.. David Corlett remembers riding with his dad to take food for the gatherings.
A stroke in 2008 forced Diane into an early retirement. It didn’t keep her from supporting the local music and theater community, including those in which her husband was a cast member.
At different times, Fred Corlett performed, directed or stage-managed plays for nearly every theater group in town, his name appearing somewhere in the programs of hundreds of plays. By day, he was a state employee who processed disability claims for Medicaid and Medicare. His nights were spent by theater lights.
Jerome Davis, who formed Burning Coal Theatre with his wife, Simmie Kastner, in the late 1990s, met Fred around the year 2000.
“He had a fascinating life,” Davis said. In addition to his broad theater experience, Fred was a skilled gymnast, and a history buff who brought a deep understanding of context to plays that were based on real events.
Fred could — and did — play any role, Davis said, and while he enjoyed leads he would always take supporting roles, sometimes several at once.
“Fred almost never said ‘no’ to anything that you offered him if it involved acting,” Davis said. “He might turn it down if he was already doing two or three other things. But usually if I asked him or another artistic director in town asked him, he was there.”
Bringing the audience to tears
Davis said that in more than 100 shows they worked on together, through hundreds and hundreds of hours of rehearsals, he could never recall Fred missing a rehearsal or even being late for one.
“And I never recall him saying a negative word about anybody else,” Davis said. “He was just joyous. He was a light bulb in the room. And those are few and far between.”
David Corlett recalled his father’s performance of Otto Frank in “The Diary of Anne Frank,” in which David also had a role.
“That was a stellar performance,” David said, remembering his father bringing the audience to tears with the final monologue about what happened to his wife and daughters.
David liked his father as Isador Rabi in Burning Coal’s production of “The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”
David Corlett said his mom went into the hospital for a surgical procedure in December, and while she was there, his dad visited every hour he was allowed. When it was time for her to move to a rehab facility for recuperation, she had to get a COVID-19 test as a precaution.
It came back positive.
Fred got tested a couple of days later, his son said, and his results were positive, too.
‘He just wanted to be with her’
Diane Corlett was moved on New Year’s Eve to a rehab center in Pittsboro that accepted COVID patients. On Jan. 10, nurses told him by phone that her vital signs looked good, he said. They called back that night and said she had passed.
By then, Fred had been hospitalized with the virus. David called to tell him of Diane’s passing, and he could hear his father’s spirit fall.
“I think he just wanted to be with her,” he said.
Four days later, on Jan. 14, Fred Corlett died. He was 71. His wife was 70.
David Corlett is still working on arrangements, and doesn’t know yet if there will be one memorial service or two. But he said his parents chose cremation.
He plans to scatter their ashes together.
This story was originally published January 26, 2021 at 11:16 AM with the headline "They supported each other’s passions for years. Within days, COVID claimed their lives.."
