Derek Paravicini is blind and autistic. He is severely disabled yet he can play and remember any tune he has ever heard.

Derek Paravicini, a blind savant from England, is profiled tonight on CBS’ 60 Minutes. Paravicini, 30 years old, has a difficult time communicating verbally and physically. But he plays the piano at a level that is beyond brilliant; it seems almost otherworldly. As Lesley Stahl looks on and makes requests, as if sitting next to a Billy Joel type piano man in a dark lounge, Paravicini seamlessly and effortlessly transitions between classical, pop, and show tunes.

Not only, in fact, is Paravicini able to play any piece of music that he’s ever heard, he’s able to play them in any number of different styles, taking a show tune, for example, and playing it in a jazz style and back again as if he is simply changing the stations on a television.

Asked, however, to take his hands off of the piano and raise three fingers for the camera, Paravicini awkwardly raises both hands and seems lost.

Peter Graves, the cool spymaster of television’s “Mission: Impossible” and the dignified host of the “Biography” series, who successfully spoofed his own gravitas in the “Airplane!” movie farces, died on Sunday. Peter Graves dies at 83.
He died of a heart attack at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif., said Fred Barman, his business manager.

It was a testament to Mr. Graves’s earnest, unhammy ability to make fun of himself that after decades of playing square he-men and straitlaced authority figures, he was perhaps best known to younger audiences for a deadpan line in “Airplane!” (“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”) and one from a memorable Geico car insurance commercial (“I was one lucky woman”).

Born Peter Aurness in Minneapolis, the blond, 6-foot-2 Mr. Graves served in the Army Air Forces in 1944 and ’45, studied drama at the University of Minnesota under the G.I. Bill of Rights and played the clarinet in local bands before following his older brother, James Arness, to Hollywood.

His first credited film appearance was in “Rogue River” (1950), with Rory Calhoun. Mr. Graves’s getting a Hollywood contract for the picture persuaded his fiancée’s family to let her marry him. He changed his name for that movie to Graves, his maternal grandfather’s name, to avoid confusion with his older brother.

He soon found himself in classics like Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17” (1953), where he played a security officer with a secret; Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter” (1955); Otto Preminger’s “Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell” (1955); and John Ford’s “Long Gray Line” (1955).