Archive for the ‘Obits’ Category

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Obit watch: March 12, 2019.

Tuesday, March 12th, 2019

Kelly Catlin passed away last week.

You probably were not familiar with her: she was part of the women’s pursuit cycling team that won the silver medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

She was 23 years old.

Catlin’s father, Mark Catlin, broke the news in a letter sent to VeloNews Sunday morning. Mark Catlin said that Kelly had died Friday around 12 a.m. at her residence in California. Mark Catlin said that Kelly died by suicide.
“There isn’t a minute that goes by that we don’t think of her and think of the wonderful life she could have lived,” Mark Catlin wrote. “There isn’t a second in which we wouldn’t freely give our lives in exchange for hers. The hurt is unbelievable.”

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

We often hear from those who have attempted suicide but survived that they believed the world would be better off without them. While sharing suicide-prevention hotline numbers can help a great deal, sharing the perspectives and grief of those left behind can as well. Because those still in this world but contemplating an exit must know that their feelings of self-worthlessness are not shared by those who love them.
If someone is contemplating suicide, they should know the utter devastation that will be left in their wake. While those who have died may have thought the world a better place without them, we survivors are living witness to the fact that it is not, that our worlds will not ever be whole without them in it.

Edited to add: sometimes there’s just nothing else you can say.

Posted in Cycling, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 11, 2019.

Monday, March 11th, 2019

Bill Powers, former University of Texas president.

Powers was the second-longest-serving president in UT history, holding the post for more than nine years until he stepped down in June 2015 to return to the Law School, where he previously was dean. Under his watch as president, UT overhauled the undergraduate curriculum; completed an eight-year fundraising campaign that netted $3.1 billion; launched the ESPN-owned Longhorn Network in a deal giving the campus $300 million over 20 years; and collaborated with local, state and UT System leaders to establish the Dell Medical School.

Quoting Lawrence:

Powers is probably most famous to BattleSwarm readers for his central role in the UT admissions scandal, in which well-connected students were admitted to the University of Texas despite not having the necessary grade averages or test scores. Powers eventually resigned over the scandal.
The UT admissions scandal was not only real, but several of the state’s most powerful politicians (including then-speaker Joe Straus) and media outlets conspired to bury the story.

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to see how the Statesman addressed this in their obituary. Hint: you will need a (metaphorical) shovel.

Sidney Sheinberg, film executive best known as an early and influential supporter of Steven Spielberg.

Just being a celebrity’s kid doesn’t automatically get you an obit watch. But if the child had an interesting life outside of, or in relation to, their famous parent: absolutely, I’ll mention it here.

In that vein: Julia Ruth Stevens, Babe Ruth’s daughter. She was 102. Ruth adopted her when he married Claire Hodgson, his second wife. (He had a daughter, Dorothy, from his first marriage to Helen Woodford. Ms. Woodford died in a house fire in 1929: Ruth married Ms. Hodgson in 1930, she adopted Dorothy, and the family lived together.)

Claire Hodgson Ruth died in 1976 and Mrs. [Dorothy Ruth – DB] Pirone died in 1989. Mrs. Stevens ultimately became the spokeswoman for the Ruth family.
She was at Yankee Stadium in May 1998 for the unveiling of a postage stamp portraying Ruth admiring one of his home run drives. That August, she threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox game in Fenway Park at ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of Ruth’s death.
She was at Fenway Park in October 1999 to toss the first pitch before the decisive Game 5 of the American League Championship Series. Having lived for many years in Conway, N.H., she had become a Red Sox fan.
“I went to see the Red Sox beat the Yankees tonight,” she said.

…

When the Yankees played their last game at the old Stadium, the House That Ruth Built, in September 2008, she threw out the first pitch. And she threw out the first ball at a Red Sox game at Fenway Park on July 10, 2016, to mark her 100th birthday three days earlier.

Freeda Foreman, one of George Foreman’s daughters, passed away over the weekend. She was 42, and had a 5-1 record as a professional boxer.

Edited to add: prompted by the exchange with Lawrence below, here’s a little lagniappe for you.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Politics, Sports, Texas | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: March 9, 2019.

Saturday, March 9th, 2019

I held back on these yesterday because I wanted to give them 24 hours to shake out.

Dan Jenkins, noted Texas author (Semi-Tough) and sports writer. NYT.

If you want to get a taste of his work, you could do worse than browse through the “SI 60“, especially “The Disciples Of St. Darrell On A Wild Weekend: A Texas football odyssey” and “The Sweet Life Of Swinging Joe: Joe Namath, celebrity and New York City“.

Jan-Michael Vincent, for the historical record.

Carmine “The Snake” Persico, noted Mafia boss.

“He was the most fascinating figure I encountered in the world of organized crime,” said Edward A. McDonald, a former federal prosecutor who was in charge of a Justice Department unit that investigated the Mafia in the 1970s and ’80s. “Because of his reputation for intelligence and toughness, he was a legend by the age of 17, and later as a mob boss he became a folk hero in certain areas of Brooklyn.”

…

The extent of Mr. Persico’s influence and authority in the Mafia was exposed at a watershed federal trial in 1986 in Manhattan. He and the reputed bosses of the Genovese and Lucchese crime families were convicted of being members of the Commission, the select body that resolved major disputes and set policies for the five New York crime families: the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese factions.
At the trial, Mr. Persico, a high school dropout, decided to represent himself, and he won the praises of lawyers and judges for his acumen in questioning witnesses, writing legal briefs and raising points of law.
His unorthodox trial tactics failed, however, and he was convicted, along with Anthony Corallo, the accused boss of the Lucchese family, and Anthony Salerno, a high-ranking member of the Genovese family. Each man was sentenced to 100 years in prison without the possibility of parole after being found guilty of conspiracy to commit murders, racketeering and leading a criminal enterprise, the Commission.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 8, 2019.

Friday, March 8th, 2019

Ralph Hall, former Republican House rep from Texas.

Mr. Hall was 91 when he left the House after 34 years. He was defeated in a Republican primary runoff in 2014 by John Ratcliffe, a former United States attorney less than half his age.
An avid jogger who began his days with two-mile runs, Mr. Hall celebrated Memorial Day 2012, when he was 89, by skydiving. That Christmas he became the oldest member of the House, breaking the record set by Charles Manly Stedman of North Carolina, who died in office in 1930 at the age of 89 years, seven months and 25 days.

…

Mr. Hall, who flew Hellcat fighters during World War II, was known in Congress for promoting NASA and energy production. Hailing from a small town east of Dallas, he was fond of saying that he often voted with his party but always voted with his district.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Jerry Merryman. You’ve probably never heard of him, but to my mind, he was one of the great men of history.

While working at Texas Instruments, Mr. Merryman co-created the first pocket calculator.

With this device, Mr. Merryman and his collaborators, Jack Kilby and James Van Tassel, also pioneered rechargeable batteries and “thermal printing,” which used heat to print numbers onto a special kind of paper. Speaking with NPR, Mr. Merryman said he was reminded of their work whenever he used a cellphone or was handed a thermally printed receipt by a grocery store cashier.

…

Years later, when a friend mentioned that Mr. Merryman had designed the calculator’s circuitry in only three days, Mr. Merryman leaned toward him and said, “And three nights.”
He, Mr. Kilby and Mr. Van Tassel initially built a prototype, which spanned an entire room at their Texas Instruments lab. Then, over the next two years, they packed the same circuit design into a hand-held casing using microchips.
The device had 18 keys, and it could handle addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, printing calculations on a tiny spool of paper. It reached the market in 1970 after Texas Instruments licensed the technology to Canon, carrying a $400 price tag. Soon a second partner, Bowmar, introduced a $250 version called the Bowmar Brain.

The first calculator I ever used only supported six digits (not eight) and the basic math operations. I don’t know how much it cost. I think my dad paid around $300 for a Rockwell scientific calculator sometime in the 1970s. It wasn’t that many years later that I got a TI-30 for Christmas: I think by that time they were somewhere around $20 or $30.

Moore’s Law, man.

Posted in Geek, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Totally random stuff: March 6, 2019.

Wednesday, March 6th, 2019

I’ve been getting more and more depressed by what seems to be the constant stream of obit watches, so I decided it was time to do another variety post. (Not to be confused with variety meats, although that’s an easy mistake to make.)

Obit watch: King Kong Bundy, pro wrestler.

In one memorable match at the first WrestleMania, in 1985 at Madison Square Garden, Bundy snatched Special Delivery Jones in a bear hug, slammed him into the turnbuckle, hit him with an avalanche and then finished him with a splash, pinning him in a matter of seconds.

Legal update #1: sentences in the basketball bribery case.

James Gatto, the former head of global basketball marketing at Adidas, was sentenced to nine months by U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan. Merl Code Jr., another former Adidas employee, and Christian Dawkins, an aspiring agent, were given six months each. Code and Dawkins, who are also defendants in next month’s trial, were ordered to pay restitution of a little more than $28,000 each, with Gatto’s amount of restitution still to be determined.

(Previously.)

Legal update #2: no, the government can’t seize the trademark of the Mongols motorcycle club. Again.

Denying Mongol members the ability to display the logo on their leather riding jackets and elsewhere would overstep the right to free expression embedded in the 1st Amendment, as well as the 8th Amendment’s ban on excessive penalties, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter found.

(Previously. I actually saw this over the weekend, but have been waiting for a better link: the LAT has become increasingly obnoxious.)

Posted in Law, Media, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 5, 2019.

Tuesday, March 5th, 2019

Luke Perry, for the record. I wish I could say more, other than 52 is too young.

Nathaniel Taylor. He was perhaps best known as “Rollo” on “Sanford and Son”.

Last and least, serial killer Juan Corona.

I thought about using the “is burning in Hell” line for the late Mr. Corona. But if you read the NYT obit (and I’ve seen these facts referenced elsewhere), there were some…questionable things that went on during his two trials:

Prosecutors were found to have misplaced or mishandled evidence, and forensic tests that ought to have been done early on were delayed. At one point a prosecutor improperly suggested that Mr. Corona’s refusal to testify suggested that he was guilty.
The judge, who repeatedly expressed dismay at the prosecutors’ performance, reminded the jury that the burden of proof rested totally on the prosecution. Mr. Corona was convicted on Jan. 18, 1973, and sentenced to life in prison. (The California Supreme Court had overturned the state’s death penalty months before the trial.)

…

Even after finding Mr. Corona guilty, some jurors said they were “shocked” and “flabbergasted” that his defense had presented no psychiatric evidence on his behalf. His original public defender had planned to have him plead not guilty by reason of insanity, but the family retained a lawyer who spurned that approach. Later, the lawyer was found to have been angling for a book deal about the case.
In May 1978, a California appeals court overturned the conviction, declaring that Mr. Corona’s defense had been inept and compromised.

During the second trial, Mr. Corona’s new lawyers suggested that the actual killer was his half-brother, Natividad Corona, who had disappeared somewhere in Mexico. Mr. Corona was convicted again. As far as I can tell, he’d been in jail or prison since 1971.

Posted in 1970s, Law, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 2, 2019.

Saturday, March 2nd, 2019

Katherine Helmond. Alzheimer’s got her at 89. THR. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

I didn’t watch “Who’s the Boss?” and my parents wouldn’t let me watch “Soap” first run. But:

Ms. Helmond became a well-regarded stage actress in New York and beyond. In 1966, working with the Trinity Square Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., she took on the role of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Her TV credits go back to 1955, and include “Car 54, Where Are You?”, “Hec Ramsey”, “Harry O”, “Meeting of Minds” (she played Emily Dickinson)…

…and, believe it or not, two episodes of “Mannix”. (“A Fine Day for Dying” and “A Rage to Kill”.)

And she was in three Terry Gilliam movies: “Time Bandits”, “Brazil”, and “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas”.

She sounds like someone I would have enjoyed hanging out with, maybe over a cheeseburger and the amusing house red.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 27, 2019.

Wednesday, February 27th, 2019

Dick Churchill passed away earlier this month at the age of 99.

The Germans captured Mr. Churchill, a squadron leader at the time, after they shot down the bomber he was flying over the Netherlands in 1940. In 1942 he was transferred to Stalag III, a camp in what is now Zagan, Poland, a little more than 100 miles southeast of Berlin and then a part of Germany, where a few hundred prisoners soon began excavating escape tunnels.

…

Mr. Churchill helped dig the three main tunnels, which the prisoners called Tom, Dick and Harry. It was arduous, nerve-racking work, conducted with improvised tools and the constant risk of discovery or a cave-in.
“You didn’t have any air,” Mr. Churchill said, “and you had a little fat lump lamp which was Reich margarine, which spluttered, with a bit of pajama cord or something similar, which sucked up the oil and gave you a little bit of a light. And you hacked away at your sand, pushed it behind you where another fool took it further back.”
The tunnels were cleverly concealed, but Tom was discovered by the Germans in 1943 and Dick proved unusable. On a frigid night in March 1944, Mr. Churchill was one of 76 prisoners to make their way through the tunnel called Harry and out of Stalag III.

…

Most of the escapees were recaptured in days — only three made it to freedom — and 50 were killed for the attempt. Mr. Churchill said he thought he was spared because his captors believed he might be related to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and could be a useful bargaining chip. (After he made it back to England he said that they were not related as far as he knew).

Mr. Churchill was the last surviving member of the escape party.

Jeraldine Saunders.

Ms. Saunders, who also wrote a widely syndicated astrology column for the Tribune Company as well as a book on hypoglycemia, had an eclectic résumé to say the least. She was a model as well as an author; a practitioner of numerology and palm reading as well as an astrologer. She liked dating younger men and at age 89 filmed a segment for the TLC series “Extreme Cougar Wives” (with a boyfriend, not a husband).

She was most famous as the author of The Love Boats (link goes to revised edition on Amazon, and yes, I will get a tiny kickback if you buy the book), about her time as a cruise ship hostess and cruise director. That book inspired three TV movies, and ultimately “The Love Boat” television series.

Mark Bramble, who wrote the book for the musical “Barnum” and co-wrote the book for “42nd Street”. Oddly, when I was in my late teens, I saw “Barnum” with Stacy Keach in the title role. But I don’t remember very much about the music or the book…

I’ve avoided writing about Brody Stevens because:

  • I wasn’t familiar with his work. I’ve seen him described, mostly on Twitter, as “a comedian’s comedian”.
  • Everything I’ve seen before now has been on Twitter. Yesterday’s NYT was the first reliable report I’ve seen.
  • I find his death at 48 depressing, and don’t know what else I can say about it.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Posted in 1970s, Boats, Books, Heroism, History, Obits, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 24, 2019.

Sunday, February 24th, 2019

Stanley Donen, who I have seen described as “one of the last Golden Age directors”, and certainly one of the greats. THR.

“On the Town”, “Singin’ in the Rain”, “Charade”, “Funny Face”, “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”, “Damn Yankees”, “Bedazzled”. What a life.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Also by way of THR: Morgan Woodward. Interesting career: he did a lot of stuff. Oddly, not “Mannix”, but 19 episodes of “Gunsmoke”, “Hill Street Blues”, “Bonanza”, “Bearcats!”, two episodes of “Star Trek: Original Recipe” (“on which he was the first victim of Mr. Spock’s telepathic ‘Vulcan mind meld.'”), “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp”…

…and “Boss Godfrey” (the guy with the mirrored sunglasses) in “Cool Hand Luke”.

Speaking of “Star Trek”, we caught the last three or so minutes of “The Naked Time” last night while waiting for “Kolchak”. Now, I’m not a big “Trek” fan, but for some reason, I got to wondering what John D.F. Black (who wrote that episode) was up to.

Turns out he passed away in late November without my noticing. Google does not turn up an obit in the NYT or any of the papers I usually frequent, though it looks like THR ran one that I (and everyone I know) missed.

I knew that he was one of the more highly regarded “Trek” writers. I did not know that he’d co-written the screenplay for the original “Shaft” with Ernest Tidyman. He also did TV work for, among other shows, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, “Hawaii Five-O”…and, yes, he wrote an episode of “Mannix” (“A Day Filled with Shadows”: he shares the writing credit with Cliff Gould).

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 23, 2019.

Saturday, February 23rd, 2019

Yesterday was a busy day for the NYT: the obit writers were apparently playing catch-up. One of these I knew about, but was waiting for a reliable source on, while the others I had not heard about.

William E. Butterworth III, noted and bestselling author.

According to his website, there are more than 50 million copies of his books in print in more than 10 languages.

If the name doesn’t ring a bell with you, that’s because he wrote mostly under pseudonyms. His best known pen name was W.E.B. Griffin.

(Also: awesome photo, NYT.)

Ken Nordine, poet and “word jazz” guy.

Mr. Nordine became wealthy doing voice-overs for television and radio commercials. But he found his passion in using his dramatic baritone to riff surreally on colors, time, spiders, bullfighting, outer space and dozens of other subjects. His free-form poems could be cerebral or humorous, absurd or enigmatic, and were heard on the radio and captured on records, one of which earned a Grammy nomination.

I used to fall asleep with the radio on and wake up to it in the morning. As I recall, early on Sunday mornings, in that twilight zone when I was half-awake and half-asleep, our local public radio station aired re-runs of “Word Jazz”.

I had not heard of Ethel Ennis, but this is an interesting story: Playboy jazz poll winner for best female singer,

She recorded for major labels in the late 1950s and the ’60s; toured Europe with Benny Goodman; performed onstage alongside Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong; and appeared on television with Duke Ellington. She became a regular on Arthur Godfrey’s TV show and headlined the Newport Jazz Festival.

And then she mostly walked away from it all and became Baltimore’s unofficial “First Lady of Jazz”.

“They had it all planned out for me,” she told The Washington Post in 1979, referring to the music executives in charge of her career. “I’d ask, ‘When do I sing?’ and they’d say, ‘Shut up and have a drink. You should sit like this and look like that and play the game of bed partners.’ You really had to do things that go against your grain for gain. I wouldn’t.”
She added: “I want to do it my way. I have no regrets.”

Finally, David Horowitz, newscaster and consumer reporter. I remember watching the syndicated version of “Fight Back!” on one of the Houston TV stations (though I don’t recall which one) back when I was young…

Posted in Books, Guns, Music, Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 22, 2019.

Friday, February 22nd, 2019

For the historical record: Peter Tork, of The Monkees.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 20, 2019.

Wednesday, February 20th, 2019

Don Newcombe, noted pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

An imposing right-hander, at 6 feet 4 inches and 225 pounds, with an overpowering fastball, Newcombe claimed a string of achievements: National League rookie of the year in 1949; four-time All-Star; the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1956, when he also won the first Cy Young Award as baseball’s top pitcher. Moreover, he was the first black pitcher to start a World Series game.

…

While Newcombe was proud of his accomplishments as a pitcher, he was gratified as well to have played a role in the civil rights struggle by helping to shatter modern baseball’s racial barrier after the arrival of the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson and catcher Roy Campanella.
He once said that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King came to his house in the weeks before his assassination in 1968 and told him, “I would never have made it as successfully as I have in civil rights if it were not for what you men did on the baseball field.”

Also among the dead: Karl Lagerfeld, fashion designer.

Guy Webster, album cover photographer.

Mr. Webster’s work with the Rolling Stones — including the photo for the bucolic cover of the United States release of the anthology “Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass)” (1966) — began with an unusual offer in 1965 from Andrew Loog Oldham, their producer and manager: Take photographs, but don’t expect to be paid because it’s an honor simply to work with the band.
“And I said, ‘Well, it’s an honor for you that I take these pictures,’ ” Mr. Webster said at the Annenberg event. “He paid me for one album cover. Three of them came out during the years using my photographs.”

For Exposure, call your office, please.

Posted in Music, Obits, Photography, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 19, 2019.

Tuesday, February 19th, 2019

George Mendonsa has passed away at the age of 95.

Mr. Mendonsa was the man in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square after the Japanese surrender.

At least, maybe he was. Eisenstaedt didn’t record the names of the sailor or nurse, and at least three women and 11 men have claimed they were one or the other.

But Mr. Mendonsa was adamant that he was the one. He sued Life in the 1980s when the magazine would not definitively acknowledge that he was the sailor, though nothing came of the lawsuit.

…

Mr. Mendonsa eventually received recognition from most parties after extensive testing. Among other efforts, in 2005, Richard Benson, a photographer and printmaker at Yale, scrutinized the photographs in the early 1980s and determined that Mr. Mendonsa’s specific features, like a cyst on his left arm and a dark patch on his right, matched those of the sailor in the photo.
Mr. Mendonsa’s face was painstakingly 3-D mapped, then reverse-aged, to show that it matched the sailor’s in Eisenstaedt’s picture. Four years later Norman Sauer, a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University, analyzed the photo and said he could not find a single inconsistency between Mr. Mendonsa’s face and the sailor’s.

Greta Friedman, who may have been the nurse, passed away in 2016.

Posted in History, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 18, 2019.

Monday, February 18th, 2019

From the Department of Brief Round-Ups, a couple of obits that people mentioned to me over the weekend:

Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Patrick Caddell, prominent political pollster.

Betty Ballantine, wife of Ian Ballantine. The Ballantines basically pioneered paperbacks in this country:

With a $500 wedding dowry from Ms. Ballantine’s father, the couple established Penguin U.S.A. by importing British editions of Penguin paperbacks, starting with “The Invisible Man” by H. G. Wells and “My Man Jeeves” by P. G. Wodehouse.

…

They left Penguin in 1945 to start Bantam Books, a reprint house. Having purchased the paperback rights for 20 hardcovers, their first round of titles included Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi,” John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
They started Ballantine Books in 1952, publishing reprints as well as original works in paperback.

And:

While Ian Ballantine, who died in 1995, was the better known of the publishing duo, Betty Ballantine, who was British, quietly devoted herself to the editorial side. She nurtured authors, edited manuscripts and helped promote certain genres — Westerns, mysteries, romance novels and, perhaps most significantly, science fiction and fantasy.
Her love for that genre and knowledge of it helped put it on the map.
“She birthed the science fiction novel,” said Tad Wise, a nephew of Ms. Ballantine’s by marriage. With the help of Frederik Pohl, a science fiction writer, editor and agent, Mr. Wise said, “She sought out the pulp writers of science fiction who were writing for magazines and said she wanted them to write novels, and she would publish them.”
In doing so she helped a wave of science fiction and fantasy writers emerge. They included Joanna Russ, author of “The Female Man” (1975), a landmark novel of feminist science fiction, and Samuel R. Delany, whose “Dhalgren” (1975) was one of the best-selling science fiction novels of its time.
The Ballantines also published paperback fiction by Ray Bradbury, whose books include “The Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451”; Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey”; and J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 16, 2019.

Saturday, February 16th, 2019

The late great Bruno Ganz.

In the Wim Wenders drama “Wings of Desire” (1987), he played an angel whose job was to spend time on earth, make himself visible to the dying and to comfort them. But the character saw such beauty in human life that he wanted it for himself.

…

Most of Mr. Ganz’s more than 80 films and television movies were European productions, among them Mr. Wenders’s film noir hommage “The American Friend” (1977), with Dennis Hopper, in which he played a German with a terminal-illness diagnosis who agrees to be a hit man; Volker Schlöndorff’s “Circle of Deceit” (1981), as a war correspondent in Beirut; Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu” (1979), as the innocent Jonathan Harker; and Barbet Schroeder’s “Amnesia” (2017).
But he did appear in American films, including “The Boys From Brazil” (1978), the drama about Nazi war criminals starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier; Jonathan Demme’s all-star 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate”; and “The Reader” (2008), with Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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