Catherine Spaak, Italian actress. Credits include “Hotel” and “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium”.
Rio Hackford. Other than “Treme” and “Swingers”, credits include motion capture work on “The Mandalorian”, “Jonah Hex”, and “Exit to Eden”.
Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category
Obit watch: April 20, 2022.
Wednesday, April 20th, 2022Obit watch: April 13, 2022.
Wednesday, April 13th, 2022Your Gilbert Gottfried roundup, as promised: NYT (Note the correction. What did I tell you?). Variety. THR 1. THR 2.
In honor of the late #GilbertGottfried, everyone tell the filthiest, most politically incorrect joke you know. https://t.co/q60BSYgTn4 pic.twitter.com/5efeoZRV6P
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) April 12, 2022
I don’t have a lot I want to say about the late Mr. Gottfried. My close friends know how I felt about his work, and for everyone else: “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in all mankind” and “De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est.”
I will say:
1.
…the actor succumbed to a heart abnormality called recurrent ventricular tachycardia, an arrhythmia caused by myotonic dystrophy Type 2.
Myotonic dystrophy (DM) is a genetic disorder marked by progressive muscle wasting and weakness which predominantly affects the limbs and face but can create increasingly dire complications for respiratory, skeletal and cardiac muscles.
People with DM are at a higher risk of irregular heartbeat, including ventricular tachycardia, an arrhythmia in the lower chambers of the heart (ventricles) that causes the heart to beat faster. A sustained sped-up rhythm can cause a fatal drop in blood pressure.
I’ve never heard of this disorder before, but damn, what a sucky way to go.
2. It surprised me, but Mr. Gottfried’s version of the joke in “The Aristocrats” documentary was, to me, the best of them all. Apparently, I’m not the only person who felt this way.
In other news: Michel Bouquet, French actor.
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Obit watch: April 12, 2022.
Tuesday, April 12th, 2022Patricia MacLachlan, author. (Sarah, Plain and Tall)
Kathy Lamkin, actress. Other credits include “My Name Is Earl”, “Boston Legal”, and “Bones”.
Obit watch: April 8, 2022.
Friday, April 8th, 2022Jimmy Wang Yu, martial arts movie guy.
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Another notable Wang film from this period was Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976), which Quentin Tarantino would rank as one of his favorite films and that would later influence RZA’s The Man with the Iron Fists.
By the 1980s, Wang’s career began to slow down, and he was better known for the scandals in his private life. There were reports of domestic abuse, continued reports of his alleged links to Triads and in Taiwan, he was charged with murder in 1981, but the charges were dropped due to a lack of evidence.
Obit watch: April 6, 2022.
Wednesday, April 6th, 2022Bobby Rydell, one of the big teen idols.
Mr. Rydell and two other affable performers who became stars in those years, Frankie Avalon and Fabian, grew up within about two blocks of one another in South Philadelphia. Long after their days on the pop chart were past them, they enjoyed great success on the oldies circuit. The three had toured extensively together since 1985, billed as the Golden Boys, and were still performing together this year.
Mr. Rydell did not just have staying power; he also made a comeback after years of alcohol abuse, which he chronicled in his autobiography, “Bobby Rydell: Teen Idol on the Rocks” (2016), written with the guitarist and producer Allan Slutsky. Near death, he had a kidney and liver transplant in July 2012. By that October he was back, singing on a cruise ship with Mr. Avalon. But five months later, he underwent cardiac bypass surgery. Some of his later appearances were charity promotions for organ donation.
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Mr. Rydell’s recording prime encompassed the era roughly between 1959, when Elvis Presley was in the Army and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash, and 1964, when Beatlemania hit America. It didn’t hurt that Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” was broadcast in those years from Philadelphia, the home of Mr. Rydell’s label, Cameo Records.
Mr. Rydell’s repertoire included plaintive love ballads; slow, danceable tunes; occasional frenetic rockers like “Wild One” and “Swingin’ School”; and ageless songs like Domenico Modugno’s 1958 hit “Volare,” which became Mr. Rydell’s signature song in his later touring years.
Mr. Rydell was a pop phenomenon but hardly a cutting-edge rock star. Still, he sold a lot more records than some of those who were. Over the course of his recording career he placed 19 singles in the Billboard Top 40 and 34 in the Hot 100. His name alone could conjure up an entire era: The 1970s rock musical “Grease,” in both its Broadway and movie versions, was set in 1959 at the fictional Rydell High School.
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Alan J. Hruska, lawyer, novelist, and one of the founders of Soho Press.
Nehemiah Persoff. THR. He was 102.
206 credits in IMDB. If he wasn’t in everything, he was in lots of it. “Some Like It Hot”. “On the Waterfront”. “Law and Order”. “Barney Miller”. The good “Hawaii 5-0” multiple times. “Battlestar Galactica”. “Supertrain”. “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”. “Quincy, M.E.” “Sword of Justice” (I was just thinking about that show the other day.) “Columbo”. “McCloud”. “McMillan and Wife”. (Trivia question I don’t have an answer for: how many actors appeared on all three of the initial shows in the “NBC Mystery Movie” wheel?) “Mission: Impossible”.
And, yes, “Mannix”. (“A Puzzle for One“, season 6, episode 11.)
Historical note, NOT suitable for use in schools.
Monday, April 4th, 2022This post is strictly in the interest of history. I am not posting this for any prurient reasons: it just seems like an appropriate bit of history, especially since I recently mentioned Leslie Van Houten.
To be clear, these are not post mortem photos: they were taken when Ms. Tate was 21. She was 26 when the Manson family murdered her.
Cabrejas, 46, had been searching for camera equipment to photograph a solar eclipse when she came across the pics.
“They had been sitting in our garage for years until I came across them cleaning his stuff,” the West Los Angeles native told SWNS.
She added that the photos were “totally a casual thing, from before she was even famous.” Tate was just starting to build her career at the time and was going to a plethora of auditions.
I am, of course, in the interest of respecting copyright and intellectual property, not reproducing the photos here. You can click through to the linked NY Post article if you wish to view a selection of them.
Brief note on film.
Thursday, March 31st, 2022I don’t usually make note of individual podcast episodes here. There has to be some compelling reason for me to do so.
In this case: “The comedies of Preston Sturges“, from “Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast”.
I actually have several reasons for this one:
- I’m very interested in Preston Sturges. I have not seen “Sullivan’s Travels” or “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek”, but I very much want to see both. “Miracle” got a really good write-up in Joe Bob Briggs’s Profoundly Erotic, but there doesn’t seem to be a blu-ray, and the DVDs are expensive. Criterion needs to do an edition of that, since they’ve already done “Sullivan’s Travels” (affiliate link). (At some point, Lawrence and I plan a Saturday night double bill of “The Freshman” and “The Sin of Harold Diddlebock”.)
- Joel McCrea, who we have seen recently elsewhere, and who I would like to see more of. He seems like a truly interesting gentleman.
- Veronica Lake is always in order.
- As I’ve said before, Anthony Esolen is a writer I greatly admire. (I found this while searching for an essay he wrote on the films of John Ford. Edited to add: finally found that essay, and added a link.)
Anyway, I commend this to the attention of the movie buffs in my audience.
Obit watch: March 30, 2022.
Wednesday, March 30th, 2022Marvin J. Chomsky, TV director. Credits include “Roots” and “Holocaust”. Also three episodes of a minor 1960s SF TV series, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Mission: Impossible”, “Lancer”, “Bearcats!”, “Evel Knievel”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Little Girl Lost“, season 7, episode 4.)
Paul Herman. Credits other than “The Sopranos” and “Goodfellas” include “We Own The Night”, “Once Upon A Time In America”, and “The Last Temptation of Christ”.
Obit watch: March 25, 2022.
Friday, March 25th, 2022Scoey Mitchell, comedian and actor.
Credits (other than “Barefoot In the Park”) include “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling”, and guest shots on “Lou Grant”, “Police Story”, and “The Six Million Dollar Man”.
Yvan Colonna. This is a couple of days old, and you’ve probably never heard of him, but the case is interesting.
Mr. Colonna was a Corsican nationalist.
In 1998, Claude Érignac, who was basically France’s appointed governor of Corsica, was shot and killed.
Mr. Colonna evaded capture for four years. He was convicted of murder in 2007. That conviction was later overturned, but he was convicted again in 2011 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Three weeks ago, Mr. Colonna was attacked by another inmate:
…a known Islamist extremist who had been convicted on terrorism charges and had a history of violent acts in prison. The inmate, identified by French authorities as Franck Elong Abé, 35, beat, strangled and suffocated Mr. Colonna in the prison gym.
Mr. Elong Abé later told investigators that he had heard Mr. Colonna make “blasphemous” comments. Prosecutors have opened an investigation. But it is still unclear how the attack was able to last nearly 10 minutes without any intervention from prison guards.
Obit watch: March 19, 2022.
Saturday, March 19th, 2022John Korty, director.
He won an Emmy for “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and an Oscar for the documentary “Who Are the DeBolts? And Where Did They Get Nineteen Kids?” Other credits included “Go Ask Alice” and “Oliver’s Story”.
Robert Vincent O’Neil, writer and director. Among his credits: the original “Angel” (“High School Honor Student by Day. Hollywood Hooker by Night.”) and the sequel “Avenging Angel”. Also, the series “Lady Blue” which I do not remember:
Don Young (R-Alaska).
In a state whose small population allows for two senators but only one representative, Mr. Young, who cultivated the image of a rugged frontiersman with outsize clout in Washington, was sometimes called Alaska’s “third senator.” To this day, most Alaskans have had no congressman in their lifetimes but Mr. Young, who was first elected in 1973, during the Nixon administration.
Early in his 24th term in 2019, he became the longest-serving Republican in House history, surpassing the tenure of the former speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois, who as a teenager had followed the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates and went on to serve 23 House terms in three discontinuous segments between 1873 and 1923. At his death Mr. Young was in his 25th term and 49th year in Congress. (John Dingell, a Democratic House member from Michigan for 59 years, was the longest-serving member of Congress in American history.)
John Clayton, former NFL reporter for ESPN and later for Seattle Sports.
“John was a pioneer as an NFL insider but also one of the kindest men you could ever work with,” said Seth Markman, vice president and executive producer at ESPN. “He literally never said no to a show that asked him to come on — from 6 a.m. to midnight, if you asked for the Professor, he was there for you. I’ll also personally remember how he loved and cared for his beloved wife Pat as she has battled multiple sclerosis. We will all miss John greatly.”
Clayton received the profession’s highest honor, now known as the Bill Nunn Memorial Award, in 2007. The award is presented annually by the Pro Football Writers of America in recognition of “long and distinguished reporting in the field of pro football.”
“It’s the highest honor any writer covering this sport can receive,” Clayton said at the time.
(Hattip to Lawrence for the Don Young and John Clayton tips.)
Obit watch: March 18, 2022.
Friday, March 18th, 2022He was “Hideto Ogata” in the 1954 “Godzilla”. (He also appeared in the 1956 American version.)
We are saddened to hear of the passing of Akira Takarada.
May his memory continue to inspire the lives of many Godzilla fans. pic.twitter.com/wzBxq8Usi1— GODZILLA.OFFICIAL (@Godzilla_Toho) March 17, 2022
Dr. Eugene N. Parker. I actually saw this reported a couple of days ago, but didn’t have a good source for it.
Dr. Parker predicted the existence of the solar wind.
When Dr. Parker published his prediction in 1958, almost no one believed him, including the reviewers of his paper and the editor of The Astrophysical Journal that published it.
“The prevailing view among some people was that space was absolutely clean, nothing in it, total vacuum,” Dr. Parker told The New York Times in 2018.
In response to the reviewers’ negative comments, he appealed to the journal’s editor, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who was also an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. Dr. Parker argued that the reviewers had not pointed out any errors in his calculations, which described how the particles flowed from the sun like water spreading outward from a circular fountain.
“He went where the equations led him,” said Michael S. Turner, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Foundation in Los Angeles who was a longtime colleague of Dr. Parker’s at Chicago. “And they led him to some very interesting phenomena that people hadn’t discovered.”
Dr. Parker, he said, was happy when people pointed out a mistake in his calculations but not pleased when people accepted prevalent scientific assumptions without question.
“He had little patience for ‘It’s well known that …’” Dr. Turner said.
“He went where the equations led him,” “He had little patience for ‘It’s well known that …’”. That’s science, right there. (Also, mad props to the late Dr. Chandrasekhar.)
Even though Dr. Chandrasekhar, a future Nobel laureate, disagreed with Dr. Parker’s conclusions, he overruled the reviewers, and the paper was published.
Four years later, Dr. Parker was vindicated when Mariner 2, a NASA spacecraft en route to Venus, observed energetic particles streaming through interplanetary space — exactly what he had predicted.
In 2017, NASA renamed “Solar Probe Plus” after Dr. Parker.
NASA had never before named a spacecraft after a living person. But Dr. Zurbuchen, who had met Dr. Parker years earlier, said he did not have much trouble getting Robert Lightfoot, the acting administrator of NASA at the time, to approve the change in 2017. Dr. Zurbuchen then called Dr. Parker to ask if that would be all right with him. “He said, ‘Absolutely. It will be my honor,’” Dr. Zurbuchen recalled.
Dr. Parker later said he was surprised that NASA had asked for his permission.
A few months afterward, Dr. Parker went to visit the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, where the spacecraft was built and tested. Dr. Fox, then project scientist for the mission, recalled saying, “Parker, meet Parker.”
…
“Parker was always understated,” said Dr. Zurbuchen, who was watching the liftoff near Dr. Parker that morning. “I only saw him cry twice. The first time, when he pulled up to the rocket and his name was on it, and after that launch, when it really got to him — the magnitude of what was happening.”
Months later, Dr. Fox traveled to Chicago to share some of the early data from the Parker probe with Dr. Parker. “His eyes literally lit up,” said Dr. Fox, who showed Dr. Parker photographs not of the sun itself but of dim particles to the side of the sun — the solar wind.
Dr. Fox arranged to send him preprints of papers that mission scientists were writing about the findings. “He read them and he sent notes on them,” she said. “He was just really, really excited about a mission that was really going to do all the science that he always wanted to do.”
Dr. Parker was 94.
Obit watch: March 17, 2022.
Thursday, March 17th, 2022Peter Bowles, British actor.
Other than “To the Manor Born”, he was “Guthrie Featherstone” on “Rumpole of the Bailey”, and did guest shots on “Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)”, “Tales of the Unexpected”, “I, Claudius”, “Space: 1999”, “The Prisoner”, and appeared four times on “The Avengers”, among other credits.
When I published yesterday’s obit watch, Tyler James was the only person confirmed dead in the Andrews County car crash. Since then, the names of the others have been published:
Mauricio Sanchez
Travis Garcia
Jackson Zinn
Karisa Raines
Laci Stone
Tiago Sousa
Henrich Siemans (driver of the pickup truck)
Obit watch: March 14, 2022.
Monday, March 14th, 2022Tova Borgnine, Ernest Borgnine’s fifth wife and cosmetics magnate.
Lawrence sent over a nice obit for Anne Beaumanoir. She spent a long time as
Before that, she was part of the Algerian resistance.
Practicing as a neurophysiologist in the southern French city of Marseille in the 1950s, she became a porteur de valise, a suitcase carrier, as well as a chauffeur for the Algerian resistance members inside France as part of what became known as the Jeanson network, which was also supported by intellectuals including the writer/philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Convicted in Marseille for 10 years in 1959, she was released into house arrest the following year because she was pregnant, escaped and found her way across the Mediterranean — first to Tunisia and later to Algeria. After France conceded independence to Algeria in 1962, she worked for the ministry of health under that country’s first independence president Ahmed Ben Bella and was granted Algerian citizenship. (Dr. Beaumanoir remains revered in Algeria for her supportive role, as a Frenchwoman, in the fight for independence.)
Before that, she was part of the French resistance.
In early 1944, Dr. Beaumanoir helped save two French teenagers of Polish origin whose father, Ruben Lisoprawski, ran a bakery in Paris. Like most of his family, he had been taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland and never seen again. But his children Daniel Lisoprawski, 14, and Simone, 16, survived in part because Dr. Beaumanoir learned that the Gestapo was planning a raid on a Paris apartment where the teens were being hidden by a Frenchwoman.
Dr. Beaumanoir went to the apartment to warn them and take the teens to a resistance safe house. That house was also soon raided by German soldiers, but a resistance leader managed to flee with the children over the rooftops of Paris to another safe place.
Eventually, Dr. Beaumanoir spirited them to her parents’ restaurant and home in Dinan, Brittany, where they remained hidden, moving among friendly locations during German house-to-house searches, until the end of the war in 1945. Afterward, the Beaumanoir family brought them up as if their own children.
In 1996, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, named Dr. Beaumanoir as well as her parents among the Righteous Among the Nations, a designation for non-Jews who rescued Jews, for their role in helping the Lisoprawski family.
Obit watch: March 9, 2022.
Wednesday, March 9th, 2022Conrad Janis, jazz musician and actor.
“Conrad Janis Is Glad to Live Three Lives,” the headline on a 1962 Newsday article read. At the time he was starring in the romantic comedy “Sunday in New York” on Broadway and, after the Friday and Saturday night performances, playing trombone with his group, the Tailgate 5, at Central Plaza in Manhattan. (On Sundays he’d trek to Brooklyn to play at the club Caton Corner.) When not onstage or on the bandstand, he could often be found at his father’s art gallery.
Sixteen years later he found himself on one of the most popular shows on television when he was cast on “Mork & Mindy,” which premiered in September 1978, as the father of Mindy (Pam Dawber), a Colorado woman who befriends an eccentric alien (Robin Williams). On Sundays during this period, he played in the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band at the Ginger Man, a club in Beverly Hills, Calif., whose owners included Carroll O’Connor of “All in the Family.”
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In the movies, he played alongside some famous names: Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple in the notoriously bad “That Hagen Girl” (1947), Charlton Heston and other prominent stars in “Airport 1975” (1974), Lynn Redgrave in “The Happy Hooker” (1975), George Burns in “Oh God! Book II” (1980).
He was on television from the medium’s earliest days, playing numerous roles in the late 1940s and ’50s, many of them on shows like “Suspense,” “Actor’s Studio” and “The Philco Television Playhouse” that were broadcast live. Some of those roles took advantage of his familiarity with musical instruments.
Among other credits, he did a few cop shows: “Baretta”, “Banacek”, “Cannon”. And he was a regular (“Palindrome”) on “Quark”.
Obit watch: March 7, 2022.
Monday, March 7th, 2022I was running flat out yesterday from 7 AM to 8:30 PM, so I got a little behind in obits. My apologies.
Mitchell Ryan. THR. Other credits (besides those in the headline) include guest shots on a lot of cop shows (“O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “Cannon”, “Barnaby Jones”), “High Plains Drifter”, “Magnum Force”, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”, and apparently he starred in a series called “Chase” that I’ve never heard of.
Tim Considine. THR. Other credits include “Soldier Who Gets Slapped” in “Patton”, “The Shaggy Dog”, and a guest shot on “Ironside”.
…he made a career as a sports and automobile photographer, writer and author. His books included “The Language of Sport” (1982) and “American Grand Prix Racing” (1997).
Mr. Considine even substituted a couple of times for William Safire, writing the “On Language” column for The New York Times Magazine. He explained how “the first Olympic Games, in 776 B.C., in which a line scratched in the dirt served as the starting point” for some events, led to the expression “start from scratch.”
“Great But Forgotten” did a nice tribute to “The Adventures of Spin and Marty” a while back. The idea of a children’s show where the main characters actually grow and change kind of interests me.
(Shallow rabbit hole about “The Shaggy Dog”, because it came up over the weekend. Lawrence was wondering, and according to Wikipedia (the source of all slightly accurate information), “The Shaggy D.A.” was actually a sequel. There was also a two-part TV movie in 1987, “The Return of the Shaggy Dog”, set at some point between the two movies and starring Gary Kroeger.)
Johnny Brown. Other credits include “The Lost Saucer”, “The Wiz”, “Get Christie Love!”, and he played a character called “Huggy Bear” in an episode of “The Rookies”. (I can’t tell if “Streets of San Francisco” [Edited: D’oh! “Starsky and Hutch”! I blame the fact that my parents wouldn’t let me watch any of these shows.] intended for this to be the same character, but they did use Antonio Fargas instead of Johnny Brown.)
Gary North, economist. I’d heard of him, but I never actually read any of his work.