Obituaries

The last of either Odd Couple.



What a damn fine piece of music, minus the lyrics. So much better than the TV version. Like comparing the theme for STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE to the horse power-less TNG version.

Charles Durning dead as well.

Had only just gotten the new BR of TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING and rewatched it ... he always considered it his best (if mostly unknown and unheralded) work, and I heartily agree.

There's a dynamic in TWILIGHT that is mirrored to some degree in FALLING DOWN ... the movie seems to be about one character, but ultimately revolves around the other, with audience sympathies altering as the film progresses.

Yeah, Durning was one of my favorite character actors. But hey, both he and Klugman had a good run.

first film I saw Durning in, and knew him for a while for was Final Countdown. Sad loss.

Gerry Anderson, Thunderbirds creator, dies

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Gerry Anderson, the creator of hit TV shows including Thunderbirds, Stingray and Joe 90, has died at the age of 83.

He also created Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and his puppet superheroes fired the imaginations of millions of young viewers in the 1960s and '70s.

Thunderbirds, a science-fiction fantasy about a daring space rescue squad, ran from 1965 and was his most famous show.

Anderson had suffered from Alzheimer's since 2010 and the disease had worsened in recent months, his son Jamie said.

Jamie Anderson announced the news on his website, saying his father died peacefully in his sleep at noon on Wednesday.

"Gerry was diagnosed with mixed dementia two years ago and his condition worsened quite dramatically over the past six months," he wrote.

Gerry Anderson talked about the onset of the disease in June 2012.

Speaking on BBC Berkshire he said: "I don't think I realised at all. It was my wife Mary who began to notice that I would do something quite daft like putting the kettle in the sink and waiting for it to boil."

His other creations included UFO, Space: 1999, Supercar and Fireball XL5.

Actor Brian Blessed, who worked with Anderson on shows including The Day After Tomorrow and Space 1999, told BBC News: "I think a light has gone out in the universe.

"He had a great sense of humour. He wasn't childish but child-like and he had a tremendous love of the universe and astronomy and scientists.

"He got their latest theories, which he would expand on. He was always galvanised and full of energy."

'Great creation'

Celebrities paying tribute on Twitter included comedian Eddie Izzard, who wrote: "What great creation Thunderbirds was, as it fuelled the imagination of a generation."

TV presenter Jonathan Ross wrote: "For men of my age, his work made childhood an incredible place to be."

Anderson, who lived in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, began his career studying fibrous plastering, but had to give it up when it gave him dermatitis.

After a spell in photographic portrait work, a job in Gainsborough films and time spent in air traffic control, he set up AP Films with some friends.

Commissions were few, however, so he responded eagerly to the opportunity to make a puppet series called The Adventures of Twizzle in 1956. It was nine years before Thunderbirds came into being on ITV.

The action was filmed on Slough Trading Estate in Berkshire.

The story revolved around International Rescue, a futuristic emergency service manned by the Tracy family, often assisted by Lady Penelope - voiced by Mrs Anderson - and her butler, Parker.

It included the catchphrases "Thunderbirds are go!" and "FAB".

The show marked the career apex for Gerry and his wife Sylvia, who had honed their "supermarionation" technique on Fireball XL5 and Stingray.

Nick Williams, chairman of Fanderson, the Gerry Anderson appreciation society, described him as "a quiet, unassuming but determined man".

"His desire to make the best films he could drove him and his talented teams to innovate, take risks, and do everything necessary to produce quite inspirational works," he said.

"Gerry's legacy is that he inspired so many people and continues to bring so much joy to so many millions of people around the world."

Genuinely saddened to hear of Gerry Anderson's passing away ... loved the likes of Joe 90, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and (of course) Thunderbirds when I was a youngster.

Blunt Instrument wrote:

Genuinely saddened to hear of Gerry Anderson's passing away ... loved the likes of Joe 90, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and (of course) Thunderbirds when I was a youngster.

Likewise. Shaped my childhood in some ways quite considerably, fired the imagination in all sorts. Still got my die cast Thunderbirds from the 'craze' of the early 90s. All the series had good model work, stories and even music (Fireball XL5 title song, Zero-G instrumental, the incidentals in Thunderbirds etc).
Even Space 1999 had its moments.

And even Terrahawks, even though by the time it ended in '86 I was mid-teens and likely 'too old' for it. Hehehe.

"Thunderbirds are go!!! " Sends chills. One of the great recurring moments in TV.



One of the best "Bond shows" on TV.

The mid-Noughties live-action movie was a bloody disgrace, though.

Blunt Instrument wrote:

The mid-Noughties live-action movie was a bloody disgrace, though.

No kidding. God knows what one of Stingray or Scarlet would've been like.

As for chills, always that moment when Thunderbird 2 rolls out of the hangar to that music and then the music stopping as her engines blast away. As a kid the episode that got me initially was Terror in New York City when Thunderbird 2 crash lands.
Or the music as Scott and Virgil go about getting the Sidewinder out in Pit of Peril ("They did it! They did it!"). Dad said when he was a kid and the show had first come out he had a LP that made some use of a puppet's line in End of the Road: "He cut off! He cut off!"




2.57 to about 3.09 on

Harry Carey Jr. The last of Ford's stock company?

R.I.P. 2012

01 January 2012. Bob Anderson. 89. Stunt guy from The Swordfight from Die Another Day.
17 January 2012. Piet Römer. 83 Dutch actor.
11 February 2012. Whitney Houston. 48.
17 May 2012. Donna Summer. 63.
05 July 2012. Gerrit Komrij. 68. Dutch book writer.
08 July 2012. Ernest Borgnine. 95. Airwolf-Santini.
10 September 2012. Lance LeGault. 77. Best known as Dekker from The A-team.
14 September 2012. Ger Smit. Voice actor. Together with another voice actor who already past a way he doing voices of very animated series like De Smurfen (Grote Smurf aka Red Smurf and Potige Smurf aka Hefty Smurf) and Niels Holgerson (The Fox) and serie De Fabeltjes Krant (Then you must think about some like Fantastic Mr Fox.)
30 December 2012. Arend Langenberg. 63. Dutch. Voice from Radio station Sky Radio and the voice of Peter R De Vries his program.

20 July 2012. People who died at Dark Knight Rises Release.

Wow, so Bob Anderson was still stunt-performing in his late 70s? Impressive.

Obituary: Michael Winner

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Michael Winner's first work as a director was satirical but he became more well-known for his action films

Film director Michael Winner, who has died aged 77, is probably best-known for the Death Wish movies. A flamboyant character, he enjoyed a series of high-profile relationships, most notably with the actress, Jenny Seagrove.

Michael Winner provoked great passions among those who knew him.

To some people, he was a visionary, whose films, especially his early ones, exhibited a remarkable narrative ability.

His detractors called Winner a purveyor of violence and sleaze, a dilettante who traded his talent for the transient pleasures of the bon viveur.

Continue reading the main story “Start QuoteWomen like to be treasured for themselves”
End Quote Michael Winner
The son of a London property developer, Michael Winner was born in London on 30 October 1935. Educated at a Quaker public school in Hertfordshire, he wrote his first showbiz column for local newspapers aged just 14.

After reading law at Cambridge, Winner worked as a journalist on London's Evening Standard before moving into film production, directing his first film, Shoot to Kill, in 1960.

His second film was a comedy about nudism, called Some Like It Cool.

By the mid-1960s, Winner had established himself as a successful director.

Working with stars like Oliver Reed, Michael Crawford and Frankie Howerd, Winner captured the spirit of the times with a series of fast-paced comedy-thrillers like The Jokers (1966) and I'll Never Forget What's 'is Name (1967).

Gritty realism

His 1969 WWII adventure Hannibal Brooks saw Reed's prisoner of war, Stephen 'Hannibal' Brooks escape through to Switzerland with an elephant in tow.

The film was praised by US critics and soon Hollywood beckoned. Winner worked with Charles Bronson and Jack Palance on the lyrical, yet morally ambiguous, Chato's Land (1971).

He wrote, produced, directed and edited most of his movies himself and said that the film of which he was most proud was The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel to Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, starring Marlon Brando and Stephanie Beacham.

Winner eschewed the studio, preferring to work on location. This approach added gritty realism to the Death Wish films, the first of which appeared in 1974.

Starring Once Upon a Time in the West's mouth organ-playing cowboy Charles Bronson as the liberal-turned-vigilante, Paul Kersey, the three Death Wish films were a violent apologia for individuals taking the law into their own hands in an atmosphere of rising urban crime.

Kersey's character shocked many cinemagoers by being judge, jury and executioner. As the Death Wish body-count piled up, Winner dismissed the criticism he received.

Police memorial plaques

"My sympathy is totally with the little old lady who gets bashed over the head with an iron bar," he said.

"Not with the youngster who did it and gets sent to the south of France for six weeks to turn into a lovely human being."

Michael Winner said that he abhorred violence and, after the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984, he founded the Police Memorial Trust to erect plaques to police officers killed on duty.

After directing a number of remakes, including The Big Sleep (1977) and The Wicked Lady (1982), Winner returned to the vigilante theme in 1993 with the disturbing Dirty Weekend, in which his protagonist was now female.

As directing jobs dried up, Winner's private life made more headlines than his films. Although unmarried, he enjoyed a string of affairs with attractive women, usually many years younger than he was.

Michael Winner shared a west London home with actress Jenny Seagrove in 1988
For six years, he enjoyed a relationship with the British actress, Jenny Seagrove, but he denied that women were only interested in him for his wealth or fame.

"Women like to be treasured for themselves," he said.

"They don't get taken in by men with money. In fact, I did far better when I was an assistant director."

He did eventually settle down in 2011, at the age of 75, when he married Geraldine Lynton-Edwards - who he met in 1957 when he was a 21-year-old film-maker and she was a 16-year-old actress and ballet dancer.

He said it felt "terrifying but wonderful" to be married after so many years.

As well as producing and directing films, Winner carved himself a niche as a newspaper columnist, most notably with his often outrageous restaurant reviews in the UK's Sunday Times.

Often called "pompous, rude and brash" by others, Winner said that, underneath, he was actually a shy and lonely person.

The director lived in some splendour in a 48-room house in London, with five servants and a vast collection of art and books, which he once said he planned to leave to the nation.

He had a history of heart problems and underwent surgery in 1974 and had a a triple heart by-pass in 1993.

Winner had been ill for some time prior to his death. Last summer, he said liver specialists had given him 18 months to live.

Shame. Made some enjoyable films during his career. I'd say DEATH WISH and THE SENTINEL were his best. I also liked his take on Chandler's THE BIG SLEEP.

Rest in peace.

My personal favourites were THE SYSTEM and THE MECHANIC.

RIP.

RIP.

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John Kerr obituary
Actor who starred as the troubled pupil in Tea and Sympathy on stage and screen


John Kerr as Tom with Deborah Kerr (no relation) as the housemaster's wife in the film of Tea and Sympathy, 1956, directed by Vincente Minnelli. Photograph: Everett/Rex

The actor John Kerr, who has died aged 81, won a Tony award in his first starring role on the Broadway stage, as Tom in Tea and Sympathy in 1953, and subsequently appeared in the 1956 film version directed by Vincente Minnelli. Robert Anderson's play, in which a schoolboy "confesses" to his housemaster's wife that he might be homosexual – only to be seduced out of the notion by the sympathetic listener – was considered so controversial that it was restricted to a "members only" theatrical run in London, and Minnelli's film received an X certificate, despite modification, notably in the suggestion that the housemaster was gay.

Kerr starred as the boy, although by then he was in his 20s. Born in New York, son of the actors Geoffrey Kerr and June Walker, he had already graduated from Harvard, played in summer stock and made his Broadway debut in 1952 in Bernardine. He made a handsome hero and was superbly matched with Deborah Kerr (no relation) as she dispensed tea and largesse in equal measure. Although the movie was sanitised, the dialogue remained intelligent, the premise timely for the period and the acting exceptional under Minnelli's elegant guidance.

The director had been responsible for Kerr's memorable film debut the year before in The Cobweb. He was cast as a sensitive youngster, a suicidally inclined patient in a psychiatric clinic, who becomes the focus of a dispute between his sympathetic doctor (Richard Widmark) and the clinic's manager (Lillian Gish). Kerr should, after such acclaim, have embarked on a major career. But he trod water in television dramas such as Playhouse 90 and movies including Gaby (1956, opposite Leslie Caron), a poor reworking of Waterloo Bridge, and The Vintage (1957), a preposterous thriller set in a French vineyard.

There was an upturn when he took the role of the tragic Lt Cable in the lavish – though stodgy – version of the musical South Pacific (1958). Although his voice was dubbed (by Bill Lee), he had the great number Younger Than Springtime to mime to and looked suitably dashing in his white uniform. The movie was a critical failure, but it gave Kerr a wider audience than Girl of the Night and The Crowded Sky (both 1960) and The Seven Women from Hell (1961).

He was temporarily rescued from the doldrums by Roger Corman's flamboyantly gothic The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), in which he became the torture victim of an insane Vincent Price. That cult movie signalled Kerr's exodus from the big screen and he moved permanently to television, playing stalwart establishment characters. He was presciently cast as an assistant district attorney in the TV series Arrest and Trial (1963-64) and given the top job as District Attorney John Fowler in Peyton Place (1965-66), moving on to an even steamier series, playing Duane Galloway in The Long, Hot Summer (1965). During this period he returned to his studies, graduating in law from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969 and setting up a practice in California.

Despite his new occupation, Kerr returned sporadically to acting, appearing in television series including The Young Lawyers, Columbo, The Streets of San Francisco, Police Story and The Invisible Man. He also enjoyed key roles in mini-series such as Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977) and television movies including Incident on a Dark Street, in which he was again cast as a lawyer. He effectively retired from acting in the late 70s; although he could be glimpsed in the television movie The Park is Mine in 1986.

He is survived by his second wife, Barbara; a son, Michael, and two daughters, Rebecca and Jocelyn, from his first marriage; and seven grandchildren.

Ronald Bergan writes: In 1994, while researching a biography of Anthony Perkins, I interviewed John Kerr at his law office in Beverly Hills. He was 63 and grey-haired, but had kept his slim figure and his handsome, sensitive face.

Initially, Kerr and Perkins had parallel lives and careers. They both attended Miss Carden's private school in New York. They both came from theatrical families – Perkins's father, Osgood, was a well-known Broadway actor, and Kerr's grandfather (Frederick Kerr), father and mother were all actors.

When Perkins and Kerr were in their early 20s, their paths crossed again. In July 1953, Perkins put himself up for the role of Tom Lee in Tea and Sympathy. Kerr was also up for the part. Perkins was confident that the play's director Elia Kazan, who had acted with Osgood, would value him as his father's son. Yet Anderson and Kazan opted for Kerr. "Jack Kerr had the quality we were looking for," explained Anderson. "The very thing that had worked for Tony, particularly in the movies – a certain 'differentness' – we didn't want at the outset for Tom Lee."

Nevertheless, when the Broadway cast was changed a year later, Kerr told Kazan that he believed Perkins had the right qualities to replace him in the role. When Tea and Sympathy reopened starring Joan Fontaine and the unknown Perkins, Kerr was relieved. "My hunch was justified when I saw Tony. He was excellent," Kerr remarked generously. "Tony played it with more humour than I did."

But it was Kerr who was given the part for Minnelli's bowdlerised screen version after the play closed in June 1955. A year later, the tables were turned. Kerr had wanted the part of Gary Cooper's son in William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion, but his agent advised against it. The film launched Perkins as a film star; while Kerr went on to appear in several stinkers.

Kerr also turned down the choice role of Charles Lindbergh in Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St Louis, because, he explained, "the American hero was sympathetic to Nazi Germany". He had no regrets, and seemed very relaxed and content in his choice of having given up acting for the law.

• John Grinham Kerr, actor and lawyer, born 15 November 1931; died 2 February 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/feb/10/john-kerr

Richard Griffiths Rip. He playing the part of Harry Potter's bad uncle.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/mar/29/richard-griffiths-harry-potter-dies
http://www.rtl.nl/%28/actueel/rtlnieuws/%29/components/actueel/rtlboulevard/2013/03_maart/entertainment/harry-potter_acteur-richard-griffiths-65_dood.xml

Richard Griffiths died after complications following heart surgery.

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RIP.

Lovely actor. Hilarious in WITHNAIL AND I.

It seems a bit odd and disrespectful to reduce the man to his role in Potter... :suspect:

Don't dare question the Balje.

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