2008 winding down

Paul Benedict, 70; actor at home in TV sitcoms, modern and classical dramasPaul Benedict, in Harold Pinter's ''No Man's Land'' at the ART. By Ed Siegel Globe Correspondent / December 4, 2008

In an acting troupe that included Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino, the person who stood out more than any other in the Theatre Company of Boston during the 1960s was Paul Benedict. The long-jawed actor who found a touch of menace in the most comic parts and a touch of the absurd in the most serious roles, was found dead Monday at 70 of unknown causes on Martha's Vineyard.Mr. Benedict, who also acted locally with the American Repertory Theatre, would have his own share of success on television and in the movies, playing the English neighbor Harry Bentley on the CBS series "The Jeffersons" from 1975 to 1985. He also appeared in the Christopher Guest comedies "This Is Spinal Tap," "Waiting for Guffman," and "A Mighty Wind."

His long face was, in part, a result of acromegaly, a pituitary disorder that was first diagnosed by an audience member, an endocrinologist, at one of his Theatre Company performances.Theatre Company founder David Wheeler, who directed Mr. Benedict there and at ART and remained a close friend, recalled the joy he spread. "From the point he came into the theater, it was one continuous round of laughter," Wheeler said yesterday. "My wife, Bronia, would always ask him to tell her a joke before he got off the phone, and then break up in laughter."As an actor, Mr. Benedict "could do so much with his voice and body," Wheeler added. "He could do any kind of comedy from the knockabout and outrageous to more subtle and verbal roles. . . .

He found the characters."Mr. Benedict grew up in Boston and attended Suffolk University. After that, he told The New York Times in a 1990 interview, he "walked into the center of Boston, to a local theater, the Charles Playhouse. They said they needed a janitor and they'd pay 15 bucks a week. I said I'd take it. . . . Within a year I was building sets and running the box office."He became a regular at the Theatre Company of Boston from 1963 to 1968 before moving to New York. He loved Martha's Vineyard, though, where he had a summer home. (He was renting the place where his body was found.) ART founder Robert Brustein recalled yesterday that unlike his neighbors, Mr. Benedict did not try to get rid of the many raccoons in the neighborhood.

"He had this wonderful devotion to the Vineyard, where he collected raccoons and fed them," Brustein said.Mr. Benedict and Brustein often appeared in readings together at the Vineyard Playhouse. While he acknowledged Mr. Benedict's "long run" on television, Brustein said that didn't capture his gifts as an actor, which were best shown in classical and modern plays."He excelled in mystery, the mystery of the character," Brustein said. "He was very good about withholding the obvious, who this man [character] was. He was a very good Pinter actor and a very good Beckett actor for that reason. The unspoken, the pauses between the words, are more important than the words themselves. He had that face, those deep-set eyes and enigmatic smile. I would have cast him in anything."His last ART performance was in May 2007, in Pinter's "No Man's Land." He played Hirst, a character facing his mortality. "It didn't matter that it was a part made famous by Ralph Richardson," said Wheeler, who directed the show. "He was undaunted."He was also good. "Benedict infuses Hirst with complexity and pleasingly baffling ambiguity,"

Globe critic Louise Kennedy wrote. "If we never know quite who this man is, we still can't stop thinking about him."In the Times interview, Mr. Benedict expressed no bitterness over being typecast as an oddball. What he said of playing the pompous Professor Fleeber in the film, "The Freshman," could describe his approach to all his roles: "I try to make each of the characters different. I think the trick is to cement in the reality, to make it logical and real to yourself. Once there's a reality, I think you can make it as crazy as you want it to be."Mr. Benedict leaves a brother, Charles of Newton.

Beverly Garland, versatile actress in film and TV, dies at 82File photoActress Beverly Garland in 1958.In a career spanning more than 50 years, she moved from B-movie cult stardom to scores of roles in television, notably on 'My Three Sons.' She also operated a namesake hotel in North Hollywood.By Dennis McLellan 11:19 AM PST, December 6, 2008

Beverly Garland, whose long and varied acting career ranged from B-movie cult stardom in the 1950s portraying gutsy characters in movies such as "Not of This Earth" and "It Conquered the World" to playing Fred MacMurray's wife on the sitcom "My Three Sons," has died. She was 82.Garland, who also was an involved owner of her namesake hotel in North Hollywood, died Friday evening after a lengthy illness at her Hollywood Hills home, said son-in-law Packy Smith.

In a more-than-50-year career that began with her film debut in a supporting role in the 1950 film noir classic "D.O.A.," Garland appeared in about 40 films and scores of television shows.She was once called "one of the finest actresses in this windblown theater" by former Times TV critic Cecil Smith and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1955 for her performance as a leukemia patient in the pilot of the medical drama "Medic.""Not only was she a terrific actress, she was one of those special gals who was fun to work with," said Mike Connors, who appeared with Garland in director Roger Corman's low-budget 1955 film "Swamp Women" and later worked with her when she made guest appearances on his TV detective series "Mannix."

"She had a great sense of humor, she was very thoughtful and had a great laugh," Connors said. "You couldn't help but laugh with her when she laughed."Despite her reputation for doing heavy drama -- including playing a suicidal alcoholic in a "Dr. Kildare" episode -- Garland showed her lighter side playing Bing Crosby's wife in the short-lived situation comedy "The Bing Crosby Show" in the mid-'60s.

She returned to comedy in "My Three Sons" as the second wife of MacMurray's widower Steve Douglas during the last three seasons of the popular series that aired from 1960 to 1972."The only thing that bothers me is that everybody loves this character so much," Garland told The Times in 1969. "I don't remember anybody loving me all that much."Garland also played her fair share of mothers in TV series. She was Stephanie Zimbalist's in the 1980s in "Remington Steele," Kate Jackson's in the 1980s in "Scarecrow and Mrs. King" and Teri Hatcher's in the 1990s in "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman." She also had recurring roles in the TV shows "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," "7th Heaven" and the ABC soap opera "Port Charles."

Early in her career, Garland played undercover New York police officer Casey Jones in the 1957-59 syndicated series "Decoy," reportedly the first American TV police series built around a female protagonist. Garland's big-screen credits included roles in films such as "The Joker Is Wild" (1957), "Pretty Poison" (1968), "Where the Red Fern Grows" (1974) and "Airport 1975" (1974).But her starring roles in low-budget exploitation films in the '50s such as "The Alligator People" gave her an enduring cult status.For Corman, she starred in five films in the 1950s: "Gunslinger," "It Conquered the World," "Naked Paradise," "Not of This Earth" and "Swamp Women."

"Part of what made her a favorite of B-movie fans was that she was seldom a shrinking violet in her movies," Tom Weaver, a science fiction and fantasy film expert, told The Times. "In fact, she was just the opposite."In "It Conquered the World," "she grabs a rifle and goes gunning for the monster in its own lair. In 'The Alligator People,' she chases an alligator man into the swamp, and so on," he said."She didn't play the demure, reserved heroines very well," Weaver said.Garland acknowledged that in a 1985 interview with Weaver for Fangoria magazine."I never considered myself very much of a passive kind of actress," she said. "I was never very comfortable in love scenes, never comfortable playing a sweet, lovable lady."

She was born Beverly Fessenden in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Oct. 17, 1926, and grew up in Glendale, where she studied acting in high school and began working in little theater, which she continued after the family moved to Phoenix. She became Beverly Garland when she married actor Richard Garland; they were divorced in 1953 after less than four years of marriage. An earlier, brief marriage to Bob Campbell when she was 18 also ended in divorce.In 1960, she married real estate developer Fillmore Crank, a widower with two children, Cathleen and Fillmore Jr. They had two more children, Carrington Goodman and James Crank.

In 1972, the couple built their mission-style hotel in North Hollywood, now called Beverly Garland's Holiday Inn. They also built a hotel in Sacramento that bore Garland's name in the '80s but later sold it.Garland, whose husband died in 1999, remained involved in running the North Hollywood hotel.She was the honorary mayor of North Hollywood and served on the boards of the California Tourism Corp. and the Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau.Garland is survived by four children, eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Nina Foch, actress and influential coach and teacher, dies at 84The Hollywood veteran, who first attracted attention in noir films of the 1940s, went on to become a respected teacher of directors at USC and the American Film Institute.By Elaine Woo 10:38 AM PST, December 6, 2008

Nina Foch, a veteran actress from Hollywood's film noir era of the 1940s who became a widely respected acting coach and teacher of directors, died Friday at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. She was 84.The cause was complications of long-term myelodysplasia, a blood disorder, according to her son, Dr. Dirk De Brito.Foch became ill Thursday while teaching "Directing the Actor," a popular course at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, where she taught for 40 years. She also offered the class for years at the American Film Institute.

Her students have included a number of accomplished directors, including Randal Kleiser, Amy Heckerling, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz."She was one of those few teachers who was truly life-changing," said Herskovitz, who with his partner, Zwick, created and produced the critically acclaimed television shows "thirtysomething," "My So-Called Life" and "Once and Again."

"She had a point of view that was so profound and so provocative that it forced you to really reassess not just your thoughts about filmmaking but your whole approach to life and relationships."Herskovitz, who met Zwick in Foch's class at AFI in the 1970s, said her philosophy was difficult to boil down because it stemmed from her insights into how people behave and think and what they believe. "She had a wonderful phrase that used to torment us -- "idiosyncratic contrapuntal juxtaposition," he recalled Friday. "What it meant was what happens in life is often the opposite of what you think would happen, so the way you play a scene is often the opposite of the way you would think. . . . I'm not exaggerating when I say that what she taught us comes up literally weekly in our careers.

She so influenced us in our way of looking at material, directing, even writing."Foch began her career as an actress whose most memorable work was in the B-movie classic "My Name Is Julia Ross" (1945), directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Foch played a young woman who takes a job as secretary for a wealthy family and becomes ensnared in a plot to cover up a murder.Her standout acting inspired a recent UCLA Film & Television Archive series celebrating Columbia's "noir girls" of the '40s. I

n addition to "Julia Ross," the series featured such films as Fritz Lang's "Human Desire" and Rudolph Mate's "The Dark Past," which starred Foch opposite William Holden and Lee J. Cobb."She's really the reason we did these films," Andrea Alsberg, who curated the UCLA series, told The Times in October. "Nina is this tall, cool drink of water. She's not a dame, like Gloria Grahame. She's got class. 'Julia Ross' is a great, Hitchcockian thriller. And it's Nina that brings it alive. It's only 65 minutes, but you want to look at her the whole time."Foch was born Nina Consuelo Maud Fock on April 20, 1924, in Leyden, Netherlands. Her father was the renowned Dutch composer-conductor Dirk Fock; her mother was actress Consuelo Flowerton. They divorced when Foch was a toddler.She later moved to New York with her mother and enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She also studied Method acting with Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler.She changed her last name to Foch when her movie career began in 1941 at Warner Bros. She eventually worked under contract at several major studios, including Columbia, MGM, Universal, 20th Century Fox and United Artists.

Her film credits include "A Song to Remember" (1945), "An American in Paris" (1951), "Scaramouche" (1952) and "The Ten Commandments" (1956). She earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress in "Executive Suite" (1954).Foch appeared on Broadway, including the 1947 hit "John Loves Mary." She briefly tried directing, serving as assistant director to George Stevens on "The Diary of Anne Frank" (1959), but turned to television acting when it became clear to her that the time was not ripe for a female director.Her lengthy television credits include "Prescription: Murder" (1968), which launched the popular "Columbo" detective series starring Peter Falk, the miniseries "War and Remembrance" (1989) and episodes of "Gunsmoke," "Bonanza," "The Mod Squad," "Dharma & Greg" and "NCIS."

She earned an Emmy nomination for best supporting actress in a drama series in 1980 for her work on an episode of "Lou Grant."Foch ran her own actors studio in Hollywood for many years and taught two classes a week at USC, where her course was a requirement for a masters in fine arts."Nina taught our students one of the most difficult skills in the cinematic arts: how to turn the words on the page into compelling performances," Elizabeth M. Daley, dean of USC's School of Cinematic Arts, said in a statement Friday. "She inspired and influenced generations of USC women and men, who in turn went on to shape direction of both cinema and television.""Believe it or not, teaching is the most rewarding thing I do," Foch told United Press International in 1994. "It has been the most successful thing I've done in my life."Thrice married and divorced, she is survived by three grandchildren, in addition to her son.