Shirley Knight, actress.
She did a lot of theater work (and won a Tony), did some movie work, and a whole bunch of TV (winning three Emmy awards). No “Mannix”, but she did appear on a lot of Quinn Martin productions.
Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category
Obit watch: April 23, 2020.
Thursday, April 23rd, 2020Obit watch: April 22, 2020.
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2020Tom Lester. He didn’t have an extensive list of credits, but is perhaps best known as “Eb Dawson”, the farmhand on “Green Acres”. He was apparently the last surviving member of the original cast.
Andrew J. Fenady, TV producer and writer.
Obit watch: April 20, 2020.
Monday, April 20th, 2020Nobuhiko Obayashi, Japanese film director.
Mr. Obayashi’s startling feature debut, in 1977, was “House,” a demented horror movie that is more comic than scary. The Los Angeles Times called it “one of the most enduringly — and endearingly — weird cult movies of the last few decades.”
Reviewing it in The New York Times in 2010, when it had a theatrical run at the IFC Center in Manhattan in advance of a DVD release, Manohla Dargis described the goings-on.
“This might be about a haunted house,” she wrote, “but it’s the film that is more truly possessed: In one scene a piano bites off the fingers of a musician tickling its keys; in another a severed head tries to take a bite out of a girl’s rear, snapping at the derrière as if it were an apple. Later a roomful of futons goes on the attack.”
Peter Beard, wildlife photographer and wild man. I’d never heard of this guy before, but the obit is amazing.
Even by the dashing standards of wildlife photography, his résumé was the stuff of high drama, full of daring, danger, romance and tall tales, many of them actually true. Had Mr. Beard not already existed, he might well have been the result of a collaborative brain wave by Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Paul Bowles.
He was matinee-idol handsome and, as an heir to a fortune, wealthy long before his photographs began selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.
Besides documenting Africa’s vanishing fauna, he photographed some of the world’s most beautiful women in fashion shoots for Vogue, Elle and other magazines. He had well-documented romances with many of them, including Candice Bergen and Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
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There was the time, for example, as Vanity Fair reported in 1996, that Mr. Beard, after roistering until 5 a.m. at a Nairobi nightclub, emerged the next afternoon from a tent on his ranch in the Kenyan countryside followed by the “four or five” young Ethiopian women he had brought home with him.
“We were very cozy,” he noted.
There was the time in 2013, The New York Post reported, citing court documents, that Mr. Beard, then 75, returned home about 6 a.m. to the Midtown Manhattan apartment he shared with his wife, Nejma Beard, who was also his agent, after a night’s revels.
Ms. Beard did not take kindly to his return — not because of the hour, but because he happened to have two Russian prostitutes in tow. In response, she dialed 911, declared that her husband was attempting suicide and had him committed for a time to a local hospital.
He “discovered” the supermodel Iman, and was at one time married to Cheryl Tiegs.
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Mr. Beard’s close studies of wildlife at Tsavo East National Park in Kenya had shown him that the elephant population there, having far outstripped the available food supply, was starving to death by the thousands. Deeming himself a “preservationist,” he argued for the controlled culling of elephant herds, a position that by the 1960s had made many conservationists cringe.
“Conservation,” Mr. Beard once said, “is for guilty people on Park Avenue with poodles and Pekingeses.”
Mr. Beard brought his thesis home even more starkly in subsequent editions of “The End of the Game,” which contained his later aerial photographs of the ravaged Kenyan landscape. In those images, elephant skeletons litter the parched earth like gleaming ghosts.
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For Mr. Beard, the late 20th century was a notably dark time. In 1977, while he was in New York City, an oil furnace exploded at his Montauk home. The house was destroyed, along with paintings by Warhol, Bacon and Picasso and decades’ worth of Mr. Beard’s photographs and diaries.
In September 1996, while picnicking near the Kenya-Tanzania border, he was charged by an elephant, who came at him, he recalled, like “a freight train.”
The elephant ran a tusk through his leg, narrowly missing the femoral artery. Using its head as a battering ram, it crushed Mr. Beard, breaking ribs and fracturing his pelvis in at least a half-dozen places. By the time he arrived at the hospital in Nairobi, according to news reports, he had no pulse.
Doctors revived him, but damage to his optic nerve left him blind. He was told that he might never walk again. He eventually regained his sight, and the ability to walk. He underwent further surgery in New York and lived ever after with more than two-dozen pins in his pelvis.
Sadly, Mr. Beard had developed dementia: he wandered away from his home sometime around March 31st. His body was discovered yesterday.
Obit watch: April 17, 2020.
Friday, April 17th, 2020NYT obit for Brian Dennehy.
Brawny and gregarious, Mr. Dennehy was often called on to play an Everyman or an authority figure: athletes, sheriffs, bartenders, salesmen and fathers. He was in scores of movies — “First Blood” (1982), “Gorky Park” (1983), “F/X” (1986) and “Presumed Innocent” (1990) were among them — as well as an assortment of television series. But his first love was always the stage.
“He was a towering, fearless actor taking on the greatest dramatic roles of the 20th century,” Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where Mr. Dennehy did some of his finest work, said in a phone interview. “They were mountains that had to be climbed, and he had no problem throwing himself into climbing them.”
We watched “First Blood” recently. Yeah, yeah, Stallone is good. But so is Dennehy: he’s really convincing as the sheriff who isn’t necessarily cruel, but just simply out of his depth and doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with until it is too late. I think it was Lawrence who made the point that “First Blood” is really a story about managerial incompetence.
He was pretty good in “F/X” as well: I still say that’s a really underappreciated thriller.
Obit watch: April 16, 2020.
Thursday, April 16th, 2020I received a report from a usually reliable source that Brian Dennehy has passed, but I don’t have any independent or linkable confirmation of that at the moment.
Edited to add: THR has an obit up now. Variety does as well.
NYT obit for John Horton Conway.
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Willie Davis, one of the Green Bay Packers greats.
Davis’s Packer teams captured N.F.L. championships following the 1961, ’62 and ’65 seasons and won the first two Super Bowls, defeating the Kansas City Chiefs in 1967 and the Oakland Raiders in 1968.
Davis was an all-N.F.L. player five times and chosen for the Pro Bowl five times as well. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1981 and named to its all-N.F.L. team for the 1960s.
His Packers defeated the Giants in the 1961 and 1962 championship games, and he impressed New York’s star quarterback, Y.A. Tittle. “Davis is a great pass rusher,” Tittle was quoted as saying. “He’s strong and aggressive. He’s always towering over you, coming, coming, all the time.”
Obit watch: April 14, 2020.
Tuesday, April 14th, 2020I’ve been waiting on John Horton Conway: while I’ve seen tributes on Twitter and elsewhere (this one from XKCD is nice), there wasn’t anything I considered reliable until Princeton published their obit this morning.
“John Conway was an amazing mathematician, game wizard, polymath and storyteller who left an indelible mark on everyone he encountered — colleagues, students and beyond — inspiring the popular imagination just as he unraveled some of the deepest mathematical mysteries,” said Igor Rodnianski, professor of mathematics and chair of the Department of Mathematics. “His childlike curiosity was perfectly complemented by his scientific originality and the depth of his thinking. It is a great loss for us and for the entire mathematical world.”
Over his long career, Conway made significant contributions to mathematics in the fields of group theory, number theory, algebra, geometric topology, theoretical physics, combinatorial game theory and geometry.
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One of Conway’s most well-known accomplishments was the Game of Life, which he conceived in the 1970s to describe how life can evolve from an initial state. The concept builds on ideas that trace back to John von Neumann, a pioneer of early computing, in the 1940s. Conway’s game involves a two-dimensional grid in which each square cell interacts with its neighbors according to a set of rules. Over time, these simple interactions give rise to complexity.
The game was introduced in an October 1970 issue of Scientific American’s mathematical games column, whose creator, the late Martin Gardner, was friends with Conway. Conway continued his interest in “recreational mathematics” by inventing numerous games and puzzles. At Princeton, he often carried in his pockets props such as ropes, pennies, cards, dice, models and sometimes a Slinky to intrigue and entertain students and others.
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Hank Steinbrenner, one of the heirs to the New York Yankees.
By way of Lawrence: Keith Ferrell, writer, former editor in chief of Omni, and another one of those people who sounds like a really good guy.
Obit watch: April 13, 2020.
Monday, April 13th, 2020Both of these are by way of Lawrence, originator of the Clown Unicycle Update.
Tarvaris Jackson, former NFL quarterback.
Anthony Causi, sports photographer for the New York Post. He sounds like a really good guy:
“He was a New Yorker,” said Jason Zillo, the Yankees’ vice president of communications and media relations. “Anthony was passionate, he grinded, he cared and was caring, and he wore his heart on his sleeve. And it was a huge heart. I don’t know how it fit on his sleeve. People gravitated towards him, but he had an edge to him and he never wanted to have the second-best photo of the day.”
Balancing that edge, bolstering that heart, was an innate generosity that Causi expressed most regularly with his work tools. Without prompting or requests, he typically took photos of co-workers and competitors in addition to his work subjects, offering them to folks for their personal collections. Causi’s uncle Joe Causi, an on-air personality for WCBS-FM Radio, said his nephew would often take photos pro bono at area Little League events.
“Anthony was kind, thoughtful and one of the best at what he did,” the Rangers said in a statement.
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Obit watch: April 12, 2020.
Sunday, April 12th, 2020Stirling Moss died “quietly on Sunday at his home in London”. He was 90. McThag beat me on the tribute watch.
“To race a car through a turn at maximum possible speed when there is a great lawn to all sides is difficult,” he said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1961, “but to race a car at maximum speed through a turn when there is a brick wall on one side and a precipice on the other — ah, that’s an achievement!”
He raced for 14 years, won 212 of his 529 races in events that included Grand Prix, sports cars and long-distance rallying, in 107 different types of car.
He set the world land speed record on the salt flats of Utah in 1957. He won more than 40 percent of the races he entered, including 16 Grand Prix. For four consecutive years, 1955-58, he finished second in the world Grand Prix championship. And in each of the next three years, he placed third.
The man was a class act. And I don’t mean in terms of style (although he apparently was rather stylish):
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In 1962 at the Goodwood Circuit racetrack in England’s West Sussex County, a plume of fire shot from his Lotus 18/21 car. The crowd gasped. As Moss tried to pass Graham Hill, his car veered and slammed into an eight-foot-high earthen bank.
It took more than a half-hour to free Moss from the wreckage. His left eye and cheekbone were shattered, his left arm broken and his left leg broken in two places.
An X-ray revealed a far worse injury. The right side of his brain was detached from his skull. He was in a coma for 38 days, and paralyzed on one side of his body for six months. He remembered nothing of the disaster. He considered hypnosis to recover the memory, but a psychiatrist said that might cause the paralysis to return.
When he left the hospital, he took all 11 nurses who had treated him to dinner, followed by a trip to the theater. A year later, he returned to Goodwood and pushed a Lotus to 145 m.p.h. on a wet track. He realized he was no longer unconsciously making the right moves. He said he felt like he had lost his page in a book.
Though he believed he remained a better driver than all but 10 or 12 in the world, that was not good enough. He retired at 33.
Moss was more than his talent. He was a beautiful name, one that still connotes high style a half-century after his crash, evoking an era of blazers and cravats, of dance bands and cigarette holders. One legend had him driving hundreds of miles in a vain effort to introduce himself to Miss Italy the night before a big race. His 16 books cemented his legend.
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Lawrence emailed an obit for Tim Brooke-Taylor, British comedian:
Brooke-Taylor was reunited with Cleese and Chapman on ITV’s At Last The 1948 Show, another collection of sketches and quick-fire repartee.
The first episode featured The Four Yorkshiremen sketch, co-written by Brooke-Taylor, which would later be revived by the Monty Python team.
I apologize for the quality. But: this is (according to YouTube) actually from “At Last the 1948 Show”.
Obit watch: April 11, 2020.
Saturday, April 11th, 2020Colby Cave, forward for the Edmonton Oilers. He was 25. According to the reports, he had emergency surgery on Monday and was placed in a medically induced coma.
I am seeing unconfirmed reports that John Horton Conway, noted mathematician, has passed on, but I don’t have any links or anything that I’d consider confirmation yet.
Obit watch: April 10, 2020.
Friday, April 10th, 2020Mort Drucker, one of the great Mad Magazine artists.
A self-taught freelance cartoonist who had worked on war, western, science fiction and romance comic books as well as personality-driven titles like The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and The Adventures of Bob Hope, Mr. Drucker came to Mad in late 1956, soon after Al Feldstein succeeded Harvey Kurtzman, the magazine’s founder, as editor. Mad had run only occasional TV and movie satires, but Mr. Drucker’s arrival “changed everything,” the pop-culture critic Grady Hendrix wrote in a 2013 Film Comment appreciation of Mad’s movie parodies.
“No one saw Drucker’s talent,” Mr. Hendrix wrote, until he illustrated “The Night That Perry Masonmint Lost a Case,” a takeoff on the television courtroom drama “Perry Mason,” in 1959. It was then, Mr. Hendrix maintained, that “the basic movie parody format for the next 44 years was born.”
From the early 1960s on, nearly every issue of Mad included a movie parody, and before Mr. Ducker retired he had illustrated 238, more than half of them. The last one, “The Chronic-Ills of Yawnia: Prince Thespian,” appeared in 2008.
Obit watch: April 9, 2020.
Thursday, April 9th, 2020Hal Willner, who the Times describes as “matchmaker, yenta, fan, longtime music coordinator for the sketches on ‘Saturday Night Live'”.
I have a couple of those Willner tribute albums. “Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill” in particular is a swell album, and I wish someone would re-release that digitally.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Thomas L. Miller, TV producer. (“Full House”, “Family Matters”.)
Linda Tripp. For my younger readers, Ms. Tripp was a central figure in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal of the 90s.
When Ms. Lewinsky confided in Ms. Tripp that she had had a physical relationship with the president, Ms. Tripp got in touch with Lucianne Goldberg, a literary agent who had once reached out to her for information on Vincent Foster, the White House lawyer who committed suicide in 1993.
More recently, Ms. Tripp had been working on a book proposal tentatively titled “Behind Closed Doors: What I Saw Inside the Clinton White House.” Now she had a hook.
Ms. Goldberg suggested, among other things, that Ms. Tripp tape her telephone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky. That was legal in the District of Columbia and in 39 states, but not in Maryland, where Ms. Tripp was living.
More than 20 hours of audiotapes were turned over to Kenneth Starr, the independent prosecutor handling the Clinton investigation.
Obit watch: April 8, 2020.
Wednesday, April 8th, 2020Damn.
I wouldn’t say I was a big Prine fan, but he did a fair number of songs that I’m partial to. Here’s one of my favorites:
Edited to add: Borepatch has a nice tribute up, with some of Mr. Prine’s deeper cuts.
Robert Barth. He was a pioneering Navy diver: he was the only person involved with both the Genesis dry land test and all three iterations of the Sealab underwater habitats.
The dangerous experiments Mr. Barth took part in paved the way for exploits of deepwater espionage, undersea construction and demolition projects around the world.
He never achieved conventional fame, but he was the “ultimate aquanaut,” said Leslie Leaney, the executive director of the International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame. “His contributions benefited the world of science and national security, but also the economies of all nations that explored for offshore oil.”
In 2010, the Navy named its aquatic training facility in Panama City for Mr. Barth. “Nothing that Navy divers do is one guy,” he said at the dedication. “There is always a whole bunch of people involved in it.”
By way of Lawrence, Allen Garfield. He was in a whole bunch of stuff, including “The Conversation” and “Nashville”.
Also by way of Lawrence, George Ogilvie, co-director of “Max Max: Beyond Thunderdome”.
The paper of record finally got around to publishing an obit for Ira Einhorn.
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It was a measure of his ability to make important connections that after he was charged with murder, his lawyer was Arlen Specter, the city’s former district attorney who was then in private practice and who went on to become a United States senator.
Mr. Specter managed to get Mr. Einhorn’s bail reduced to $40,000. To be released from custody, Mr. Einhorn had to put up only 10 percent, or $4,000. It was paid by a Canadian socialite, one of several well-off people who supported him financially and who doubted he could have been involved in murder.
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But his darker side and a monumental ego were emerging, most noticeably during the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, when 20 million people across the country gathered to draw attention to environmental problems.
As two environmental activists later wrote in an op-ed in The Inquirer, Mr. Einhorn had made himself unwelcome at organizational meetings in advance of Earth Day, and then, at the actual event, he “grabbed the microphone and refused to give up the podium for 30 minutes, thinking he would get some free television publicity.”
He later falsely claimed to have been a founder of Earth Day, a title generally accorded to Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat.
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Obit watch: April 7, 2020.
Tuesday, April 7th, 2020Wow. Yesterday was a day.
In no particular order of importance (and I may be a day or three behind on some of these):
Julie Bennett. She was primarily known as a voice actress: she did a lot of animated stuff, including voicing “Cindy Bear” in the “Yogi Bear Show”. (And “Aunt May” in “Spider-Man: The Animated Series”.) She also did guest shots on a few of my favorite shows: “Adam-12”, “Dragnet 1967”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, and “Get Smart”.
James Drury. He was famous as the lead in “The Virginian”, but he had a solid body of work outside of that. (Lawrence pointed out that one of his early roles was “Crewman Strong” in “Forbidden Planet”.)
Bobby Mitchell. He played with the Cleveland Browns and the Washington Redskins, and was a Hall of Fame player:
Fast, elusive and versatile, he scored 91 touchdowns, amassed more than 14,000 net yards, was named to the Pro Bowl four times and was voted to the N.F.L.’s all-decade team for the 1960s.
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“Bobby Mitchell was one of the greatest all-around ballplayers,” Lenny Moore of the Baltimore Colts, a contemporary and fellow Hall of Famer, was quoted as saying on the Redskins’ website. “Anybody who can transition himself and be one of the best in the business at both positions, that’s saying something.”
Forrest Compton. Another knock-around guy: he was most famous for playing “Mike Karr” on “The Edge of Night” soap, but he also was a semi-regular on “Gomer Pyle: USMC”, appeared multiple times in “Hogan’s’ Heros” and “The F.B.I”…
…and, yes, he did do a “Mannix”. (“One for the Lady”, season 4, episode 2. He was “Elgin Bonning”.)
Ed Biles, former coach of the Houston Oilers. He started out as a defensive coordinator:
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Shirley Douglas, who seems to be consistently described as a “Canadian actor and activist”. Among other roles, she was in the original “Lolita”, the pilot of “The Hat Squad” TV series, the “Flash Gordon” TV series, and “Dead Ringers”.
She was also married to Donald Sutherland: Kiefer Sutherland is her son by Donald. (She also had a daughter, Rachel, with Donald, and another child with her second husband Timothy Emil Sicks.)
Al Kaline, All-Star outfielder for the Detroit Tigers.
He became the youngest batting champion in major league history in 1955 when he hit .340 at age 20. He had 3,007 career hits, the 12th player to reach the No. 3,000 milestone, and he hit 399 home runs, a Tiger record.
Renowned for his powerful arm, Kaline won 10 Gold Glove awards for his play in right field and sometimes in center. He set an American League record for outfielders by playing in 242 consecutive games without an error. He played in 2,834 games from 1953 to 1974, the most of any Tiger, and only Ty Cobb equaled his 22 years with the team.
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Kaline had a .297 career batting average, with 1,583 runs batted in and 1,622 runs scored.
Obit watch: April 6, 2020.
Monday, April 6th, 2020It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit watch.
Honor Blackman, “Pussy Galore” in “Goldfinger”. She also preceded Diana Rigg as Patrick Macnee’s partner on “The Avengers”, but left the show for the “Goldfinger” role.
Before “Goldfinger,” she made dozens of appearances on British television and more than 20 feature films, among them “A Night to Remember” (1958), Roy Ward Baker’s drama about the sinking of the Titanic; “The Square Peg” (1959), a comedy with Norman Wisdom set during World War II; and “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), in which she played the goddess Hera.
Ms. Blackman continued her screen acting career well into her 80s, including taking a small part as a glamorous party guest in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001) and a recurring role on the classic British soap opera “Coronation Street” in 2004.
She worked in the theater for decades as well. In the 1980s she did a British tour of “A Little Night Music” (she deemed Madame Armfeldt in that show her favorite role — “That part just fit me like a glove,” she told the British Huffington Post) and played Captain von Trapp’s child-averse love interest, the Baroness, in a West End revival of “The Sound of Music.”
Ms. Blackman was 94 when she passed.
You know, Lawrence, when things get back to normal, “Cockneys vs. Zombies” might be worth putting on the list.
Speaking of Lawrence, he also tipped me to the death of actress Lee Fierro at the age of 91. She has three credits as an actress: two of those were “Mrs. Kintner” in “Jaws” and “Jaws: The Revenge”.
(“Mrs. Kintner” is the woman whose child is gobbled up by the shark in “Jaws” and then slaps Chief Brody.)
Obit watch: April 5, 2020.
Sunday, April 5th, 2020Tom Dempsey, legendary placekicker for the New Orleans Saints.
On November 8, 1970, Mr. Dempsey kicked a 63 yard field goal on the last play of the game to beat the Detroit Lions 19-17. It was one of two wins for the Saints that year. It was also a NFL record which stood for 43 years: several other players tied it in that time, but it wasn’t until 2013 that Matt Prater of the Broncos kicked a 64 yard field goal in Denver.
The broadcast of the play, along with the play call from CBS commentator Don Criqui, still makes Saints fans misty-eyed.
“I don’t believe this …,” Criqui said as the ball sailed nearly two-thirds of the field, then added as the ball cleared the bar by a yard, “It’s GOOD! I don’t believe it!”
The miraculous moment so moved powerful Louisiana Congressman F. Edward Hebert that he had an account of “The Kick” by Dempsey inserted into the Congressional Record.
According to the statement from his family, Mr. Dempsey died of corona virus complications. He was 73 years old and in a nursing home after being diagnosed with dementia in 2012.
Edited to add 4/6: as Lawrence points out, while YouTube will let you embed the videos, you can’t play them here because the NFL is a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. I’ve left the embeds in place because you can click through and watch them on YouTube directly. Sorry about that: I should not have underestimated the stupidity of professional sports leagues.
Also: NYT obit for Mr. Dempsey, which (of course) went up after I posted yesterday.