Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: November 20, 2025.

Thursday, November 20th, 2025

Col. Robert L. Stirm (USAF – ret.). He was 92.

You may not recognize the name, but you probably recognize the photo.

That’s his 15-year old daughter Lorrie in front. His wife is wearing the corsage. The photographer, Slava Veder, won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.

His will to survive as a P.O.W., he later said, was built on memories of his domestic life and the hope of returning one day to his family. Those thoughts sustained him after he was shot down and forced to eject from his F-105 Thunderchief during a bombing mission over North Vietnam on Oct. 27, 1967, and they continued to sustain him in prison camps, including the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” where he was starved, tortured and subjected to mock executions.
He held the rank of major at the time he was taken prisoner and was eventually elevated to colonel. He was among 591 American prisoners of war released as part of Operation Homecoming after the Paris Peace Accords ended the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

The photo sort of hides what was really going on.

Three days before he landed at Travis Air Force Base, he was handed what he described as a “Dear John” letter from his wife.
“I have changed drastically — forced into a situation where I finally had to grow up,” his wife of 18 years wrote. “Bob, I feel sure that in your heart you know we can’t make it together — and it doesn’t make sense to be unhappy when you can do something about it. Life is too short.”
“I love you — we all love you,” she continued, “but you must remember how very unhappy we were together.”

Her daughter says she had an affair while Col. Strim was in captivity.

Despite the painful letter to her husband, Loretta Stirm offered to try to make her marriage work, her daughter said.

They divorced in 1974.

Colonel Stirm kept several copies of the picture autographed by Mr. Veder, but, while his children displayed them, he did not.

…

He said little about Vietnam after returning home, Ms. Stirm Kitching said, but he told a story about a fellow P.O.W., John S. McCain, the Navy pilot and future U.S. senator, who told a joke by tapping on the wall in code to Colonel Stirm in an adjacent cell. “My dad said it was the first time he laughed in jail,” she said, adding, “I wish I knew the joke.”

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 12, 2025.

Wednesday, November 12th, 2025

Sally Kirkland, actress.

Other credits include “Supertrain”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, “Bronk”, and an uncredited role in “Blazing Saddles”.

Tatsuya Nakadai, Japanese actor.

The film writer Chuck Stephens, in a 2009 essay for the Criterion Collection, which issued many of Mr. Nakadai’s films on DVD and Blu-ray, said Mr. Nakadai was so prominent in Japanese films of the 20th century that he deserved the title “The Eighth Samurai.”

He did a lot of work with Akira Kurosawa, including the lead role in “Kagemusha”. He was also the lead character in “Ran”, Kurosawa’s version of “King Lear”.

Early in his career, Mr. Nakadai often worked opposite Toshiro Mifune, one of Japan’s best-known acting exports. They could not have been less alike: Mr. Mifune, untrained as an actor but with wild energy, often presented a gruff, overtly physical persona, while Mr. Nakadai took on vastly different characters and delivered subtly intricate performances.
They usually played adversaries. In “Yojimbo” (1961) and “Sanjuro” (1962), both directed by Mr. Kurosawa, and “Samurai Rebellion” (1967), directed by Mr. Kobayashi, the two meet in climatic duels, with Mr. Mifune’s character winning each time with a horizontal slash to the midsection. In “Sanjuro,” the fatal cut released a towering fountain of blood.

…

Mr. Nakadai also worked with other seminal postwar Japanese directors, including Mikio Naruse, Masaki Kobayashi, Kihachi Okamoto and Kon Ichikawa. He also appeared on television, in roles large and small, and in several plays.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 10, 2025.

Monday, November 10th, 2025

Robert H. Bartlett, big damn hero. He was one of the pioneers of ECMO.

An ECMO machine consists of an external circuit of tubes, a pump that functions as a heart, and a membrane that serves as an artificial lung. The device continuously pumps blood out of the body, adds oxygen, removes carbon dioxide, warms the blood and returns it to the body.
ECMO treatment can continue for days or weeks or longer, allowing the heart and lungs to rest and try to heal from traumas like acute respiratory distress, a blood clot, a heart attack or an injury from a car crash. It can also be used for patients awaiting a heart or lung transplant, and it is increasingly being used in emergencies for people experiencing cardiac arrest.
According to a registry kept by the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization, which Dr. Bartlett founded, more than 260,000 critically ill newborns, children and adults around the world have received the treatment, and roughly 800 medical centers in 66 countries offer the procedure; about 54 percent of patients treated with ECMO survive to leave the hospital, and more than 100,000 lives have been saved.

…

In 1975, while he was at the University of California, Irvine, Dr. Bartlett and his surgical team, including Dr. Alan Gazzaniga, successfully used ECMO treatment for the first time on a newborn who was experiencing lung failure and had been left at the hospital by her mother, an undocumented immigrant.
The infant — named Esperanza, or Hope, by the nurses — recovered after spending six days on the machine. Over the years she remained in touch with Dr. Bartlett, joining him at conferences and attending University of Michigan football games with him, one of his favorite activities.
Thanks to ECMO, what had once been a mortality rate of 80 percent in newborns struggling to breathe became a survival rate of 80 percent.
“If Dr. Bartlett wasn’t there that day I was born, I wouldn’t be here today,” Esperanza Pineda, who is now 50, said in an interview.

Betty Harford, actress. Other credits include “T.H.E. Cat”, “The Name of the Game”, and “Mrs. Columbo”.

Paul Tagliabue, former commissioner of the NFL. ESPN.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 7, 2025.

Friday, November 7th, 2025

James Watson, DNA guy.

Dr. Watson’s role in decoding DNA, the genetic blueprint for life, would have been enough to establish him as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. But he cemented that fame by leading the ambitious Human Genome Project and writing perhaps the most celebrated memoir in science.

…

Dr. Watson’s tell-all memoir, “The Double Helix,” had also provoked his colleagues when it was published in 1968, infuriating them for, in their view, elevating himself while shortchanging others who were involved in the project. Still, it was instantly hailed as a classic of the literature of science. The Library of Congress listed it, along with “The Federalist Papers” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” as one of the 88 most important American literary works. (The list was later expanded to 100.)
But it was in discerning the double-helix physical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, the chromosome-building molecule and medium of genetic inheritance, that won Dr. Watson and his co-discoverer, Francis H.C. Crick, enduring fame and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

…

In 2007, Dr. Watson became the second person to have his full genome sequenced. The first was J. Craig Venter, who as president of the Celera Corporation started a human genome sequencing project originally in competition with the government effort. Both men made their genomes available to researchers.
Today, commercial concerns sell sequencing efforts to the public. And the double helix has entered popular culture. Its image has appeared on commercial products ranging from jewelry to perfume and on postage stamps issued by countries as various as Gabon and Monaco. Salvador Dalí incorporated the image in a painting, and the performance artists who make up Blue Man Group use the image in their shows.

John Cleary. You probably don’t recognize the name, but you might recognize the photo:

He was shot and seriously wounded at Kent State on May 4, 1970.

Following the shooting, Mr. Cleary spent weeks in a hospital and then moved back home. He returned to Kent State the following year to resume his studies. After graduating in 1974, he married his college sweetheart, Kathy Bashaw, and they settled near Pittsburgh.

Ed Moloney, historian of the Troubles.

In Mr. Moloney’s 2002 book “A Secret History of the I.R.A.,” he described the long conflict as “a low-intensity war that occasionally exploded into spectacular bursts of violence but more often was characterized by a killing or two a week, deaths that by the end had become so routine that they scarcely merited a headline outside of Ireland.”

I wanted to note his death because of this:

After moving to the Bronx in 2000 to help care for his mother-in-law, Mr. Moloney directed the Belfast Project at Boston College, a collection of audio interviews with paramilitary fighters on both sides of the Troubles conducted by two people, one a loyalist and the other a former I.R.A. volunteer who had served 17 years in prison for murder.
The tapes were to stay sealed until the interview subjects died. Mr. Moloney used interviews with two of them for his 2010 book, “Voices From the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland,” which was adapted into a documentary film of the same name that year.

…

After the British government learned of the archives — which, among other things, implicated Mr. Adams in the McConville killing — it asked the Justice Department, under a mutual assistance legal treaty, to compel Boston College to turn over the tapes.
Under a federal subpoena, 11 of the 200 tapes were turned over in 2013. The college offered to return the tapes to the participants in the project and has done so in some cases, said Jack Dunn, a university spokesman. The archive is closed to the public.

Previously on WCD.

Posted in History, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: special dying media edition.

Tuesday, November 4th, 2025

A reliable source has informed me that the NRA is ending publication of Shooting Illustrated and America’s First Freedom. I have not found a link for this, and when I checked the NRA website earlier today, I still had a choice of these magazines with my membership.

The same source also informs me that the NRA is switching to quarterly print publication for American Rifleman and American Hunter. Again, I have no link for this. I’ve checked the NRA’s website and done a lazy Google search. But this is not a person prone to misinformation or falsehood, so I trust them implicitly. If I find a link, I will update here.

I think this is just another example of what Roy Huntington is talking about: the gun, ammo, and gun accessory manufacturers are dropping print advertising in favor of the Internet, and the print market just isn’t sustainable any longer. Of course, nobody’s considered what’s going to happen when the big companies that effectively control the Internet start hating guns again.

Edited to add: link from Bearing Arms, dated October 30th. It doesn’t name the magazines, but my source tells me they are named in the linked Cam and Company interview.

Link from News2A, also dated October 30th.

On a happier note, “Teen Vogue” has snuffed it. More or less.

“Teen Vogue”, the print publication, actually ceased publishing in 2017, but it continued on as a website under the Condé Nast brand until yesterday. Condé Nast is folding the website into the regular “Vogue” website. I’ve seen one report that says 75% of TV’s staff was fired, “including its entire politics team”.

I would be happier about this if they had snuffed regular ‘Vogue”, too, but you take your victories where you find them.

And, finally, Gannett announced today that they are changing the name of the company. The new name? USA Today Company.

Gannett’s name change will take effect on Nov. 18, when the company’s stock will switch to trading under the ticker symbol TDAY on the New York Stock Exchange.

Posted in Guns, Media, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: November 4, 2025.

Tuesday, November 4th, 2025

Diane Ladd. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “Carnosaur”, “White Lightning”, “Then Came Bronson”, and “The Fugitive”. And the pool of living “Alice” actors gets even smaller.

Former vice president Dick Cheney. WP (archived).

Victor Conte. I’m not sure how many people will remember that name: he was the founder of Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), the people who provided “performance enhancing drugs” to various athletes “including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track champion Marion Jones”.

The federal government’s investigation…yielded convictions of Jones, elite sprint cyclist Tammy Thomas, and former NFL defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield along with coaches, distributors, a trainer, a chemist and a lawyer.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Politics, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 30, 2025.

Thursday, October 30th, 2025

Bjorn Andresen. There’s a certain lack of notability here, but I think it is offset by the sadness of this story.

Mr. Andresen was 15 when Luchino Visconti cast him as Tadzio, the object of desire in his adaption of “Death In Venice”.

Tadzio’s mere appearance bewitches the composer Gustav von Aschenbach, played in the film by Dirk Bogarde. They meet in an elevator, leaving Aschenbach spellbound as they lock eyes but do not speak. Aschenbach then follows Tadzio around the city and fantasizes about him as a kind of artistic and romantic muse, before growing sick and dying in a beach chair as he reaches toward the boy.

Visconti called him “the most beautiful boy in the world”.

Visconti was also fixated on Mr. Andresen. During the boy’s screen test, the director asked him to strip to his swimsuit.
“When they asked me to take off my shirt, I wasn’t comfortable,” Mr. Andresen told Variety after the release of “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World,” a 2021 documentary about him directed by Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri. “I wasn’t prepared for that. I remember when he posed me with one foot against the wall, I would never stand like that.
“When I watch it now,” he said, “I see how that son of a bitch sexualized me.”
He told The Guardian that Visconti was “the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.”

…

During the making of “Death in Venice,” Visconti acted protectively toward Mr. Andresen. But the boy felt unprepared when Visconti took him to a gay club after the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1971.
In the documentary, Mr. Andresen recalled feeling besieged by “voracious looks, wet lips and rolling tongues” and getting drunk to cope with the unwanted attention. He wondered if Visconti, who was gay, was testing him to see if he was also gay, which he wasn’t.

…

Over the last 20 years or so, his flowing hair became gray and he obscured his face behind a beard that made him look something like Ian McKellen as the wizard Gandalf in the “Lord of the Rings” films.
Mr. Andresen continued to act, mostly on television in Sweden but also in films, including a memorable turn in Ari Aster’s 2019 horror movie, “Midsommar.” He was also a keyboard player in a dance band, a composer of jazz and bossa nova music, the arranger of the music for a Swedish production of “The Rocky Horror Show,” and the manager of a small theater in Stockholm.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Pierre Robert, long time Philadelphia DJ. The NYPost ran one as well.

His legendary career with WMMR spanned over 44 years, beginning in 1981 and became a constant voice for listeners in southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, Delaware and parts of Maryland.

This isn’t quite an obit, but I don’t know where else to put it. I also don’t quite know how to write about it, so I’m just going to do the best I can.

Officer Lauren Craven of the La Mesa (California) Police Department was killed on October 23rd. She was 25 years old, and had joined the department in February of 2024.

She came upon a deadly rollover crash on Interstate 8 northeast of San Diego just before 10:30 p.m. last Monday, officials said.
She reported the incident over the radio before stepping out and walking toward a car that had flipped over.
Craven was struck by another car, which triggered a chain reaction, smashing into the vehicles involved in the initial crash.

David Pearce was sentenced yesterday.

Pearce met Christy Giles, 24, and Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola, 26, at a rave party in Los Angeles and lured them back to his place — plying them with fentanyl-laced coke and drugged drinks and then refusing to call for help when they overdosed.
A witness claimed Pearce said “dead girls don’t talk” when he begged the killer to call 911.
Instead, Pearce dragged their limp bodies into his Toyota Prius and dumped them on the sidewalk in front of two different hospitals.

After the girls were murdered and scumbag Pearce was charged, seven other women came forward and said they’d been assaulted by him.

It came out yesterday, during the sentencing, that one of those women was Ms. Craven.

Pearce assaulted Craven while she was unconscious in 2020, prosecutors said at trial. He was given six years for that crime, plus sentences of 15 years to life for the other rapes.

…

Pearce was sentenced to a total of 146 years in prison for his crimes…

She was assaulted by someone who isn’t even worth being called “human”, but she didn’t let that stop her. She worked her butt off to get through the police academy and get sworn in as an officer, and she died a hero.

Anybody else notice that there’s an awful lot of dust in the air today?

Posted in Cops, Heroism, Law, Movies, Obits, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 29, 2025.

Wednesday, October 29th, 2025

Holly Hill. She was 30 years old, a third-grade teacher, and had three kids.

On Valentine’s Day 2023, she went out to a Mexican restaurant in Elgin, Oklahoma, and ordered a margarita.

The margarita was contaminated with a corrosive industrial cleaner that burned a hole in her esophagus. Her death is being attributed to complications from the incident.

“Avoiding Poisoned Alcohol in Foreign Countries” from Active Response Training.

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 28, 2025.

Tuesday, October 28th, 2025

Prunella Scales, actress. NYT (share link).

Other credits include “The Boys from Brazil”, “Wolf”, and “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1978).

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 27, 2025.

Monday, October 27th, 2025

For the record (I got behind over the weekend): June Lockhart. THR.

Other credits include “Babylon 5”, “The John Larroquette Show”, “C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud”, three episodes of “Quincy, M.E.”, “Sword of Justice”…and pretty much every other darn thing.

Except she never did a “Mannix”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 17, 2025.

Friday, October 17th, 2025

The archiving service I use has been having issues all day, so I’m going to put this up without some links. If they fix the problems in the next day or two, I’ll go back and add them.

Kanchha Sherpa has passed away at the age of 92. (Paywalled link. Sorry.) He was the last surviving member of the Hillary-Norgay team that climbed Mount Everest.

Mr. Kanchha carried 60 pounds of gear, fixed ropes and scouted the trail for the team. Despite injury, cold, illness and hardship, “I got good work,” he told Climate Wire in 2011. “I got good clothing. It was good for me.”

…

More recently, he expressed concern about the large numbers of people climbing Everest and the environmental damage they caused.Still, as a mountain guide, he told Climate Wire: “If we stop the tourists to save the mountains, we don’t have anything to do. Just grow potatoes and eat and sit.”

Ace Frehley, of KISS. NYT (share link, should be free).

I don’t have much to say about Mr. Frehley, and I feel a little bad. But I was never a fan of Knights In Satan’s Service.

Susan Stamberg, NPR host famous for her “cranberry relish” recipe. Recipe here. NYT (non-archived, paywalled link. Sorry.)

American Handgunner, the print edition. The brand is going to continue in the form of online “newsletters”, and I think Guns is still going to be around.

But to me, this is awful news. AH is one of the few gun magazines I subscribed to, and I’m not sure if signing up for all the newsletters will get me the content I want. Sure, Dr. Dabbs will still be around, but what about the “Ayoob Files” and Ayoob’s monthly column? Will the “Guncrank Diaries” still exist? If not, who’s going to tell me stories, like the one about Elon Musk’s dad killing three cannibals with two bullets? And what if I want to go back and refer to something? The website is a little skirty about pulling up older articles, even if you are a paid subscriber.

I think I understand the reasons, and I still support the AH staff. But the older I get, the more change stinks.

Posted in Guns, History, Media, Music, Obits, Radio | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 16, 2025.

Thursday, October 16th, 2025

Ed Williams, actor. He was 98.

Other credits include “Carnosaur”, “Hooperman”, and apparently there was a remake of “I Want to Live“?

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 14, 2025.

Tuesday, October 14th, 2025

John Searle, philosopher. He was best known (at least to me) as a critic of artificial intelligence: not what passes for AI today, but the entire idea that computers could become conscious.

Professor Searle sought to solve the long-running debate over the division between the mind and the body by dispensing with the duality altogether. He argued that mental experiences like pain, ecstasy and drunkenness were all neurobiological phenomena, caused by firing neurons. Consciousness is not, he said, a separate substance of its own: It is a state the brain is in, like liquidity is the state of the molecules in a glass of water.
That view underpinned his thought experiment about what he called “the Chinese room,” which he made the centerpiece of provocative articles in the early 1980s that interpreted nascent research into artificial intelligence.
Suppose, Professor Searle wrote, that he, who did not know a word of Chinese, was locked in a room with boxes full of documents in Chinese script as well as a rulebook, in English, explaining how to match the various Chinese symbols together. It does not teach Chinese; it just says, in effect, “squiggle-squiggle” goes with “squoggle-squoggle.”
People outside the room pass more Chinese documents inside, and Professor Searle sends other documents back, following the rulebook’s instructions. The people passing him documents call them “questions.” The symbols he gives back they call “answers.” The rulebook they call “the program.” And Professor Searle they call “the computer.”
That situation is equivalent to the workings of A.I., he said. Both involve manipulating formal symbols to simulate understanding.
“No one supposes that computer simulations of a five-alarm fire will burn the neighborhood down,” Professor Searle wrote in his first paper on the subject, published in 1980. “Why on earth would anyone suppose that a computer simulation of understanding actually understood anything?”

Personally, I think that Dr. Searle’s argument that computers can’t think, but at best can do a clever simulation of thinking, somewhat interesting. And if I had ever met the good doctor, I would have told him that I would take this argument more seriously if he could convince me he was actually thinking, as opposed to just engaged in a clever simulation of thinking.

Clark Olofsson, Swedish criminal. I would have skipped this for notability, if it wasn’t for the fact that Mr. Olofsson was one of the two robbers in the “Stockholm syndrome” case. The obit is worth reading, as it casts a somewhat skeptical light on the whole idea of “Stockholm syndrome”.

The term was coined by a Swedish police psychologist, Nils Bejerot, after he was asked to assess the hostages’ curious behavior during the robbery. But Stockholm syndrome has never been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the handbook of mental illness in the United States.
Some psychologists have explained the behavior as a coping mechanism, seen in victims of kidnappings and among hostages seized by Middle East terrorists, and in victims of domestic abuse. The captives, psychologists say, find a way to self-preservation by siding with their all-powerful captors.

…

Ms. Enmark, the Stockholm hostage, spent years denying that she had ever empathized with Mr. Olsson and Mr. Olofsson. She accused the police who laid siege to the bank of incompetency. She called Stockholm syndrome a myth, saying she had done what was necessary to stay alive.“It’s a way of blaming the victim,” she told a BBC podcast in 2021. “I did what I could to survive.”

…

Although mental health experts have theorized about Stockholm syndrome for half a century, almost none thought to speak to Ms. Enmark, the bank employee central to the drama and the diagnosis.
One psychologist who did was Allan Wade, a Canadian therapist specializing in interpersonal violence, who, after meeting Ms. Enmark, called Stockholm syndrome a made-up concept meant to shift focus from the stumbles of the Swedish police.
“The whole notion was an accusation,” he told the BBC in 2021. “It was a way to dismiss what an incredibly heroic woman had been doing for six and a half days to resist, preserve her dignity and look after the other hostages.”

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 12, 2025.

Sunday, October 12th, 2025

Diane Keaton. THR. IMDB.

I think her death has been very well covered everywhere, but fun fact by way of Lawrence: yes, she was a “Mannix” alumna. (“The Color of Murder”, season 4, episode 22. She was “Cindy Conrad”.) She also appeared on “The F.B.I.”.

Posted in Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 3, 2025.

Friday, October 3rd, 2025

Patricia Routledge, noted British actress. She was 96.

…from the beginning she was a stage performer, and an acclaimed one.
Ms. Routledge won a Tony for her 1968 Broadway appearance in the musical “Darling of the Day” (a tie with Leslie Uggams, for “Hallelujah, Baby!”) and its British equivalent, the Laurence Olivier Award, as the Old Lady in a 1988 production of “Candide” at the Old Vic.

…

Many of Ms. Routledge’s biggest fans, from “Appearances” and from “Hetty Wainthropp Investigates,” the detective series she starred in afterward (1996-98), may never have even known about her time with the Royal Shakespeare Company or her stage roles on the West End.
She was the temperamental character actress Dotty Otley and a harried housekeeper in the farce “Noises Off” (1982), the imperious Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1999), the title character in “Little Mary Sunshine” (1962), Madame Ranevskaya in “The Cherry Orchard” (1975), Queen Margaret in “Richard III” (1984), the confused Mrs. Malaprop in “The Rivals” (1976), the earthy Nettie Fowler in “Carousel” (1992) and a religious fanatic in “And a Nightingale Sang” (1979).

…

Other American stage appearances included the 1980 Shakespeare in the Park production of “The Pirates of Penzance,” with Kevin Kline, as Ruth the pirate maid; and the London comedy “How’s the World Treating You?” (her Broadway debut, in 1966), as a frumpy 1940s mom.None of her Broadway shows had long runs. In 1968, “Love Match” (her second time portraying Queen Victoria) never opened, because of a disappointing Los Angeles run.
Her most notable flop was the Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein’s “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” in which she played a series of American first ladies. It opened on May 4, 1976, and closed on May 8. She looked back on the experience as a composer-lyricist mismatch, telling the London newspaper The Telegraph in 2007, “I think Alan Jay Lerner was frightened of Lenny.”

…

She appeared in a handful of feature films, including “To Sir, With Love” (1967) and “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969). Her last screen appearance was in 2001 in the British television movie “Anybody’s Nightmare,” a true-crime drama about a teacher in her 60s wrongly imprisoned for murder.

IMDB.

She was best known as “Hyacinth Bucket” (pronounced by the character “Bouquet”) on “Keeping Up Appearances”, a show (and a character) beloved by many people in my family.

One of those family members sent me this, which I rather like:

I’ll be turning 95 this coming Monday. In my younger years, I was often filled with worry — worry that I wasn’t quite good enough, that no one would cast me again, that I wouldn’t live up to my mother’s hopes. But these days begin in peace, and end in gratitude.
My life didn’t quite take shape until my forties. I had worked steadily — on provincial stages, in radio plays, in West End productions — but I often felt adrift, as though I was searching for a home within myself that I hadn’t quite found.
At 50, I accepted a television role that many would later associate me with — Hyacinth Bucket, of Keeping Up Appearances. I thought it would be a small part in a little series. I never imagined that it would take me into people’s living rooms and hearts around the world. And truthfully, that role taught me to accept my own quirks. It healed something in me.
At 60, I began learning Italian — not for work, but so I could sing opera in its native language. I also learned how to live alone without feeling lonely. I read poetry aloud each evening, not to perfect my diction, but to quiet my soul.
At 70, I returned to the Shakespearean stage — something I once believed I had aged out of. But this time, I had nothing to prove. I stood on those boards with stillness, and audiences felt that. I was no longer performing. I was simply being.
At 80, I took up watercolor painting. I painted flowers from my garden, old hats from my youth, and faces I remembered from the London Underground. Each painting was a quiet memory made visible.
Now, at 95, I write letters by hand. I’m learning to bake rye bread. I still breathe deeply every morning. I still adore laughter — though I no longer try to make anyone laugh. I love the quiet more than ever.
I’m writing this to tell you something simple:
Growing older is not the closing act. It can be the most exquisite chapter — if you let yourself bloom again.
Let these years ahead be your *treasure years*.
You don’t need to be famous. You don’t need to be flawless.
You only need to show up — fully — for the life that is still yours.
With love and gentleness,
— Patricia Routledge

Posted in Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

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