Charles Harris “Sonny” Bell III

October 3, 1947 — October 30, 2025

Charles Harris Bell III was known to most who loved him simply as Sonny.

His sister, Myrtle, explained the name as the family gathered to say goodbye: he was called Sonny because he had been such a happy baby.. The name stayed with him for a lifetime.

Sonny died on October 30, 2025, at Elizabeth House in Flat Rock, North Carolina. He was 78. He left behind a life filled with theater and teaching, family and friendships, laughter, and an enduring partnership with his wife, Nancy Baird, that spanned nearly half a century.

He was born in Dayton, Ohio, on October 3, 1947, and initially seemed headed toward a life far removed from the theater.

Sonny graduated from the University of Dayton in 1969 with a B.S. in Business Management and Communication Arts. He took what might have become the beginning of a conventional business career. But when he talked with some of his fellow new hires about his real passion—the theater—they encouraged him to follow it.

So he did. That decision changed the course of his life.

Sonny went to Bowling Green State University, where he earned his master’s degree in directing and staging and later his Ph.D. in history, directing and staging. His master’s thesis centered on an original adaptation and production study of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. His doctoral dissertation explored an entirely different corner of American theatrical history: A History of an Ohio Tent Show Family: The Kinsey Komedy Kompany (1881–1951).

Theater became not simply something Sonny loved, but the world in which he would spend his professional life.

He taught acting, directing, world theater, drama appreciation, playscript analysis, theater history and speech communication. But reducing Sonny’s career to the courses he taught misses something important about the kind of educator he was.

He loved working with students. Teaching was personal to him.

He wanted students to think, to question, to understand what they were doing and why they were doing it. He could be demanding. He could be direct. He possessed an exceptionally good judge of character and, as those closest to him knew, he did not suffer fools gladly.

You generally knew where you stood with Sonny. He was seen. He was heard.

Sonny joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1975, first serving as an instructor and later returning as a Visiting Assistant Professor. He directed The Philadelphia Story and The Hot L Baltimore at UNCG and choreographed fight sequences for productions of Peter Pan and When You Coming Back, Red Ryder?

Those years in North Carolina also brought something far more important into his life.

In 1976, Sonny met Baird at UNC Greensboro.

There was an immediate connection. A series of unusual coincidences seemed only to reinforce what the two of them had already discovered in one another, and what began at UNCG became a journey together lasting nearly fifty years.

Sonny’s life in theater was never confined to a classroom.

He was a guest artist at the Parkway Playhouse in Burnsville, North Carolina, from 1977 through 1979 and served as its Artistic Director during the summer of 1980. He directed Arsenic and Old Lace and Bus Stop there and directed A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the Barn Dinner Theatre.

And Sonny was an actor.

He played Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire, Billis in South Pacific, Sidney Hopcroft in Absurd Person Singular, and one of the roles that would stay with him throughout his life—Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Eventually, Sonny and Baird left North Carolina for the Midwest, where he joined the faculty at Western Illinois University.

He would teach there for twenty years.

Those decades represented much of Sonny’s life’s work: teaching young actors and theater students, directing, studying theater, advising students and passing along what he had learned. Generations of students passed through his classrooms and his office.

Then, after a career spent teaching others about theater, Sonny and Baird returned to North Carolina.

They retired to Lake Lure in Rutherford County, surrounded once again by the mountains and nature they had loved decades earlier when they lived in Union Mills.

But Sonny wasn’t quite finished with the stage.

During Asheville Community Theatre’s 2006–2007 season, he returned to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and once again became Big Daddy—a role he had performed twice before.

This time was different.

He was older. He had lived more. He understood things about the character that a younger actor simply could not.

After a lifetime spent teaching people how to find truth in a character, Sonny now had the years and experience to bring his own truth to Big Daddy.

And sitting in the audience were former students.

Some reconnected with him after the production and became a wonderful part of Sonny and Baird’s retirement years. It was an appropriate closing of a circle: teacher and students finding one another again through the theater that had first brought them together.

There was another place that remained part of Sonny’s story throughout his life: Boyd, Kentucky.

The Craig family farm there had belonged to Sonny’s family since his grandparents, Calvin and Myrtle Craig, acquired it in 1931. His mother, Kathryn Craig Bell, carried that connection forward, and although Sonny grew up in Dayton, the Kentucky farm became part of his life through weekends, summers and family gatherings.

Following his mother’s death in 2009, Sonny and his sister, Myrtle Gruber, brought the family’s properties together under Clifford Craig Heritage Farm. It was a way of preserving not simply acreage and buildings, but a family place that had survived generations of change.

Sonny understood history professionally. He spent a career studying it, teaching it and examining the people and institutions that came before us.

But at Boyd, history was personal. It was family. It was land. It was memory.

Sonny’s life cannot really be summarized by a list of productions, academic appointments, degrees or dates. Those things tell us where he went and what he accomplished. They don’t entirely tell us who he was.

He was a teacher whose door was open.

An actor who never completely left the stage.

A director who spent his life thinking about stories and how they should be told.

And for nearly fifty years, he was Baird’s partner and, in her words, “the heart of my heart.”

Sonny followed his heart into the theater when he was a young man.

It turned out to be a pretty good decision.

It gave him a career, generations of students, stages and characters, friendships stretching from coast to coast and beyond—and, ultimately, the place where he met the woman with whom he would share his life.

The final curtain came on October 30, 2025.

But anyone who spent his life in theater knew that a curtain call was never really about the ending.

It was about recognizing what had just taken place.

A life had been lived.

People had been changed by it.

And the story remains.