Obituaries

Went round the section of the London Film Museum devoted to his work a couple of years ago, featuring such exhibits as both the miniature and full-size Medusa from Clash Of The Titans and the statue of Talos from Jason And The Argonauts.

R.I.P. indeed ... he breathed life into big-screen mythological beasties, long before CGI.

Aye a true pioneer and creative genius, the kind the cinema has all too few of.

RIP Mr Harryhausen

Quote :

Stepford Wives film director Bryan Forbes dies aged 86



Film director Bryan Forbes has died "following a long illness" at the age of 86, a family spokesman has said.

Forbes' work included the original 1970s horror classic Stepford Wives and Whistle Down The Wind.

The "giant of cinema" was married to British actress Nanette Newman and had two daughters, TV presenter Emma Forbes and journalist Sarah Standing.

Forbes died surrounded by his family at his home in Virginia Water, Surrey, family friend Matthew D'Ancona said.

Forbes was made a CBE in 2004 for services to the arts and to the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain.

He was awarded the Dilys Powell Award for outstanding contribution to cinema at the London Film Critics' Circle Awards in 2006.

Mr D'Ancona said: "Bryan Forbes was a titan of cinema, known and loved by people around the world in the film and theatre industries, and known in other fields including politics.

"He is simply irreplaceable and it is wholly apt that he died surrounded by his family."

Richard Attenborough (l) and Bryan Forbes founded Beaver Films (pictured with wives Sheila Sim and Nanette Newman)
Behind camera

Forbes, who was born John Theobald Clarke in east London on 22 July 1926, made his screen acting debut in 1948.

He landed supporting parts in several notable British films including An Inspector Calls (1954) and The Colditz Story (1955) - but it was not long before screenwriting and directing lured him behind the camera.

Together with Richard Attenborough, he set up Beaver Films in 1959. Its first release, The Angry Silence (1960), was written by Forbes and featured Attenborough in the lead role.

His directing career began in 1961 with Whistle Down the Wind, featuring child star Hayley Mills.

Forbes directed many more films in the 1960s and early 1970s, including Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), The Wrong Box (1966) and The Raging Moon (1971), which starred Nanette Newman, whom he had married in 1955.

In 1969 he took over as head of production and managing director of EMI-MGM Elstree, and under his tenure the studio achieved notable successes with The Railway Children and Tales of Beatrix Potter.

But it was a torrid time for the company, beset by financial difficulties and staffing issues, and Forbes resigned in 1971.

He then directed The Stepford Wives, based on the novel by Ira Levin, in 1975 and International Velvet, starring Tatum O'Neal, in 1978.

Film critic Mark Kermode paid tribute to Forbes on Twitter, writing: "Once had the fan-boyish pleasure of telling Bryan Forbes how much I loved Stepford Wives. He was charming and self-effacing. A great loss."

Forbes married Nanette Newman in 1955
Forbes, who counted the late Queen Mother among his friends, continued directing, writing and acting throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

He also found success as an author with a number of novels, the latest of which - The Soldier's Story - was published last year.

Last June he told the Daily Mail how he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1975 but doctors later admitted the diagnosis was wrong.

In the same interview he said he would want to be remembered as "somebody not taken in by fame".

Saddened. Fan of League of Gentlemen (leaves Attenborough as the surviving member of the cast), quite liked Whistle Down the Wind and always good to see Forbes on screen (Guns of Navarone, Colditz Story etc). RIP.

http://variety.com/2013/more/news/james-gandolfini-dead-of-sudden-stroke-at-51-1200499141/



Wow. James Gandolfini died of a suspected heart attack today at age 51.

What a fucking blow. This totally threw me. Rest in peace, big guy.

Yeah, I was shocked.  Great actor, too young.

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Fine work (of course) as Tony Soprano and in the aforementioned In The Loop (the scene where he and Malcolm Tucker 'face off' is brilliant), amongst other things.

R.I.P.

He did well as Leon Panetta in ZERO DARK THIRTY.

He also stole the show in the rightfully forgotten THE LAST CASTLE.

Very saddened by this news. Gandolfini was one of the greatest actors of recent years as well as one of my favourites.

Utterly wretched news. Great actor and sadly missed.

Feel kind of gutted by the news of Gandolfini's death, The Sopranos is my favorite show and I realize I haven't really seen any of his post Sopranos work, maybe I need to catch up on the more acclaimed stuff.

R.I.P.

Sad to note that author and Scriptwriter Richard Matheson has passed away. So many great stories and inspirations, he will be greatly missed.

IMDB article

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only found out whilst watching Gold.

Bernard Horsfall (1930-2013)

from The Stage

The Stage spotted his potential early on. When he played novelist Christopher Isherwood in a production of I Am a Camera in Ipswich in 1956, it praised his performance as one of “warmth and integrity and outstanding for its economy and depth”.

Horsfall’s television career lasted just over 50 years. He first appeared in Doctor Who in 1968, when he played Gulliver in The Mind Robber. The following year, he appeared as the First Time Lord in The War Games. There followed the role of Taron in Planet of the Daleks (1973) and Chancellor Goth in The Deadly Assassin (1979). This last episode elicited complaints about violence from the Clean Up TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse.

Although Horsfall appeared in many Shakespearean productions, he was not above pantomime, being commended once in Puss in Boots at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, for his “splendidly unheroic ogre with a fine sense of comedy”.

In the cinema, he was seen in the James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning Gandhi (1982) and the Mel Gibson epic, Braveheart (1995).

Bernard Horsfall, who was born on November 29, 1930, died on January 29, aged 82.


Indie has a bit more:

A character actor on stage and screen for more than 50 years, Bernard Horsfall's stand-out roles came in a James Bond film and four different Doctor Who adventures. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), alongside George Lazenby in his only outing as 007, Horsfall was the British spy Campbell, aiding Bond in his search for the villain Blofeld (Telly Savalas) in Switzerland. Campbell has been described as the film's "official sacrificial lamb", coming to an untimely end when he is murdered by Blofeld's henchmen.

Horsfall appeared alongside the second, third and fourth incarnations of Doctor Who. His first two appearances were with Patrick Troughton. In "The Mind Robber" story (1968), he played Gulliver in the Land of Fiction, who turns out not to be the character of Jonathan Swift's novel, but a Time Lord Goth monitoring the Doctor's activities.

Then, in "The War Games" (1969), he was one of three Time Lords presiding over the trial of the Doctor, exiling him to Earth and forcing him to regenerate – transforming him into Jon Pertwee's incarnation of the time-travelling extraterrestrial from the planet Gallifrey.

Horsfall returned, alongside Pertwee, as the Thai space soldier Taron in "Planet of the Daleks" (1973), leading an attack on the viewers' favourite Doctor Who enemies, before battling Tom Baker's Doctor in "The Deadly Assassin" (1977). This last appearance by Horsfall was the most memorable. It saw him, as Chancellor Goth, and Baker in virtual-reality combat that included Horsfall's character trying to drown his opponent – a sequence that drew the ire of clean-up TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse.

Later, Horsfall voiced Arnold Baynes, CEO of a galactic mega-corporation, in the 2003 Doctor Who audio adventure Davros. Not surprisingly, he became a Doctor Who fans' favourite. He appeared at their conventions over the years and died shortly before he was due to attend one in Los Angeles.

Horsfall was born in Hertfordshire, the son of an RAF officer and an opera singer, and brought up in Hindhead, Surrey, and Wisborough Green, West Sussex. He attended Rugby School, then took a job as a tree feller in Canada after visiting an uncle there.

Returning to Britain, Horsfall trained as an actor at the Webber Douglas Academy. He gained valuable experience at Dundee rep (1952), before the London stage beckoned and he played the Ghost to Richard Burton's Hamlet at the Old Vic Theatre (1953). In rep at Bristol, he met the actress Jane Jordan Rogers, whom he married in 1960.

The actor made his screen dèbut in the Maurice Edelman play The Last Flight (1957), in the Armchair Theatre series, directed by Philip Saville. He followed it with starring roles as Margery Allingham's sleuth Albert Campion in both Dancers in Mourning (1959) and Death of a Ghost (1960), and the title character in the children's comedy thriller Captain Moonlight: Man of Mystery (1960).

However, over the next four decades, Horsfall settled down to life as a prolific character actor in episodes of popular series such as Z Cars (1963), The Saint (1967), The Avengers (three roles, 1965, 1967, 1968), When the Boat Comes In (1981), The Jewel in the Crown (1984) and Casualty (three roles, 1988, 1991, 1995).

He was more prominent as the Black Knight in the mini-series Ivanhoe (1970), Cunliffe in the final run of the children's adventure Freewheelers (1973) and Alan Viner in the second series of the sitcom Big Boy Now! (1977). Horsfall was also impressive in Enemy at the Door (1978) as Dr Philip Martell, the islanders' representative trying to maintain tolerable relations with the occupying Germans in Guernsey during the Second World War.

Later, he played Melford Stevenson, the barrister defending Ruth Ellis – the last woman to be hanged in Britain – in Lady Killers (1980) and the flamboyant Conservative minister Alan Clark in the television film Thatcher: The Final Days (1991). His rare film roles included General Edgar in Gandhi (1982) and Balliol in Braveheart (1995).

Throughout this, his stage career continued. In the West End, he played REA Nightingale in The Masters (Savoy Theatre, 1963), Ronald Miller's adaptation of the CP Snow novel about two factions clashing over the election of a new master of a Cambridge University college. In the same year, he acted in the Iris Murdoch play A Severed Head (Criterion Theatre).

Between 1983 and 1990 Horsfall performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company in more than a dozen productions at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Barbican, London, and other venues. His roles included the Duke of York in Richard II, Capulet in Romeo and Juliet and the title character in Cymbeline. With the RSC, he also acted Marquis Saint-Brieux in a West End production of Camille (Comedy Theatre, 1985-86).

By the mid-1980s, Horsfall and his wife had moved to the Isle of Skye, where he became a crofter, producing fruit and vegetables. During the following decade he continued to appear in regional theatre productions and tours across Britain, although he took fewer screen roles. His last appearance was as the Archdeacon in the 2008 film Stone of Destiny. Horsfall's younger daughter, Rebecca, is a theatre director and novelist.


Bernard Arthur Gordon Horsfall, actor: born Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire 20 November 1930; married 1960 Jane Jordan Rogers; (one son, deceased, and two daughters); died Isle of Skye 28 January 2013.

Dennis Farina has passed away at age 69:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/publicist-actor-dennis-farina-police-officer-turned-star-of-law-and-order-has-died-at-69/2013/07/22/ffd10164-f2f1-11e2-8464-57e57af86290_story.html

Just heard about Farina.  This is one of those actor deaths that is actually sad to me.  This guy was the real deal, he had lived a life before he started acting and he brought such an authentic quality to the roles he played.  Yeah, he played a somewhat narrow stream of roles, but when this guy played a cop he wasn't posing with a gun.  He just seemed like a real guy.

Farina, John Spencer, and John Mahoney.  All three guys had late starts at fame and I've always enjoyed all three.  At least we still have Mahoney.

One of the last cool, tough-guy actors. Always sad to lose one of them, considering Hollywood's not producing them anymore.

We've still got Abe Vigoda and Harry Dean Stanton. Not "tough" guys, but real guys.

Indeed. Shame that Stanton's only been getting extra gigs lately in the mainstream. Or maybe he's just taking a break until a good film comes his way.

Eileen Brennan RIP.

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The great Karen Black has died at 74.

http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=19910442&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.co.uk%2F