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Obit watch: February 9, 2020.

Sunday, February 9th, 2020

Let’s get down to it.

Paul Farnes. He was 101, and the last surviving RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.

…for three months, through the end of October, the R.A.F. battled the Luftwaffe for supremacy in the skies over Britain. Flying a Hurricane fighter for the 501 Squadron, Mr. Farnes, a sergeant pilot, proved supremely adept at attacking German aircraft.
In August alone he shot down three Junkers Ju Stuka bombers, a Dornier 17 light bomber and a Messerschmitt 109E fighter.At the end of September, as Mr. Farnes maneuvered his malfunctioning Hurricane back to the R.A.F.’s Kenley base, he spotted a German bomber flying directly at him at about 1,500 feet.
“I thought, ‘Good God,’ so I whipped out and had to reposition myself and managed to get ’round behind him,” he said in an interview with the website History of War in 2017. “I gave him a couple of bursts, and he crashed at Gatwick just on the point between the airport and the racecourse.”

…

Aerial warfare against the Germans meant breaking away from the squadron, finding something to shoot at, firing away, then breaking away to safety. But by Mr. Farnes’s account it was also enjoyable, because he was able to combine his love of flying with the mission to protect Britain.
“The C.O. would quite often pick the next members of the squadron that had to be at ‘readiness,’ and the two or three who weren’t picked would be pretty fed up,” he told History of War. “If you weren’t picked, you’d think, ‘Why can’t I go?’ I’m sure one or two must have felt, ‘Well, thank God I’m not going!’ But a lot of us were quite happy to go.”

Robert Conrad. THR. Variety.

I was a little young for “Wild Wild West” in first run; if it was syndicated in Houston when I was a kid, I don’t remember it. It could have been on the station we were never able to pick up (the same one OG “Star Trek” was on). And “Hawaiian Eye” was before my time. But if you’re my age or a little on either side of it, this was like candy for us:

He also appeared multiple times on “Mission: Impossible” and other series, either as the lead of some less than successful ones (“High Mountain Rangers”) or doing guest shots. He did do a “Mannix”. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4.) And I didn’t know this, but he played G. Gordon Liddy in the TV movie version of “Will”.

Orson Bean. Variety. THR. Interesting guy: I remember him from “Being John Malkovich” and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on some of those old game shows on Buzzr. In the 1960s, he founded a progressive school in New York City.

Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)
When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.

In the 1980s, he settled down again and resumed acting. He was 91 years old when he died: he was hit by a car while walking, fell, and was run over by a second car (according to Variety).

After the jump, more obits.

(more…)

Posted in 1970s, Books, History, Law, Mannix, Movies, Nixon, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: January 9, 2020.

Thursday, January 9th, 2020

The great Buck Henry.

He was a co-writer of “The Graduate”, co-created “Get Smart” with Mel Brooks, did guest stints on “Saturday Night Live” in the early days (and was the first five-timer), created “Quark”, wrote the screnplays for “Catch-22” and “The Day of the Dolphin”, co-wrote the legendary disaster “Town and Country“…man, what a career.

(Edited to add: NYT obit wasn’t up previously. It is now.)

Mike Resnick, noted SF writer. Lawrence has an excellent obit up at his site, and pretty much says everything I was going to say. I won’t say we were personal friends (I don’t think he would have passed Lawrence’s “pick me out of a police lineup” test) but he was a good and erudite guy who got me into Theodore Roosevelt and “Duck, You Sucker!” (among other things). His passing leaves the world a smaller, colder place.

Edited to add: found this, by way of Dean Bradley’s Twitter, and thought it was a nice tribute to Mr. Resnick.

Edited to add 2: Michael Swanwick on Mr. Resnick.

I had not heard of Adela Holzer before her obit showed up in the paper of record, but her story is too good to ignore. She was married to a “shipping magnate” and was an early investor in the musical “Hair”. (Depending on which account you believe, she put in $57,000 and made $2 million, or she put in $7,500 and made $115,000.) She went on to produce the notorious flop “Dude“.

In 1975, she was riding high. Then she wasn’t. By the next spring, she had produced three new Broadway flops: The Scott Joplin opera “Treemonisha” held on for almost two months, but both “Truckload” and “Me Jack, You Jill” closed in previews. She followed those with “Something Old, Something New,” starring Hans Conried and the Yiddish theater star Molly Picon; it closed on opening night, Oct. 1, 1977.

Then it got worse. You may ask: how much worse can it get than having your show close on opening night? This much worse:

At that point, theater was the least of Ms. Holzer’s problems. She had declared bankruptcy seven weeks earlier. She had been arrested on fraud charges over the summer and was free on $50,000 bail, awaiting the first of the three criminal trials that would shape the rest of her life.
The indictment, which finally came in 1979, was for a classic Ponzi scheme: paying her earliest victims “profits,” which were really just funds from her next group of investors, and so on. One of those early investors was Jeffrey Picower, who was later implicated in the Bernie Madoff scandal, a much larger Ponzi scheme.

She served two years in prison. Ms. Holzer tried to make a comeback in the 1980s with a musical about Joseph McCarthy that never opened.

She was soon arrested again, on grand larceny charges. It was revealed that she had told numerous associates that their investments — in oil and mineral deals — had been guaranteed by the banker David Rockefeller, to whom she claimed to be secretly married. That lie was bolstered by at least one fake marriage license and by a framed silver photo of him at her bedside. It was later reported that the photo had been clipped from a magazine.

She served four years (of an eight year sentence) for that.

Things had changed in 2001, when she was arrested yet again, this time charged with 39 counts of fraud. At the time, she was using a different surname, Rosian — she was living with a man named Vladimir Rosian on the Upper West Side — and the stakes were much lower. She had been charging immigrants $2,000 to $2,700 each, falsely telling them that she had influence on immigration legislation and could help them gain permanent resident status.
This time she was sentenced to nine to 18 years. When she was released in June 2010, she was in her 80s.

Noted:

Ms. Holzer’s resistance to truth telling apparently knew no boundaries. “If she told me the sun was shining, I’d go out to look — and I’d take an umbrella,” Michael Alpert, who had been her theatrical public relations representative, told Vanity Fair in 1991.

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

Obit watch: December 27, 2019.

Friday, December 27th, 2019

Jerry Herman, composer and lyricist.

In a half-century of work, he scored a dozen Broadway musicals and five Off Broadway revues, composed many of the nation’s most popular songs and was showered with awards, including Tonys for “Hello, Dolly!” and “La Cage aux Folles.”
He also made stage history as the first composer-lyricist to have three musicals run more than 1,500 consecutive performances on Broadway — “Hello, Dolly!” with 2,844, “Mame” with 1,508 and “La Cage” with 1,761 — and remains one of only two to achieve that feat. (Stephen Schwartz, with “Pippin,” “The Magic Show” and “Wicked,” is the second.) And “La Cage” (1983) was the only Broadway musical to win the Tony for best revival twice, for 2004 and 2010 productions.

Posted in Obits, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 14, 2019.

Saturday, December 14th, 2019

As promised, the Danny Aiello roundup: NYT. THR. Variety. Tributes.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 9, 2019.

Monday, December 9th, 2019

René Auberjonois, versatile actor. He’s getting a lot of attention for his roles in Altman’s “MASH”, “Benson”, and some minor SF TV show, but he did a lot of movies and TV: “Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, “Mrs. Columbo” (but oddly not “Columbo”)…the list goes on.

Caroll Spinney is also getting a lot of coverage, but noted here for the record.

Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve.

Ron Leibman, another one of those highly versatile actors in movies, television, and theater.

Finally, Winston Lawson. he was the Secret Service agent who did the advance work for Kennedy’s Texas trip, rode in the motorcade, and helped load the president onto the stretcher at Parkland.

Posted in 1970s, History, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 28, 2019.

Thursday, November 28th, 2019

Godfrey Gao, actor. He was in “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones” and did some other work in Chinese films. (He was also the voice of Ken in the Mandarin version of “Toy Story 3”.)

Mr. Gao was 35 years old. He died of an apparent heart attack while filming a Chinese reality TV series, “Chase Me”, in which “participants scale tall buildings, skid down obstacle courses and hang from tightropes”.

The death of Mr. Gao, who was born in Taiwan and raised in Canada, set off a wave of anger on the Chinese internet, with millions of people criticizing the entertainment industry as focused on ratings at the expense of safety.
By Wednesday evening, the death of Mr. Gao was one of the most widely discussed topics on Weibo, a popular microblogging site, and hashtags about it had garnered hundreds of millions of views.

William Ruckelshaus, “Saturday Night Massacre” figure.

And on a night of high drama, as the nation held its breath and constitutional government appeared to hang in the balance, Nixon ordered his top three Justice Department officials, one after another, to fire the Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, rather than comply with his subpoena for nine incriminating Oval Office tape recordings.
Mr. Cox’s complete independence had been guaranteed by Nixon and the attorney general during the prosecutor’s Senate confirmation hearings the previous May. He could be removed only for “cause” — some gross malfeasance in office. But none was even alleged. Nixon’s order to summarily dismiss Mr. Cox thus raised a most profound question: Was the president above the law?
Mr. Richardson and Mr. Ruckelshaus refused to fire Mr. Cox and resigned even as orders for their own dismissals were being issued by the White House. But Robert H. Bork, the United States solicitor general and the acting attorney general after the dismissal of his two superiors, carried out the presidential order, not only firing Mr. Cox but also abolishing the office of the special Watergate prosecutor.

Clive James, British critic.

He once dismissed a tedious public affairs program as “the mental equivalent of navel fluff.” He described William Shatner’s acting technique in “Star Trek” as “picked up from someone who once worked with somebody who knew Lee Strasberg’s sister.”

Jonathan Miller, theater and opera director, “Beyond The Fringe” member, television host, and medical doctor.

I’m generally unfamiliar with his theater and opera work. But I remember when “The Body in Question” aired on US television: I was pretty impressed with the episodes I managed to catch, and would love to watch the whole series again. (It looks like it may be on YouTube, though not in great quality. I can’t find a DVD of it, or of “States of Mind”, which I would also love to see.)

Posted in Nixon, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 26, 2019.

Tuesday, November 26th, 2019

John Simon, acerbic critic for a wide range of publications (including New York magazine and National Review). Short tribute from NR: I’m hoping for a longer one later.

Many readers delighted in what they considered Mr. Simon’s lofty and uncompromising tastes, and especially in his wicked judgments, which fell like hard rain on icons of culture: popular authors, Hollywood stars, rock and rap musicians, abstract artists and their defenders in critics’ circles, for whom he expressed contempt.
But Mr. Simon was himself scorned by many writers, performers and artists, who called his judgments biased, unfair or downright cruel, and by readers and rival critics with whom he occasionally feuded in print. They characterized some of his pronouncements as racist, misogynist, homophobic or grossly insensitive.
He denied being any of those things, and argued that no person or group was above criticism, especially those who, in his view, lacked talent and covered themselves in mantles of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity and used them to claim preferential treatment in the marketplaces of culture.

…

Mr. Simon was barred from some film screenings. An advertisement signed by 300 people in Variety in 1980 called his reviews racist and vicious. At the New York Film Festival in 1973, the actress Sylvia Miles dumped a plate of food on his head after he described her in print as a “party girl and gate crasher.”
“This incident was so welcomed by the Simon-hating press that the anecdote has been much retold,” Mr. Simon recalled. “She herself has retold it a thousand times. And this steak tartare has since metamorphosed into every known dish from lasagna to chop suey. It’s been so many things that you could feed the starving orphans of India or China with it.”

As a reminder to everyone, that’s Sylvia “would attend the opening of an envelope” Miles.

Back when Lawrence and I lived together, I would read Simon’s film criticism in copies of NR I scavenged from him.

Mr. Simon liked the plays of August Wilson, John Patrick Shanley and Beth Henley. “From time to time a play comes along that restores one’s faith in our theater,” he wrote of Ms. Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart,” which won a 1981 Pulitzer Prize. He said Mr. Shanley’s “Doubt” (2004), about Catholic school scandals, “would be sinful to miss.”
He invited readers to see the world through the literary works of Heinrich Böll, Jane Bowles, Alfred Chester, Stig Dagerman, Bruce Jay Friedman, J.M.G. Le Clézio, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O’Connor, Ferenc Santa and B. Traven, and through the films of Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini or Kurosawa — but only “at their best.”

Lawrence will correct me if I’m wrong, but I recall that Simon also highly praised “The Lives of Others“, and I know that Lawrence agrees with this praise. Watching this might be a nice tribute to the late Mr. Simon. (Edited: see comments.)

(I personally have not seen it yet. I’ve only heard LP and others talk about it, and I’ve been kind of waiting until a good edition comes along on home video, perhaps from Criterion.)

Posted in Books, Movies, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 18, 2019.

Wednesday, September 18th, 2019

Betty Corwin. I hadn’t heard of her until I read the NYT obit, but it seems like she was one of nature’s noblewomen.

Ms. Corwin founded the New York Public Library Theater on Film and Tape Archive.

The still-growing archive — which at last count held 8,127 recordings, including artist interviews and theater-related films and television programs — has long been a rich resource for artists, students and researchers.
When Audra McDonald was preparing to perform in “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” on Broadway this summer, she went to the library to watch the archive’s 1988 recording of the original Manhattan Theater Club production, starring Kathy Bates. The week that Mike Nichols died in 2014, he had an appointment to look at “Master Class,” a version of which he was planning to direct for HBO.

…

The collection includes every play in August Wilson’s 20th-century cycle, starting with “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” in 1985; the 1978 New York Shakespeare Festival production of “The Taming of the Shrew,” starring Meryl Streep and Raul Julia; the original Broadway production of “Angels in America,” recorded in 1994; and the 1988 Lincoln Center Theater production of “Waiting for Godot,” starring Robin Williams and Steve Martin.

Sander Vanocur, noted TV journalist.

Mr. Vanocur, along with John Chancellor, Frank McGee and Edwin Newman, was one of NBC’s “four horsemen” — correspondents who prowled the floor of national conventions in the 1960s in search of news developments and tantalizing tidbits to report. (He was also the last surviving of those four.)

Cokie Roberts. NYT. NPR.

Posted in Media, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 17, 2019.

Tuesday, September 17th, 2019

Phyllis Newman, actress.

Ms. Newman won a Tony in 1962 as best featured actress in a musical for “Subways Are for Sleeping,” whose book and lyrics were written by her husband, Adolph Green, and his regular collaborator, Betty Comden. In the show, Ms. Newman played a long-term resident of the Brunswick Arms who, to stave off eviction, has shut herself in her room, a role that required Ms. Newman to spend the play in an unusual costume.
“Her line is that she is sick,” Howard Taubman wrote of the character in his review in The New York Times, “and to prove it she wears a towel wrapped around her excellently appointed torso. The only addition to her costume all evening is a pair of black gloves.”

Both my mother and the paper of record tell me that she was also a fixture on a lot of 70s game shows and talk shows, but I don’t remember that.

Cokie Roberts obit will probably be tomorrow, to give the dust time to settle.

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

Obit watch: August 1, 2019.

Thursday, August 1st, 2019

The paper of record has updated their Hal Prince, “Giant of Broadway and Reaper of Tonys” obit in place.

They’ve also added three corrections. So far.

I do like this a lot:

As both a producer and a director, Mr. Prince was a nurturer of unproved talent. Tom Bosley, for instance, later known as Howard Cunningham on the nostalgic television sitcom “Happy Days,” won a Tony in his first starring role in 1959 as the titular mayor of New York, La Guardia, in “Fiorello!” Liza Minnelli made her first Broadway appearance — and won a Tony — as the title character in “Flora, the Red Menace,” a 1965 politically-inflected musical set in 1935 about a spunky fashion designer who falls for a Communist. Produced by Mr. Prince and directed by George Abbott, “Flora” also featured the first Broadway score by the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, who later wrote “Chicago” and two shows produced and directed by Mr. Prince: “Zorba” and “Cabaret.”
A featured actor in “Cabaret,” Joel Grey, was a largely unknown nightclub performer with few theater credits when Mr. Prince hired him in 1966 for what turned out to be a career-defining role: the arch, leering M.C. of the bawdy Kit Kat Club in Weimar-era Berlin.

I think that’s one of the nicest things you can say about anybody in an obit: they were good at spotting and developing unknown talents.

But Mr. Rich was writing on the heels of one of Mr. Prince’s most calamitous failures, “A Doll’s Life,” a musical sequel to “A Doll’s House,” Henrik Ibsen’s domestic drama of a woman’s revolt against the stultifying expectations of womanhood. With book and lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden and a score by Larry Grossman, huge sets and grandiose sound amplification, it closed after five performances, a victim of its outsize self-importance.

Five performances. I thought the original production of “Carrie” ran for eight performances, but no: it only ran for five as well.

Also among the dead: Nick Buoniconti, linebacker for the Miami Dolphins in the 1970s (yes, he was one of the players on the 1972 team).

For many years Buoniconti was an intelligent, articulate and tough player for the Boston Patriots (now the New England Patriots) and the Dolphins, winning All-Pro honors five times in a 14-year pro football career. A former All-American at the University of Notre Dame, he anchored the Dolphins’ vaunted “No-Name Defense” under Coach Don Shula.

Mr. Buoniconti’s son, Marc, was paralyzed in a football accident in 1985. Mr. Buoniconti founded the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis:

For more than 30 years afterward, Buoniconti helped raise nearly $500 million for spinal cord and brain research carried out by the organization. He also played a critical role in directing the research and was a charismatic motivator of scientists and researchers.
Dr. Barth Green, a neurosurgeon and longtime chairman of the Miami Project, said in a phone interview: “People are walking now because of cellular transplants and the latest neuroengineering and bioengineering that has been applied to humans with disability. Nick was a stimulating force in that area, from bench to bedside. And this is someone who probably never took a science course.”

Posted in Media, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 31, 2019.

Wednesday, July 31st, 2019

Breaking, but I kind of want to get something up now: Harold Prince, one of the great men of Broadway.

Variety. (Hattip: Lawrence.) Preliminary obit from the NYT, with promises of a fuller obit to come.

…he was known, throughout his career, for his collaborations with a murderer’s row of creative talents, among them the choreographers Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins, Michael Bennett and Susan Stroman, the designers Eugene Lee, Patricia Zipprodt and Florence Klotz, and the composers Leonard Bernstein, John Kander, Stephen Sondheim, who was his most frequent confederate, and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Possibly more later.

Posted in Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 10, 2019.

Wednesday, July 10th, 2019

RIP Rip Torn. THR.

…As he once acknowledged, “I get angry easily.”
In what is probably the most famous example, in 1968 Mr. Torn was filming “Maidstone,” an underground film written and directed by Mailer. Mailer was also the star, playing a writer running for president. Mr. Torn played his half brother. In a decidedly unscripted moment, Mr. Torn struck Mailer with a hammer; Mailer responded by attacking Mr. Torn and biting his ear. The fight became the centerpiece of the film.

…

…Dennis Hopper told a story on “The Tonight Show” in 1994 about how Mr. Torn had pulled a knife on him during an argument in the 1960s. (It was apparently as a result of this argument that Jack Nicholson and not Mr. Torn was cast as the Southern lawyer in Mr. Hopper’s hit film “Easy Rider.”) The way Mr. Torn remembered it, Mr. Hopper had pulled a knife on him, not the other way around, so he sued for defamation. He won.

I’m probably being unfair by highlighting the more colorful aspects of his life. He was apparently a rather talented movie and theater actor, and a good Texas boy (born in Temple, went to both Texas A&M and UT). For some reason, I keep thinking he was on a lot of game shows when I was a kid: am I confusing him with someone else? (I know I’m not confusing Rip Torn and Charles Nelson Reilly.)

Eva Kor.

Ms. Kor took young people on annual summer tours of Auschwitz. While conducting a tour, she died on Thursday at 85 at a hotel in Krakow, Poland, near the site of the former death camp. It was there that she and her twin, Miriam, had been among some 1,500 sets of twins who were victims of experiments, including the injections of germs, overseen by the German doctor Josef Mengele.

…

“Miriam and I were part of a group of children who were alive for one reason only — to be used as human guinea pigs,” she wrote. “Three times a week we’d be placed naked in a room, for six to eight hours, to be measured and studied.
“They took blood from one arm and gave us injections in the other. After one such injection I became very ill and was taken to the hospital. If I had died, Mengele would have given Miriam a lethal injection in order to do a double autopsy. When I didn’t die, he carried on experimenting with us and as a result Miriam’s kidneys stopped growing. They remained the size of a child’s all her life.”

…

Ms. Kor, who worked in real estate for many years, traveled to Germany in 1993 to meet with a former doctor at Auschwitz, Hans Münch, who had been acquitted of war crimes. He accepted her invitation to go to Auschwitz with her and sign a document acknowledging the existence of the camp’s gas chambers. On the 50th anniversary of its liberation, they stood together before the charred ruins of its crematories.
Ms. Kor composed a letter to Dr. Münch expressing her belief in forgiving tormentors, as a thank you for his gesture.
“Dr. Münch signed his document about the operation of the gas chambers while I read my document of forgiveness and signed it,” she recalled. “As I did that, I felt a burden of pain was lifted from me.”
“Some survivors do not want to let go of the pain,” she wrote in her Forgiveness Project remembrance. “They call me a traitor and accuse me of talking in their name. I have never done this. I do it for myself. I do it not because they deserve it, but because I deserve it.”

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre, TV | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: July 6, 2019.

Saturday, July 6th, 2019

Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum, theoretical physicist.

When Feigenbaum began his career in the early 1970s, the term “chaos theory” did not exist. Generations of scientists dating back to Isaac Newton had worked on problems related to the predictability of complex systems, such as the orbits of the planets in the solar system. By the middle of the 20th century, physicists and mathematicians—inspired by the pioneering work of the French physicist and mathematician Henri Poincaré—had succeeded in characterizing chaotic states, often enabled by computers, by framing such questions as geometric problems. But the boundary between regular and chaotic behavior remained fuzzy, particularly as it applied to real physical systems.
Feigenbaum stepped into this foggy arena, developing methods capable of computationally modelling the period-doubling transition to chaos, which proceeds in a series of geometrically focused steps that remain similar when scaled across orders of magnitude, an example of so-called fractal geometry. He first studied a simple iterated algebraic equation known as the logistic map, and was later able to demonstrate that these steps are “universal:” all physical systems that become chaotic via this period-doubling route to chaos exhibit the same behavior. Feigenbaum also found that this behavior is determined by two universal constants, now known as the Feigenbaum constants.

Gene Pingatore, Illinois high school basketball coach. He holds the state record for most wins, but is perhaps more famous as the coach in “Hoop Dreams”.

Mickey Kapp. No, I hadn’t heard of him before, either, but the story is interesting: he was the provider of mixtapes to the astronauts through the Gemini and Apollo programs.

And it all started with José Jiménez.

At Mr. Kapp’s urging, Mr. Dana booked an appearance at the Kings Inn in Cocoa Beach, Fla., near where the astronauts trained. He usually did the astronaut bit with a straight man acting as interviewer, but for Cocoa Beach he was working alone.
“A few minutes into the routine, a guy in the front row began yelling out the straight man’s lines,” Mr. Thompson wrote. It was Mr. Shepard, who joined Mr. Dana onstage but was laughing so hard that another Mercury astronaut, Wally Schirra, who was there, took over, followed by another, Deke Slayton.

Paul Benjamin, actor. He knocked around quite a bit from the 1970s through to 2016: never did a “Mannix”, but he was in various other 70s cop shows, “Escape From Alcatraz” and was one of the guys on the corner in “Do the Right Thing”.

Sid Ramin.

Mr. Ramin (pronounced RAY-min) was one of two orchestrators — three, if you count the contributions of the composer, Leonard Bernstein, a lifelong friend — on the original Broadway production of “West Side Story,” which opened in 1957. According to “The Sound of Broadway Music” (2009), by Steven Suskin, Mr. Ramin worked on the haunting ballad “Somewhere,” the evocative “Something’s Coming,” the sweetly comic “I Feel Pretty,” the bravado-of-youth anthem “Here Come the Jets” and the irreverent “Gee, Officer Krupke.”

…

Shows whose orchestrations he worked on, in addition to “West Side Story,” included “Gypsy” (1959), “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” (1962), “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1962), Bette Midler’s “Clams on the Half Shell Revue” (1975), “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” (1989) and “Crazy for You” (1992).

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

Obit watch: July 3, 2019.

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019

Lee Iacocca.

Max Wright. He has an interesting back story: Mr. Wright knocked around a lot in television, movies, and theater.

His other television credits include appearances on “Murphy Brown,” “Quantum Leap,” “Misfits of Science,” “Cheers,” “Buffalo Bill,” “Taxi” and “The Drew Carey Show.”
He also appeared in early episodes of “Friends” as the manager of Central Perk, the coffee shop where the show’s main characters hung out, and played Norm Macdonald’s boss on the ABC sitcom “Norm.” His film credits include “All That Jazz,” “Snow Falling on Cedars,” “Reds,” “The Sting II,” “Soul Man” and “The Shadow.”

…

On Broadway he was the Second Murderer in “Richard III,” starring Al Pacino, in 1979; a neurotic landlord in Jean Kerr’s “Lunch Hour” in 1980; and an accident-prone clerk in an Andrei Serban production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” in 1977…
He made his Broadway debut in 1968 in the original production of “The Great White Hope,” Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play based on the life of the heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, which starred James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander. He earned a Tony nomination for best performance by a featured actor in a play for his role as Pavel Lebedev in the Chekhov play “Ivanov” in 1998, a performance that also earned him a nomination for a Drama Desk Award.
He performed Shakespeare regularly; one of his most noted roles was Sir Andrew Aguecheek in the Lincoln Center Theater production of “Twelfth Night” in 1998.

Sadly and tragically, he was best known as the father on “ALF”, one of the worst television series ever to pass across the small screen.

By the time the show’s four-year run ended in 1990, Mr. Wright told People magazine in 2000, “I was hugely eager to have it over with.” In fact, on the last day of filming, his colleagues told People, he grabbed his things and got into his car without even saying goodbye.

Lawrence sent over this THR obit for Milton Quon. Speaking of back story, wow: Mr. Quon was one of the Golden Age Disney animators (he worked on “Fantasia” and “Dumbo”).

The Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles presented a retrospective exhibit of his work in 2005; he was one of five artists featured in ” ‘Round the Clock: Chinese American Artists Working in Los Angeles” at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, California, in 2012; and he received the Golden Spike Award from the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California in 2013.
And in 2017, he was featured in a father and son art exhibition in Red Bank, New Jersey, with his son Mike and in a solo exhibition at Santa Monica College’s Emeritus Gallery.

He also had a career as an actor and extra: he may have been best known as “the old Asian guy on the bus” in “Speed”. Mr. Quon was 105.

Posted in Cars, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 18, 2019.

Saturday, May 18th, 2019

Herman Wouk, noted author. (The Caine Mutiny, adapted into the Humphrey Bogart movie and a Broadway play, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial”. The Winds of War, basis for the ABC mini-series. War and Remembrance, basis for another ABC mini-series.)

And the list goes on. He was quite prolific, and died just short of 104.

“In the long run justice is done,” he told Writer’s Digest in 1966. “In the short run geniuses, minor writers and mountebanks alike take their chance. Imaginative writing is a wonderful way of life, and no man who can live by it should ask for more.”

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

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