Marge Redmond. She was perhaps most famous as “Sister Jacqueline” on “The Flying Nun”, but she did a fair amount of other TV: “Barnaby Jones”, “The Rockford Files”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Matlock”, and more. She was also in “The Fortune Cookie”, “Manhattan Murder Mystery”, and “Family Plot”.
She was married to Jack Weston, and they were both good Cleveland people. Apparently, she died in February, but her death was only recently reported.
Richard Herd, working actor. He appeared on a minor SF TV show and was a regular on a minor sitcom, but he had a lot of other credits. (Including, interestingly enough, “Capt. Dennis Sheridan” on “T.J. Hooker”. One of the less reputable broadcast networks was running a marathon of that last weekend. Man, it is hard to watch these days.)
Anthony James, another working actor. He was in “Unforgiven” and “In the Heat of the Night” (the movie), also appeared on a minor SF TV show, and had a lot of other credits (“Quincy, M.E.”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Gunsmoke”, “Starsky and Hutch”, “Police Story”, and so on).
By way of Lawrence, Cindy Lou Butler Stevens.
“Cindy Lou who?”
No, Cindy Lou Butler Stevens. She was one of the female leads in the awful “Boggy Creek II: and the Legend Continues…“, and also appeared in “The Town that Dreaded Sundown” and “Grayeagle”.
All three of those were directed by Charles B. Pierce (who also directed “The Legend of Boggy Creek”, the first film in the trilogy). Per Lawrence, Ms. Stevens was married to Mr. Pierce at the time.
Everybody and his brother sent me this, so: Ken “Eddie Haskell” Osmond.
I’ve never been a fan of “Leave It to Beaver”, but much respect to the late Mr. Osmond for honorable service with the LAPD:
“I’m not complaining, because Eddie’s been too good to me, but I found work hard to come by,” he said. “In 1968, I bought my first house, in ’69 I got married, and we were going to start a family and I needed a job, so I went out and signed up for the L.A.P.D.”
As an officer on motorcycle patrol, he grew a mustache to disguise himself. In 1980, he was shot three times in a chase with a suspected car thief but escaped serious injury: One bullet was stopped by his belt buckle, the others by his bulletproof vest. He was put on disability and retired from the force in 1988.
Michel Piccoli, prominent French actor.
Jerry Stiller, of the comedy team Stiller and Meara, movies, theater, and a couple of obscure TV shows.
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Mr. Stiller remained active throughout his 80s. He was typically manic in a series of commercials for Capital One Bank, seen on television and heard on radio in 2012.
That same year, he played a group-therapy patient in the independent film “Excuse Me for Living.” In 2014, he provided the voice for the title character in an unorthodox animated television special, “How Murray Saved Christmas.”
“How Murray Saved Christmas” from “Great But Forgotten“.
There’s a great story at the end of the NYT obit that I won’t spoil here.
I didn’t want to put this in the main jail feed, but I did want to make note of it: YouTube is telling me that “The Wrecking Crew” documentary is available for free (with ads).
I know that great and good FOTB and highly valued contributor pigpen51 was a fan of this movie, so I figure it’s worth your time to watch.
Today is Saturday, so I feel like I can run a bit long. And there’s been one thing missing from this series to date: trains. I’m sure at least some of my readers are train fans, right?
“On the Track”, a 1940s film made by Carl Dudley for the Association of American Railroads. Mr. Dudley was apparently a fairly well known railroad film maker.
Bonus video #1: from 1952, “Northwest Empire”, a Union Pacific promo film about travel around Oregon and Washington.
Bonus video #2: “At This Moment”, from 1954. Propaganda film about the importance of American railroads.
I have to admit: “Kelly” is kind of cute in that 1950s way. I can see why someone would send her a dozen roses.
There is a delightful book that came out in 2014, and which was adapted into a Netflix series. Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War is about John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra, and their WWII experiences making films for the military. I enthusiastically recommend this book, which is available for a very reasonable price on Amazon in a Kindle edition and used.
I’ve wanted to watch pretty much all of the wartime films Mark Harris talks about in that book, and I’m happy to report that some of them are available on YouTube in very decent quality.
“Thunderbolt” was made in 1944, but wasn’t released until 1947. Harris goes into the reasons for this in detail, but it basically amounted to: the war ended before the film was edited. William Wyler was, shall we say, distracted during the post-production: he’d suffered a total loss of hearing during a B-25 flight (in an attempt to “film more ‘atmosphere shots.'” for the movie.) He did eventually recover part of his hearing, and continued working as a director until 1970 with the help of hearing aids.
I would be negligent if I didn’t mention that, before “Thunderbolt”, Wyler directed what may have been the most famous WWII propaganda film: “The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress“. Especially since tonight is “12 O’Clock High” night. (Hi, RoadRich! Miss seeing you!)
Tomorrow: Science Sunday!
Irrfan Khan, of “Life of Pi”, “Slumdog Millionaire”, and various other Hollywood and Bollywood films.
Rishi Kapoor, also a Bollywood actor, but without as much Hollywood crossover.
To be fair, these are not random YouTube recommendations. This is something I ran across a few months ago, and that became part of a small project I’m working on. I want to bookmark these here for my own reference, but I also think some of my readers (especially those with children) may enjoy these. Admittedly, they are about an hour each, but that’s why this is Science Sunday. And how long are your children’s normal school classes?
Between 1956 and 1964, the Bell System (you remember the Bell System, don’t you?) produced nine specials about various aspects of science. These were broadcast on television in prime time, and the first couple got pretty good audience ratings.
Frank Capra (yes, that Frank Capra) produced and wrote the first four, and directed the first three.
Here are the first two: “Our Mr. Sun“.
And “Hemo the Magnificent“.
You can also download “Our Mr. Sun” from the Internet Archive.
Nobuhiko 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.
NYT 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.
I 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.”
Damn.
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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It 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.)