Richard H. Castellane ’55

Dick, whose interests touched on an astonishing array of subjects, died June 18, 2023.

He was born April 17, 1933, in Newark and attended Newark Academy. At Princeton, he majored in art and archaeology and joined Cloister Inn, where he lived senior year. After Princeton he earned a law degree at Columbia and practiced law for several years. Then his life took off.

He had a cutting-edge art gallery in Manhattan that was an early supporter of pop art; lived on 110 acres in Munnsville, N.Y. (pop. 473); owned two homes in northern Maine; wrote children’s books, including one about the romance of a little hippo and a little rhino; and self-financed two of his screenplays as films, one of them, Hail Mary! about the Portland, Maine, Lobsters football team that buys a Japanese sumo school and brings it to the U.S. to provide protection for its beleaguered quarterback. He adopted young immigrants, wrote and filmed a drama about the meaning of life, and had his art collection exhibited in several museums, including Princeton’s. Friends said he was “a jolly guy who loved to laugh and tell jokes.” This good nature had one notable exception: an obsessive distaste for Donald Trump. Dick wrote letters railing against Trump to the Utica Observer-Dispatch almost weekly and compiled them into a self-published book, The I Hate Trump Book, available on Amazon.

His ashes were spread into the River of Genghis Khan by his Mongolian foster son, Batah, as per his wishes.