Obituaries

Hilly wrote:

George Baker

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15225021

RIP Sir Hilary, et al.

Sad news indeed RIP Sir Hillary and Inspector Wexford, thanks for those many many years of entertainment.

Damn. :(

Prince Kamal Khan wrote:

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/movies/australian-actress-diane-cilento-dies-aged-78/story-e6frfmvr-1226161175518

In addition to being Connery's first wife she was also a Bond girl of sorts. She doubled Mie Hama on the swimming scenes in YOLT. I mainly remember her portraying the Contessina de Medici opposite Charlton Heston in The Agony and The Ecstasy(1965).

any statement from Sir Sean?

lachesis wrote:

Hilly wrote:

George Baker

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15225021

RIP Sir Hilary, et al.

Sad news indeed RIP Sir Hillary and Inspector Wexford, thanks for those many many years of entertainment.

And one of the first #2s on THE PRISONER. Finally saw SHIP ... SHAME this year and enjoyed it loads.

trevanian wrote:

lachesis wrote:

Hilly wrote:

George Baker

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15225021

RIP Sir Hilary, et al.

Sad news indeed RIP Sir Hillary and Inspector Wexford, thanks for those many many years of entertainment.

And one of the first #2s on THE PRISONER. Finally saw SHIP ... SHAME this year and enjoyed it loads.

Yet to see Ship that Died of Shame, I've got it favourited on YouTube largely out of the Bernard Lee connection. Forgot about Prisoner. So much that he did even if it wasn't a large role like Dambusters. Great man by all accounts.

Al Davis dead at 82.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/sports/football/al-davis-owner-of-raiders-dies-at-82.html

j7wild wrote:

Prince Kamal Khan wrote:

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/movies/australian-actress-diane-cilento-dies-aged-78/story-e6frfmvr-1226161175518

In addition to being Connery's first wife she was also a Bond girl of sorts. She doubled Mie Hama on the swimming scenes in YOLT. I mainly remember her portraying the Contessina de Medici opposite Charlton Heston in The Agony and The Ecstasy(1965).

any statement from Sir Sean?

If he has, I haven't heard yet.

RIP, Captain Benson and SIr Hilary Bray.

R.I.P. George Baker, a true English acting stalwart.

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/heinz-bennent-1921-2011

John Neville (1925-2011)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/tv-radio-obituaries/8905431/John-Neville.html

x

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/arts/television/harry-morgan-mash-and-dragnet-actor-dies-at-96.html

Terribly sad news. Outside of MASH it's Support Your Local Sheriff I've known him for. Alas, never seen the Dragnet series just bits of that movie. A sad loss but as they say he had an good innings. RIP Harry.

Didn't know he was still going.

Brilliant character actor, always one of my favourites when he pops up. His work in The Ox-Bow Incident and Inherit the Wind is highly memorable in particular.

RIP.

Shattered - love Morgan's frequent character appearances. Whether its THE GLENN MILLER STORY, his small role in RACE STREET, the endless gold that is MASH and his multiple bit parts in Westerns, I always love seeing Harry Morgan on the roster.

RIP.

Goodbye, farewell, and amen.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-frederica-maas-20120107,0,244921.story

Wow.

fantastic innings for what looks to have been a fantastic woman. RIP

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/israel-baker-noted-violinist-dies/2012/01/09/gIQADFUSmP_story.html

Quote :

As concertmaster for the orchestra that recorded the soundtrack for the movie “Psycho,” classical violinist Israel Baker helped create a piece of pop culture that is regarded as one of Hollywood’s most terrifying. He led the piercing attack of the violins that accompanies the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film’s chilling shower scene.

Mr. Baker “was a renowned violinist and concertmaster in the Hollywood studio system” and was heard on dozens of movie scores, said Jon Burlingame, a film and music historian. He was also “one of the great violinists of the 20th century,” Jim Svejda, an expert in classical music, said during a tribute on Los Angeles radio station KUSC-FM last week.

Mr. Baker died Dec. 25 at his home in Los Angeles after a stroke, his daughter Hilary said. He was 92.

The musician had “one of the most brilliantly facile techniques of any violinist of his time,” Svejda said before playing a “benchmark recording” from Igor Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” (“The Soldier’s Tale”), conducted by the composer and featuring Mr. Baker.

He was “one of the most sought-after violinists in the country,” Keith Clark, then conductor of the Orange County Pacific Symphony, told the Los Angeles Times in 1981 when Mr. Baker was its concertmaster.

As his career unfolded, largely in California, Mr. Baker earned a reputation as a chamber musician, orchestral leader and soloist. He had particular success with Arnold Schoenberg’s “Phantasy” and Alban Berg’s “Chamber Concerto,” combining “stylistic acumen” with “Viennese Romantic tradition,” according to the Grove online music reference.

Mr. Baker also served as second violinist to legendary violinist Jascha Heifetz in a series of chamber concerts launched in Los Angeles in 1961 by Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.

Born Feb. 11, 1919, in Chicago, Mr. Baker was the youngest of four children of immigrants from Russia. At 6, he debuted professionally in Chicago, his daughter said.

During World War II, he served in the Army Air Forces as a roving violinist who played requests from hospitalized veterans in the United States.

With his first wife, Caroline, who died in 1974, he had three children. Besides his daughter Hilary, Mr. Baker is survived by his second wife, Imelda; daughters Merrill and Abby; and five grandchildren.

Mr. Baker’s contributions to film scores spanned several decades and included “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” (1973) and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984).

Onstage, he was known for a studied nonchalance that belied his seriousness as a musician. During a cello solo in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, the violinist once leaned over to pianist Julien Musafia and shared stock market tips.

A very great loss. Requiescam In Pacem.

Theo Angelopoulos (1935-2012)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/movies/theo-angelopoulos-greek-film-director-dies-at-76.html?_r=1

Quote :

Theo Angelopoulos, a renowned director whose films explored the human condition in general and the condition of modern Greece in particular through haunting imagery rooted in myth and epic, died on Tuesday of injuries suffered in a traffic accident near Piraeus, Greece. He was 76.

Mr. Angelopoulos was struck by a motorcycle earlier that day while crossing the street, police and hospital officials told The Associated Press. He was on location near Piraeus, the port of Athens.

The driver of the motorcycle, who was injured in the accident, was later identified as an off-duty police officer.

Possessed of a singular style that has long divided critics, Mr. Angelopoulos was considered one of the most eminent directors of the second half of the 20th century; reviewers have likened his films to those of Michelangelo Antonioni and Akira Kurosawa.

He worked with some of the world’s leading actors, among them Marcello Mastroianni, Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe, Bruno Ganz and Jeanne Moreau.

His best-known pictures include “Eternity and a Day,” which won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1998. A rumination on death, it stars Mr. Ganz as a terminally ill writer who journeys in search of answers to vast metaphysical questions.

If Mr. Angelopoulos’s work was not universally known in the United States, the explanation could be found in his style, the antithesis of Hollywood studio fare.

Seen most often here on the art house circuit, his movies are dreamy, atmospheric and enigmatic. Many are allegories that illuminate the painful history of 20th-century Greece, from its occupation by the Nazis in World War II to its brutal civil war in the late 1940s.

Visually evocative, often beautiful, his films contain long sections with little or no dialogue. They are suffused with melancholy symbolism, all of it intensely personal and some of it intensely obscure. They are typically organized around very long takes that can assume the form of wordless meditations on space, as the camera pans slowly across a landscape.

What dialogue there is can border on the opaque, at least in English translation. In “Ulysses’ Gaze” (1995), for instance, Mr. Keitel, playing a Greek-American filmmaker on an odyssey in the Balkans in search of lost reels of an early Greek film, utters lines like “Your image, still damp, unchanged since the day I left it, emerges once again from the night.”

The most distinguishing hallmark of Mr. Angelopoulos’s work is his tendency to play fast and loose — or, more precisely, slow and loose — with time: scenes can unfold with dreamlike nonlinearity, with remembered scraps of a character’s past played out as though they were part of the present action.

Some critics adored Mr. Angelopoulos’s films. Others could scarcely abide them. Which side one came down on depended partly on staying power: some of his pictures were three hours long or more.

In short, what Mr. Angelopoulos strived for, as he made clear in interviews and in his work, was nothing less than a distillation of the Greek epic tradition on celluloid.

Perhaps it was only fitting, then, that Mr. Angelopoulos, who by all accounts had a robust sense of his own artistic merit, was guilty on at least one occasion of the storied Greek sin of hubris.

In 1995, he displayed a memorable lack of politesse on being awarded the Grand Jury Prize — second prize — at Cannes for “Ulysses’ Gaze.” The Sydney Morning Herald described what happened after his name was called:

“The director caused a storm when the award was announced, remaining for some seconds in his seat, clearly enraged, his fingertips steepled tightly at his lips. Once on stage, his anger was undisguised. ‘I planned my speech for the Palme d’Or,’ he said, before adding contemptuously, ‘but now I’ve forgotten it.’ ”

Theodoros Angelopoulos was born in Athens in 1935. As a young man he studied law but, finding it dull, left school and moved to Paris, where he ostensibly studied philosophy but actually spent most of his time at the Cinémathèque Française.

He attended France’s chief film school, the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, before returning to Greece, where he worked as a newspaper film critic before embarking on his directorial career.

Mr. Angelopoulos’s survivors include his wife and frequent producer, Phoebe Economopoulos, and three daughters. Information on other survivors was not available.

His other films include “Landscape in the Mist” (1988), which explores the ravages of modern Greece through the story of siblings roaming Europe in search of their father; “The Weeping Meadow” (2004), which treats Greek history between the world wars and was the first segment of an unfinished trilogy; and “The Dust of Time” (2008), the trilogy’s second segment, about the fates of refugees from Greece, starring Mr. Dafoe, Mr. Ganz and Irene Jacob.

At his death, Mr. Angelopoulos was filming “The Other Sea,” about immigration and the crisis in contemporary Greece.

As he explained in interviews, it was the combination of a centuries-old oral tradition and a 20th-century visual medium that let him capture, for better and sometimes for worse, the soul of his homeland.

“I say to myself that I could have made a career anywhere, but I have chosen to speak in the same words that were spoken by so many who preceded me,” Mr. Angelopoulos told The Los Angeles Times in 1999. “Greece is more than a geographical locale to me. It’s a spirit, a culture, and when I’m disgusted with present-day Greece — the loss of spirituality and generosity — I go back to those words said many, many years ago.”

Ben Gazzara (1930-2012)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/movies/ben-gazzara-actor-of-stage-and-screen-dies-at-81.html

Great loss indeed, RIP.

Damn. :(