Pro wrestling legend Steve "Dr. Death" Williams dead at age 49
By Jason Powell Dec 30, 2009 - 12:28 PM



Pro wrestling great Steve "Dr. Death" Williams died on Tuesday night at age 49. He has been battling cancer in recent years. Williams held numerous wrestling titles in North America and Japan throughout his career. He achieved All-American status as a football player at the University of Oklahoma.

Arnold Stang, a character actor whose bespectacled, owlish face and nasal urban twang gave him a singular and recognizable persona, whether on radio or television, in the movies or in advertisements, or even in cartoons, died on Sunday in Newton, Mass. He was 91 and lived in Needham, Mass.

The cause was pneumonia, said his son, David.

Mr. Stang considered himself a dramatic actor who could play serious roles. But even he was aware that with his signature heavy glasses and a manner that could be eagerly solicitous, despondently whiny or dare-you-to-hit-me pugnacious, his forte was comedy.

Like Wally Cox, who was a friend, and Don Knotts, Mr. Stang was a natural for roles requiring a milquetoast, a pest or a nerd. At 5 foot 3 and never much more than 100 pounds, he once said of himself, “I look like a frightened chipmunk who’s been out in the rain too long.” And in a story he frequently told, after an auto accident in 1959 that left him needing extensive plastic surgery, he said to the doctor, “For God’s sake, don’t make me look pretty.”

His memorable moments as an actor were oddly varied signposts of popular culture. He was the spokesman for Chunky, the candy bar, in the 1950s, delivering the slogan: “Chunky! What a chunk o’ chocolate!”

In Otto Preminger’s 1955 film about drug addiction, “The Man With the Golden Arm,” he played Frank Sinatra’s pal Sparrow in a performance that is often cited as a precursor of Dustin Hoffman’s turn as Ratso Rizzo in “Midnight Cowboy.”

On “Top Cat,” the animated television series of the early 1960s, he was the voice of T. C., a k a Top Cat himself, the leader of a mischievous cat gang. (The character was based on Phil Silvers’s Sergeant Bilko.)

He was one of two gas station attendants (Marvin Kaplan was the other) who witness the destruction of their station by Jonathan Winters in the 1963 lunatic film comedy “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”

Most sources indicate that Mr. Stang was born in Chelsea, Mass., in 1925, but according to his family, though he had relatives in Chelsea, he was born in Manhattan on Sept. 28, 1918. His father was a lawyer until the 1929 stock market crash and earned a living afterward as a salesman.

The Chelsea story was one Mr. Stang perpetuated himself; he told interviewers that he got his first job in radio in 1934 at age 9 after he wrote to “Let’s Pretend,” a New York children’s radio show, and asked for an audition. Told he could audition when he was next in New York, he took the bus from Boston, alone, the following Saturday and was hired.

“We were married 60 years and I never managed to get him to correct that,” his wife, JoAnne Stang, said in an interview Monday.

The truth, Ms. Stang said, was that her husband grew up mostly in Brooklyn and graduated from New Utrecht High School. He wrote the note asking for an audition from Brooklyn, and he was older than 9.

He began his show business career as a teenager — his first radio appearances were on the shows “The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour” and “Let’s Pretend” — and he went on to perform on dozens of radio programs in the 1930s and ’40s, including soap operas, mysteries and comedies, and was often called on to play more than one role.

He was probably best known at the time for “The Goldbergs,” the long-running family series set in Bronx on which he played the character Seymour Fingerhood, the teenage neighbor to the title family, and later as a sidekick to stars like Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny and especially Milton Berle.

Mr. Stang was a regular on “The Henry Morgan Show,” a showcase for Morgan’s astringent satire, often playing a complaining, goofball New Yorker named Gerard who traded banter and one-liners with the host. After Berle moved his radio show to television, Mr. Stang appeared from 1953 to 1955, bringing along his character, Francis, a pain-in-the-neck stagehand who bugged the star relentlessly.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1949 (Wally Cox, a skilled goldsmith, made their wedding rings, she said), and his son, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Stang is survived by a daughter, Deborah Stang, of Brighton, Mass., and two granddaughters.

Mr. Stang landed on Broadway three times, the last being a revival of “The Front Page” in 1969. He was a regular on the 1960s comedy “Broadside,” a short-lived, distaff version of “McHale’s Navy,” and was a guest star on numerous series, including “Bonanza,” “Batman” and “The Cosby show.”

He was also the voice of many cartoon characters, including Nurtle the Turtle in the 1965 film “Pinocchio in Outer Space.” Other film credits include Otto Preminger’s 1968 gangster comedy “Skidoo,” with Jackie Gleason; “Hercules in New York” (1970), a comedy with Arnold Schwarzenegger; and “Dennis the Menace” (1993), with Walter Matthau.

“He loved the cartoons, and he liked doing commercials, too,” Ms. Stang said of her husband. “But most of all, he loved radio. It offered him such a span of roles.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/arts/television/22stang.html

'Mister Ed' actress Connie Hines dies at age 78
Published Dec 23, 12:56 AM EST


BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Actress Connie Hines, who played Wilbur's wife on the popular 1960s television show "Mister Ed" has died. She was 78.

Her "Mister Ed" co-star Alan Young told the Los Angeles Times that Hines died Friday at her Beverly Hills home from complications of heart problems.

Hines was best known for portraying Carol Post on the show that featured a talking horse. She wrote a section about her career in Young's 2007 book "Mister Ed and Me and More."

Born in Massachusetts, Hines also appeared in the 1960 film "Thunder in Carolina" and TV shows that included "The Millionaire," "Johnny Ringo" and "Riverboat."

Hines was married twice, the last time to Lee Savin, an entertainment lawyer and producer who died in 1995.

Date Posted: Tuesday, December 22, 12:58:45pm
In reply to: Dead at 76 's message, "Donald Pickering, Actor" on Tuesday, December 22, 12:52:03pm

---

...English actor Donald Pickering.
Donald Pickering
(b. 15 November 1933 - d. 19th December 2009)

Pickering has appeared in many television, film and radio roles.
His television appearances include several roles in Doctor Who,
The Pallisers, The House of Eliott, Watson in the 1980 series
"Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson", Yes, Prime Minister Bittas Empire
and Executive Stress. Was nominated for Broadway's 1971 Tony Award
as Best Supporting or Featured Actor (Dramatic) for "Conduct Unbecoming."

Longtime South Florida actor Clarence Thomas, whose work in films, TV and on the stage inspired a generation of younger black performers, died Sunday at age 75 in a Kendall nursing home.

Thomas, the first African-American Florida branch president of Screen Actors Guild (2000-'02), had been in poor health for much of the past decade, said actor John Archie, a protégé and frequent stage co-star.

``He has given service in so many ways to this community and the acting community,'' Archie said. ``He was a wonderful actor, a fine man. He had an incredible mind.''

The two met on an acting assignment just after Archie had graduated high school. ``He was a dear friend. How? By giving me the best advice, by supporting me and letting me know I could achieve and do well in the business. He was just there for me.''

SCREEN CREDITS

Among Thomas' big-screen credits: Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974), Cocoon (1985) and Rosewood (1997). He also was in several TV movies and series, including Miami Vice and American Playhouse.

In South Florida, he was known for many stage performances, including his final theatrical production, A Lesson Before Dying, starring Archie at GableStage in 2002.

Thomas was a public school teacher until his mid-40s, when the job began to interfere with his part-time acting career. He acted most of his adult life, about 40 years, but never won big acting awards or made a fortune, Archie said. ``People outside the business don't understand,'' he said. ``All they know is movie stars. They don't understand the guy sitting next to them works in all kinds of media and doesn't have any money.''

Thomas, who was born in Arkansas and raised in Chicago, was married 56 years to the former Barbara Jones of Hialeah. They met when both attended Knoxville College in Tennessee. The Thomases, who had no children, moved to South Florida about a year after they graduated. Since the 1960s, they lived in the same home in Richmond Heights, said Eva Cofield, a family friend.



latimes.com
OBITUARIES
Movie stills photographer Bob Willoughby dies at 82
He created enduring images of stars and jazz musicians.
By Valerie J. Nelson


December 22, 2009


Bob Willoughby, who created iconic portraits of his muse, Audrey
Hepburn, and dozens of other celebrities as one of the first still
photographers assigned to capture life on Hollywood film sets, has died.
He was 82.


Willoughby died Friday of cancer at his home in Vence, France, said
Claire Willoughby, a daughter-in-law.


The rise of Life and Look magazines created a demand for more than
routine photo stills from movie sets and led to a career for Willoughby
that spanned three decades.


It took off in 1954 when Warner Bros. asked him to photograph Judy
Garland's final scene on the set of "A Star Is Born." His portrait of
the freckle-faced star became his first Life cover.


Over the next 20 years, he made now-classic photos on the sets of about
100 films, including the 1960s movies "The Graduate," "My Fair Lady,"
"Rosemary's Baby" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"


Writing in 1974 in The Times, entertainment critic Charles Champlin
called Willoughby one of the finest movie-set photographers and said his
work was impressive "as photojournalism becomes salon art."


Director Sydney Pollack, who died last year, paid homage to Willoughby
in the photographer's 2003 book, "The Star Makers": "Sometimes a
filmmaker gets a look at a single photograph taken on his own set and
sees the 'soul' of his film right there. It's rare, but it happens, and
did so to me in 1969, the first time I looked at work Bob had done
during the filming of 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They?' "


He made himself seem invisible, Willoughby later said, by blending in
with the movie crew, once he realized they were invisible to the actors.


In turn, he revealed "actors and actresses as themselves, not merely as
characters they played," the Times of London reported in 2003.


Willoughby turned his lens on many of the era's movie legends, including
Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and Elizabeth Taylor.
William Holden, Jack Lemmon and Hepburn were "special people" whom he
saw socially, the photographer once said.


He became the go-to photographer for Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, the
raucous group of Las Vegas nightclub entertainers. One of Willoughby's
most famous Rat Pack pictures features most of the group in front of the
Sands Hotel sign when they were making the 1960 film "Ocean's Eleven."


On an earlier Sinatra film set, "The Man With the Golden Arm" (1955),
director Otto Preminger tried to tell Willoughby how to take his
photographs. Sinatra was stunned when the relatively young photographer
dared to tell Preminger: "You look after your job and I'll look after
mine," Willoughby recounted in 2002 in London's Sunday Express.


Willoughby's shots of Sinatra singing at a recording session for the
film are now regarded as classics.


The photographer was closest to Hepburn, whom he met in 1953 at
Paramount Studios when she was on the cusp of stardom for "Roman
Holiday" and he was an established magazine photographer.


While setting up his equipment, he found his eyes constantly "drifting
back to that face," he later wrote, which had a "smile that God designed
to melt mortal men's hearts."


Magazines snapped up his photographs of Hepburn on movie sets. After
shooting her a number of times, he became close enough to follow Hepburn
home.


The resulting images were the subject of a 2008 Life book, "Remembering
Audrey," which features candid portraits.


According to a Los Angeles Times review of the book, the most striking
images were taken off the clock, such as Hepburn napping at home with a
fawn in her lap.


"I was there to make the women look as beautiful, the men as handsome
and the movies as interesting as possible," Willoughby said in 2003 in
the Times of London. "Beyond that, I photographed what appealed and was
exciting to me."


An only child, Willoughby was born June 30, 1927, in Los Angeles. His
parents divorced before he was born, and his mother, Nettie, raised him.


When he was 12, his father gave him a complicated camera that Willoughby
set out to master. He studied cinema at USC and design with filmmaker
Saul Bass at the Kann Institute of Art in Los Angeles while apprenticing
with a number of Hollywood photographers.


A jazz fan, Willoughby made portraits of such famous musicians as Billie
Holiday, Chet Baker and Cole Porter.


On an airplane flight, Willoughby met his future wife, the Scottish-born
Dorothy, a stewardess, in 1959. They married six weeks later.


They had four children and lived in Pacific Palisades until 1972, when
they decided they wanted to finish raising their family in southern
Ireland, where they bought a castle.


The move was great for his lifestyle, Willoughby once said, but not for
his career.


He worked on only five more films, but his photographs continued to be
exhibited in museums throughout the world. He also published more than
15 books.


After moving to France a decade ago, the couple lived quietly in a home
largely absent of celebrity photographs but full of art and ancient
artifacts.


Willoughby, a short, cherubic man who had been called "a leprechaun with
a Leica," told the London Times: "I never wanted Hollywood for myself. I
was just about my family and my work."

Dark Star is a low budget sci-fi comedy concerning 4-5 guys who have been in space way too long. Dan O'Bannon multi-tasked on Dark Star, acting, scripting, production design, editing, all sorts. So compelling were his computer graphics (really animation) that George Lucas hired him for similar chores on Star Wars. One incident concerns a comic beachball alien that escapes into the gizzards of the ship causing mayhem. O'Bannon revisited this scene and that begat the Alien franchise.

O'Bannon cornered the market for a while in scripting movies from the novels of Philip K. Dick, Total Recall and Screamers. Although O'Bannon and Carpenter fell out, Carpenter always mentioned an O'Bannon directed USC short concerning a bathroom suicide as being something special, O'Bannon finally got to direct a feature with the hilarious Return of the Living Dead.

Dan O'Bannon, one of a kind. RIP

latimes.com
Jennifer Jones, Oscar-winning actress, dies at 90
Discovered by future husband David O. Selznick, Jones won the Academy Award for 1943's 'The Song of Bernadette.' She also was married to industrialist and art collector Norton Simon.
By Claudia Luther

10:13 AM PST, December 17, 2009

Jennifer Jones, the actress who won an Academy Award for her luminous performance in the 1943 film "The Song of Bernadette" and who was married to two legendary men -- producer David O. Selznick and industrialist and art collector Norton Simon -- died today. She was 90.

Jones died of natural causes at her home in Malibu, according to Leslie C. Denk, a spokeswoman for the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena.

Jones oversaw the museum following Simon's death in 1993, but she was best known for her movie career.

In all, she starred in more than two dozen films, playing opposite such A-list actors as William Holden, Joseph Cotten and Gregory Peck.

In addition to her best-actress win for "Bernadette," Jones was nominated for an Academy Award for leading roles in three other films: "Love Letters" (1945), a soaper in which an amnesiac is cured through the love of a man, played by Cotten; the western epic "Duel in the Sun" (1946), with Peck; and "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" (1955), in which she played Dr. Han Suyin opposite Holden. She also was nominated as best supporting actress for "Since You Went Away" (1944), in which she starred with her first husband, Robert Walker.

The tall, sensitive Jones might never have risen to stardom but for Selznick, who was the first to see something special in the beautiful "big-eyed girl" who showed up in his New York office to test -- although not very well -- for the part of Claudia in the 1943 film of the same name. (Dorothy McGuire won the role.) After seeing her second test, he decided she was "the best sure-fire female star to come along since Leigh and Bergman" --referring to Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman, both then under contract to the producer.

He found the young actress a new name and began grooming her for stardom, finding Jones her first big role in "Bernadette" and, afterward, producing or choosing most of her films. He endlessly pestered Hollywood with his memos about her makeup, her camera angles, her costumes. She was his protégé, his obsession, his crusade, eventually his lover and, finally, his wife.

His adoration of her, said film critic David Thomson, shaped the rest of his life and fueled "one of the great gossip-column melodramas of the time."

"She was an ardent young actress before she met Selznick," Thomson wrote in his "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film." "But it is hard now to be sure whether we would know her if his great wind had not picked her up like a leaf."

Jones was born Phylis Isley in Tulsa, Okla., on March 2, 1919, the daughter of the owners and stars of Isley Stock Co., a tent show that toured the Midwest. She became interested in acting during her school years and eventually studied at Northwestern University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.

It was at the academy that she met Walker, whom she married in 1939 and with whom she had two sons, Robert Walker Jr. and Michael Walker.

After several failed attempts to break into Hollywood, the two actors settled in New York City, and finally Jones got her chance for a screen test with Selznick.

By that time, Selznick was almost 40 and had already produced the epic "Gone With the Wind" and a string of popular and important films, including "David Copperfield," "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Rebecca." He was looking for another "GWTW" -- and another star to discover.

"It was a sudden fusion of supply and demand. She needed his help, he desperately needed to give it to her," Selznick's secretary, Frances Inglis, would later tell Thomson, who is also author of "Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick" (1992).

"The Song of Bernadette," a 20th Century Fox film directed by Henry King, was the vehicle Selznick picked to introduce Jones to the American public.

It was, everyone agreed, perfect casting. Jones, who was Catholic and had gone to a convent school, had the kind of wide-eyed innocence that made her believable as Bernadette Soubirous, the French peasant girl who saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in a grotto.

"I cried all the way through 'Bernadette' because Jennifer was so moving and because I realized then I had lost the award," said Ingrid Bergman, who was Oscar-nominated for her role in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" the same year Jones won.

At the time, Jones was a wife and mother, but even that tame image was not what the studio wanted for the actress it had playing a virginal mystic. For months, Jones was asked to hide her family life and present herself as a real-life Bernadette.

That changed after Selznick arranged for Jones and Walker to play opposite each other in Jones' second starring film, the World War II tear-jerker, "Since You Went Away." To promote that film, publicity stories were churned out about "Mr and Mrs. Cinderella" and their contented home life with their children.

By then, however, the relationship was a sham, and it was difficult for them to perform the love scenes. The film's director, John Cromwell, said that on two occasions Jones' "emotional upsets caused her to flee the set in tears."

The couple divorced in 1945. Walker, who had starred in "See Here, Private Hargrove" and opposite Judy Garland in "The Clock," died in 1951.

In 1948, Selznick divorced his wife, Irene Mayer, daughter of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer. Selznick, 47, and Jones, 30, were married in 1949 on a yacht off the Italian Riviera.

More than 30 years later, Jones told the Washington Post of her relationship with Selznick: "I felt appreciated right from the beginning. I felt totally at ease. I don't know whether that's love at first sight."

But she said the stories of Selznick's domination were overblown.

"I had good roles, and I had David to guide me," Jones said.

Selznick's "Duel in the Sun" (1946), a western, earned Jones one of her best-actress Oscar nominations.

Selznick intended "Duel" as a sweeping epic in the tradition of his greatest triumph, "Gone With the Wind."

But the 1946 film, in which Jones played a woman of mixed race caught between two brothers (Peck and Cotten), ran into publicity problems when the Catholic Church issued a statement saying the story "tends to throw audience sympathy on the side of sin" and that Jones "is unduly, if not indecently, exposed." The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood removed posters of her that showed cleavage, and much was made of the difference between Jones' role in "Duel" and her role as the innocent in "Bernadette."

"Duel," although a box-office hit, today is remembered with some humor by critics. Thomson dubbed it "a masterpiece of the primitive," and Leonard Maltin, writing in his movie guide, called "Duel" a "big, brawling, engrossing, often stupid sex-Western."

Among Jones' other major roles were "Portrait of Jennie" (1948) and, in the 1950s, "Carrie," "Beat the Devil," "Ruby Gentry," "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," "Good Morning, Miss Dove," "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" and "A Farewell to Arms." She played Nicole Diver in 1962's "Tender Is the Night."

"Talented, charming Jennifer was the most insecure actress I ever worked with," actress Joan Fontaine, who played Jones' sister, Baby, in "Tender Is the Night," wrote in her 1978 autobiography," No Bed of Roses." "Despite her Academy Award for 'Song of Bernadette,' I felt that acting was a torture for her."

Starting in the mid-1960s, Jones went through a bleak period. Her film career was on the wane and, in 1965, Selznick died.

Two years later, on the day her good friend Charles Bickford died at the age of 78, Jones attempted suicide. She was found by sheriff's deputies in the surf at the base of a 400-foot cliff in Malibu, where she had collapsed after taking sleeping pills and, it appeared from evidence at the scene, drinking wine.

"I don't think I wanted to die," she told the Washington Post several years later. "These accidents happen."

Jones' penultimate film, "Angel, Angel, Down We Go" (1969), was so bad that film historian Edward Margulies, co-author of "Bad Movies We Love," referred to the film in labeling Jones "the true standout" among former Oscar winners who "slid into grade-Z trash" in their later careers.

Jones' final film role was a supporting role as Fred Astaire's love interest in the 1974 film "The Towering Inferno."

But by then, Jones life had taken a turn for the better after having met Norton Simon.

The couple -- he recently divorced and she widowed for half a dozen years -- met in May 1971 at a reception in Los Angeles for a New York magazine editor. Simon was 64, and Jones was 52.

At that time, Jones had retreated from Hollywood and was raising her daughter by Selznick, Mary Jennifer, and working with the Manhattan Project, a group of Salvation Army residential treatment facilities for young people addicted to narcotics. Simon said later that, of course, he found Jones beautiful but that they connected because of her activism.

Simon by that time had severed his last managerial ties to his business empire and was one of the world's leading art collectors, mostly of old masters.

By the end of May, the couple had embarked on a trip to Paris together, stopping over in London, where they decided to get married. Their wedding was aboard a boat with a view of the white cliffs of Dover.

"It was very romantic," Simon told a reporter.

Jones said that she had considered museums boring until she met Simon. She changed her mind on a trip to Siena, Italy, with her husband.

"For the first time, I looked at paintings of the Madonna and child and saw them as abstracts, which Norton had been telling me they were all along," she told the Washington Post. "Suddenly the subject matter went away and I could see, for instance, that Matisse had been here."

Jones, in turn, opened Simon's mind to other cultures. According to Times arts reporter Suzanne Muchnic's 1998 biography of Simon, "Odd Man In," it was Jones, a longtime yoga practitioner, who persuaded Simon to take his first trip to India, where he was "smitten by the art of regions he had scarcely considered before." Simon became a major force in the Indian and Southeast Asian art market.

Jones eventually became an important part of Simon's art empire. When he became incapacitated by Guillain-Barré syndrome, he named his wife president of the Norton Simon Museum of Art. After his death in 1993, she became chairwoman of the Norton Simon Foundation Board, overseeing a $3-million renovation of the museum's interior, designed by museum trustee Frank Gehry, and the gardens, by landscape designer Nancy Goslee Power.

Jones herself was surprised at the many turns her life had taken.

"Actually," Jones told the Washington Post in 1977, "every time I stop to think about it, I'm really amazed. I think I've had an extraordinary life. And lots of times I can hardly believe it's me."

Jones is survived by her son Robert Walker Jr., eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Her son Michael Walker died in 2007. In 1975, her daughter with Selznick, Mary Jennifer, committed suicide. Services will be private.

news.obits@latimes.com

Luther is a former Times staff writer.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

TONY KENDALL, whose real name was Luciano Stella, died November 28 in Rome in a hospital in Trigoria, after a serious illness. He was born August 22, 1936, and had to his credit over 50 popular films from the sixties until the eighties after starting his career as a model and in fotoromanzi. He changed his name to Tony Kendall at the suggestion of Vittorio De Sica.

He made his debut in 1959, acting under his own name in “Femminie Tre Volte”, but then had to wait some years for a major role, in “Brennus Enemy of Rome”,1963, where he first used the Tony Kendall name. He was also known as a part of a double act with Brad Harris in several action movies, starting with “The Pirates of the Mississippi”. After the success of the Bond films and the German Jerry Cotton series, Kendall became a star in the seven films in which he played a private eye Joe Walker, aka Commissioner X, while Harris played his foil, police captain Tom Rowland.

Then, following the successful television series of “Batman”, Harris and Kendall were together again in “The Three Fantastic Superman”, 1967. Kendall’s work ranged across numerous genres, from horror to giallo, with his last appearances being in “On the Dark Continent” in 1993 and “Alex l’ariete” in 2000.


MIKE LeBELL, the promoter of the NWA Los Angeles territory during the 1960s and 1970s died this afternoon. He was 79 years old.

According to his former co-worker, Jeff Walton, Lebell died in Los Angeles, at 3:50 p.m., of apparent respiratory failure.

Just about every big name in professional wrestling passed through the Los Angeles office during Lebell's tenure, and its ties to the Japanese promotions were always strong.

The showcase arena for Lebell was The Grand Olympic Auditorium, which dates back to the 1932 Olympics in L.A. Sports Illustrated once dubbed the Olympic "an ancient, graying, high-ceiling fortress of boxing on South Grand Ave." Lebell's territory extended beyond the city as well, and encompassed much of southern California, including towns like Long Beach, San Bernadino, Ventura, and Pasedena.

"The only reason this territory survived was the density, the population, especially the Hispanics," explained former Los Angeles referee Art Williams, who admitted he was not a fan of Lebell personally. "We had some great workers here."


Headliners during Lebell's run up until 1982 included Mil Mascaras, Black Gordman, The Great Goliath, Freddie Blassie, John Tolos and The Destroyer (Dick Beyer).

In Blassie's autobiography, Lebell explained how the territory succeeded:

"Our territory extended as far as we could go south of L.A., and five miles this side of San Francisco. Along the way, we put on shows at little clubs. That was our backbone. If we drew $5,000 at the little club, my God, you could pay all the wrestlers like $75. At the end of the week, they'd wrestle at the Olympic, making $500, $800, maybe some $1,000. They were happier than hell.

The little clubs cost us nothing. In those days, it was like a joke. We paid $50 rent, and in most of the places, we built rings and left the rings there. That was about it.

One of the biggest wrestlers we had, Mil Mascaras, was a Mexican star, and he never wanted a guarantee. He'd wrestle for whatever. If we'd go to a little club, and we only had a $5,000 house, he'd take a hundred and a half and thank me for it."
Lebell is believed to be the first North American promoter to use closed-circuit television locations to broadcast the matches to the fans who couldn't get into the arena.

"We know for a fact that there are 10,000 people outside now who can't get in. These people live and die wrestling. If we told them there was going to be wrestling at 4 o'clock in the morning, they'd be here," Lebell said in an August 1971 interview with the Los Angeles Times after his first closed-circuit broadcast.

In the same interview in the Times, Lebell talked about the passion of his regulars.

"About three years ago." he said. "A lady slumped over in her chair next to her husband and they took her to the dressing room. She was dead. So now they had to tell her poor husband: 'Pardon me. sir. Could you come with me? Your wife has passed away.'

"'I will, I will,'" he said. 'Right after this fall.'"

Lebell's mother, Aileen Eaton, held the rights to promote in the Olympic Auditorium. "I just love this building," she said in a 1972 interview. "Do you know this is the only large building in the whole country that is built especially for boxing and wrestling? It's cozy. The employees are like one big family. It's a friendly place."

Eaton had two sons with Maurice LeBell, who had been paralyzed after a near drowning, and died in 1941: Mike, who the box office manager and the treasurer for Aileen Eaton Incorporated, and "Judo" Gene LeBell. "Judo" Gene helped with the promotion, often as a troubleshooting referee, while he carved out his own career in wrestling, judo and the movie industry.

Eaton, meanwhile, became a major boxing promoter both alongside and after her second husband, Cal Eaton, died. She would promote more than 10,000 bouts over the years, including the likes of Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier and George Foreman. Eaton, who died in 1987, was the first woman inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, in 2002.

In a 1967 Sports Illustrated profile, Eaton's business was featured, and her son's was mentioned as well. "Whether there is any truth or not in the line, Aileen Eaton is, as one manager put it, 'very unstupid.' Her weekly boxing shows gross close to $1 million each year, and her wrestling shows, directed by her son Mike, do better yet."

Struggling to survive until remarrying, Eaton sent her sons to the California Military Academy "on a trade deal. I handled the academy's advertising in exchange for room and board for the boys."

"Graduating from college, my choice was being an optometrist or promoting wrestling," Mike Lebell told Wrestling Revue magazine in 2003. "Of course, I chose wrestling, and am glad I did! Oh, there were many times I second-guessed myself along the way and wondered why I settled on such an unpredictable business, but overall, I wouldn't have done it any other way."

According to Walton, who served as a publicist, starting in 1969, Lebell was all business. "Mike never impressed me as really being that interested in wrestling. He was interested in filling seats," Walton wrote in his autobiography, Richmond 9-5171, A Wrestling Story

KCOP-TV, Channel 13, played a big part in the success of the Los Angeles territory, with its wide reach and charismatic host Dick Lane into the early 1970s.

Over the years, a number of other promoters tried to break into the Los Angeles territory. Johnny Doyle, who once promoted at the Hollywood Legion Stadium, was one of them, as was Verne Gagne. Ivan Koloff and Superstar Billy Graham teamed to briefly challenge Lebell as well.

Lebell's best-known promotions were the 1971 show at the Los Angeles Coliseum, a stacked card headlined by the feud between Blassie and Tolos, and his involvement with the 1976 Muhammad Ali versus Antonio Inoki fight in Japan.

The Blassie-Tolos feud, started with the infamous "Monsel's powder" thrown by Tolos into Blassie's eyes, was kept running for months, with Blassie "hospitalized" and unable to wrestle. The promotion smartly kept them apart. Blassie would show up unexpectedly at shows, screaming for Tolos' head, his eyes still bandaged. "They never touched each other. They’d come close. You’d see cops coming and grabbing Blassie and straining to hold him back," said longtime L.A. office figure Jeff Walton. When Blassie and Tolos finally met, it resulted in a crowd of 25,847, paying $5-$7 for a live gate of $142,158.50. "The paper said it was 25,000 but it looked like 35,000 to 40,000," said Tolos. "It was a hell of a big, big, big card."

Newspaper reports of the Ali-Inoki battle have Lebell as a key figure. "Inoki's office said the rules were drawn up and approved by three men in New York -- Angelo Dundee, Ali's trainer; Vince McMahon, president of the World Wide Wrestling Federation, and Los Angeles promoter Mike LeBell," reads a 1976 Associated Press story.

However, in the 2003 interview with Wrestling Revue, Lebell said the crowning glory of his promotional days was a bout between Mil Mascaras and Black Gordman. "This match took us five months to prepare and sell. Gordman defeated Mascaras to begin the program. We then announced Hair vs. Mask and sold out the Olympic Auditorium in two days, and sold out five closed-circuit theatres."

Lebell closed his promotion in 1982, ceding the rights to the territory to Vince McMahon.

For the last two decades, Lebell sold videotapes of hard-to-find movies and events. "I've had a great run, it's a very relaxing business compared to wrestling," he told Wrestling Revue.

He had distanced himself far, far from the wrestling business. As well, Lebell and his brother, Gene, had been at odds for years and years, over a number of issues, with money being a major factor.

Few oldtimers see promoters through rose-coloured glasses. As the controller of the pursestrings, just about everyone believes that they were shortchanged financially or never used correctly. Mike Lebell was no exception.

The former ref Williams tried to explain. "Mascaras was a nice enough guy. His ego was strengthened by his association with Mike Lebell, who did not know how to handle wrestlers. Lebell had no business being in the business. He got into the business because his mother handed it to him," said Williams.

In his autobiography, Blassie was even more direct. "Even during the best of times, I was always waiting for him to put a hatchet in my back. I feel pretty confident saying that every wrestler in the territory felt the same way. Because of all the publicity we got in L.A., you'd wind up with the press clippings while he wound up with the money."


Former Yankees star Tommy Henrich dies at 96
PA Sports - December 01, 2009

NEW YORK — Former New York Yankees star Tommy Henrich has
died at 96.

The team said Henrich died Tuesday in Dayton, Ohio.

Henrich began playing for the Yankees in 1937 and finished in
1950, and won four World Series championships. The outfielder
was nicknamed “Old Reliable” because of his knack for getting
clutch hits.

Among his teammates were Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Whitey
Ford. Henrich hit .282 with 183 home runs.

Paul Naschy (born Jacinto Molina, September 6, 1934, Madrid – December 1, 2009, Madrid) was a Spanish movie actor, screenwriter, and director working primarily in horror films. His portrayal of numerous classic horror figures–the wolfman, a hunchback, Count Dracula, a mummy–have earned him recognition as a Spanish Lon Chaney. King Juan Carlos I presented Naschy with Spain’s Gold Medal Award for Fine Arts in 2001 in honor of his work.

Film director Koichi Saito died of pneumonia at a Tokyo hospital just after midnight on Friday night. He was 80 years old.

Saito made his directorial debut in 1967 with "Sasayaki no Joe." Some of his better known works are "Yakusoku" in 1972 (starring Keiko Kishi) and "Tsugaru Jongarabushi" in 1973 (starring Kyoko Enami).

Joseph Wiseman, a longtime stage and screen actor most widely known for playing the villainous title character in Dr. No, the first feature film about James Bond, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

His daughter, Martha Graham Wiseman, confirmed the death, saying her father had recently been in declining health.

Released in 1962, “Dr. No” was the first in what proved to be a decades-long string of Bond movies. Starring Sean Connery and Ursula Andress, the film featured Mr. Wiseman as Dr. Julius No, the sinister scientist who was Bond’s first big-screen adversary.

Mr. Wiseman's other film credits include Detective Story(1951); Viva Zapata!1952); The Garment Jungle(1957); The Unforgiven(1960);The Night They Raided Minsky(1968) and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974).

He had guest roles on many television shows, among them Law & Order,The Streets of San Francisco, The Untouchables and The Twilight Zone. In the late 1980s, he had a recurring role as the crime boss Manny Weisbord on the NBC drama Crime Story.

On Broadway, Mr. Wiseman was seen most recently, in 2001, as a witness for the prosecution in Abby Mann's stage adaptation of his film drama Judgment at Nuremberg. In 1994, he appeared Off Broadway in the Tony Kushner play Slavs! in the role of Prelapsarianov,mthe world's oldest living Bolshevik.

Writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby said Mr. Wiseman played Prelapsarianov to frail perfection.

Joseph Wiseman was born in Montreal on May 15, 1918, and moved to the United States with his family when he was a boy. His first Broadway role was in the company of Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938). Among his many other Broadway credits are Joan of Lorraine (1946), Antony and Cleopatra(1947), Detective Story(1949); The Lark(1955) and the title role in In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1969).

Mr. Wiseman first marriage, to Nell Kinard, ended in divorce; his second wife, the choreographer Pearl Lang, died in February. In addition to his daughter, Martha, from his marriage to Ms. Kinard, Mr. Wiseman is survived by a sister, Ruth Wiseman.

Vic Mizzy, a film and television composer best known for writing the memorable theme songs for the 1960s sit-coms Green Acres and The Addams Family, has died. He was 93.

Mizzy died of heart failure Saturday at his home in Los Angeles' Bel-Air neighborhood, said Scott Harper, a friend and fellow composer.

A veteran writer of popular songs such as There's a Faraway Look in Your Eye and Pretty Kitty Blue Eyes, Mizzy launched his TV career in 1960 when he was asked to compose music for the dramatic anthology series ``Moment of Fear.''

Then came an offbeat assignment: The Addams Family, the 1964-66 TV series based on Charles Addams' macabre magazine cartoons and starring John Astin as Gomez Addams and Carolyn Jones as his wife, Morticia.

For his theme song, Mizzy played a harpsichord, which gives the theme its unique flavor. And because Filmways refused to pay for singers, Mizzy sang it himself and overdubbed it three times.

The song, memorably punctuated by finger-snapping, begins with: ``They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky: the Addams family.''

In the 1996 book TV's Biggest Hits: The Story of Television Themes From `Dragnet' to `Friends,' '' author Jon Burlingame writes that Mizzy's ``musical conception was so specific that he became deeply involved with the filming of the main-title sequence, which involved all seven actors snapping their fingers in carefully timed rhythm to Mizzy's music.''

For Mizzy, who owned the publishing rights to The Addams Family theme, it was an easy payday.

``I sat down; I went `buh-buh-buh-bump (snap snap), buh-buh-buh-bump,'' he recalled in a 2008 interview on CBS' ``Sunday Morning'' show. ``That's why I'm living in Bel-Air: Two finger snaps, and you live in Bel-Air.''

The season after The Addams Family debuted, Mizzy composed the title song for Green Acres, the 1965-71 rural comedy starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor.

For Green Acres, Burlingame observed in his book, Mizzy ``again conceived the title song as intertwined with the visuals'' of the show's opening title sequence and telling the story of wealthy Oliver and Lisa Douglas moving from New York City to a farm in the country.

Burlingame on Monday described the themes for The Addams Family and Green Acres as ``two of the best-remembered sit-com themes of all time.''

http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/george_tuska_1916_2009/

Pamela Blake

Actress in action serials

Pamela Blake, 94, a B-movie actress known for her roles in such late 1940s action serials as "Chick Carter, Detective" and "Ghost of Zorro," died of natural causes Tuesday at a Las Vegas care facility, her family said.

Born in 1915 in Oakland, Blake came to Hollywood after winning a beauty contest at age 17. Originally known by her given name, Adele Pearce, she adopted the stage name Pamela Blake in 1942, the same year she signed with MGM, according to the All Movie Internet database.

From 1934 to 1954, Blake appeared in about 50 films, and had a minor breakthrough in the classic 1942 film noir "This Gun for Hire" with Alan Ladd. That same year, she also appeared in the popular "Maisie Gets Her Man" with Ann Sothern and Red Skelton, and the western "The Omaha Trail" with James Craig.

By the early 1950s, she was regularly appearing in TV westerns such as "The Cisco Kid" and "The Range Rider."

In 1953, she moved to Las Vegas and permanently retired to raise her two children with Mike Stokey, who created the TV game show "Pantomime Quiz." That marriage, and an earlier one to actor and stuntman Malcolm "Bud" McTaggart, ended in divorce.

She was the widow of John Canavan, an Air Force master sergeant she married in 1983. Her son, Michael Stokey II, has been a military advisor on such films as "The Thin Red Line" (1998) and "Tropic Thunder" (2008).
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who through one of its most fondly-remembered periods with Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor from 1970 to 1974, has died at the age of eighty-four.

Previously an actor, Letts moved behind the camera in the 1960s, finding work as a director on several programmes for BBC television. He first worked on Doctor Who as director of the 1968 Patrick Troughton serial Enemy of the World, before accepting the job of producer during production Jon Pertwee's first season, in 1969. Working closely in association with script editor Terrance Dicks, Letts oversaw the creative direction and production of the programme for the following five seasons.

In addition to his producing role, Letts also directed several serials during his time in charge of the programme - Terror of the Autons, Carnival of Monsters and Planet of the Spiders. In addition, he handled much of the direction for Inferno after Douglas Camfield was taken ill, and after leaving the series as producer he directed The Android Invasion for his successor, Philip Hinchcliffe. He also co-wrote The Daemons with Robert Sloman (under the pseudonym 'Guy Leopold') and worked closely with Sloman on the writer's other scripts for the programme.

Letts's legacy to the programme included the creation of the character Sarah Jane Smith, played by Elisabeth Sladen on the BBC to this day, and the decision to cast Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. The latter was a decision for which Tom Baker was always ready to express immense gratitude, as when Letts appeared on his episode of "This is Your Life" in the year 2000.

Letts remained fond of and connected with the series right up until his death. When producer Graham Williams broke his leg during production of season 16 in 1978 Letts helped to keep an eye on the series, and more officially he served as Executive Producer in 1980, overseeing the inexperienced John Nathan-Turner's first season in charge of the programme. For many years thereafter Letts also penned novels, novelisations and radio serials connected to the programme. He also appeared on DVD commentaries and in various documentaries.

He also gained extensive credits outside of Doctor Who, most notably as producer of the BBC's "Classic Serial" strand during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this role he produced many acclaimed and award-winning adaptations of classic novels, including "Great Expectations", "Alice in Wonderland" and "Jane Eyre". Later, he directed episodes for the soap opera "EastEnders".

Robert Ginty, star of action films such as "The Exterminator" who also wrote, produced and directed, died of cancer Monday in Los Angeles. He was 60.
The rugged thesp was mostly known for his tough guy roles in B-movies, but in addition to writing and directing TV shows and films, he directed experimental theater productions and dabbled in painting and photography.

Ginty's first major role were in Hal Ashby's "Coming Home" and as recurring character on series "Baa Baa, Black Sheep." More recently, he became a theater director, directing productions such as a Toronto rap/hip hop version of "A Clockwork Orange."

Among his TV roles were playing Thomas Craig Anderson on "The Paper Chase," and recurring roles on "Hawaiian Heat" and "Falcon Crest."

After starring in "The Exterminator" in 1980, Ginty went on to star in a string of action movies such as "Gold Raiders," "Cop Target," "The Alchemist," "Gold Raiders," "The Scarab" and "Exterminator 2." He wrote, directed and starred in "The Bounty Hunter" and then began directing for episodic television.

Ginty was nominated for a Cable Ace award on HBO series "Dream On" and directed shows including "China Beach," "Evening Shade," "Nash Bridges," "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," "Charmed" and "Xena: Warrior Princess."

In recent years, his career took a different direction as he worked in Canada, France, Ireland and Italy as a theater director and as an artist in residence at Harvard U.

Born in New York, he studied acting at the Actors Studio and Yale, and then begin acting in theater productions. Moving to Hollywood, Ginty began guest starring in tv shows and appeared in small roles in the films "Bound for Glory" and "Two Minute Warning."

He is survived by his wife Michelle and son James Francis, an actor.

wreg.com /sns-ap-ms--obit-samcarr,0,71043.story

WREG
Blues drummer Sam Carr dies at age 83
By Associated Press


3:09 PM CDT, September 22, 2009


CLARKSDALE, Miss. (AP) - Sam Carr, a blues drummer who played with such
musicians as Sonny Boy Willamson II and Robert Nighthawk, has died. He
was 83.


Century Funeral Home director John Andrews said Carr died Monday at
Greenbough Nursing Home Center in Clarksdale of natural causes. Andrews
said services for Carr will be held Saturday at 11 a.m. at the funeral
home chapel in Clarksdale. Andrews said burial will follow in Thompson
Chapel Cemetery in Dundee.

Carr was born Samuel Lee McCollum in 1926 near Marvell, Ark. His name
was changed after he was adopted as a toddler by a Mississippi family
with a farm near Dundee.

By DENNIS HEVESI
New York Times News Service

Dick Berg, a television producer best known for creating major history-based mini-series like “Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story” and the 13-hour adaptation of James A. Michener’s book “Space,” died Sept. 1 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.

The cause was complications after a fall, his son Scott said.

In a career spanning more than 50 years, Berg produced or wrote scripts for nearly 100 television shows, starting with hourlong original dramas and detective shows in the 1950s and ’60s. He wrote the pilot for “Johnny Staccato,” a 1959-1960 series that gathered something of a cult following, in which John Cassavetes played a jazz pianist in Greenwich Village who supplements his income by taking on detective work. Soon after, Berg moved on to produce 39 episodes of “Checkmate,” a series that chronicled the adventures of a private detective agency in San Francisco that specialized in preventing crimes rather than solving them.

From there, Berg turned toward producing original dramas for Alcoa Premiere and the Chrysler Theater, for which he hired the likes of William Inge and Rod Serling to write original teleplays. Berg’s productions advanced the careers of young directors like Sydney Pollack, Mark Rydell, Robert Ellis Miller, and Stuart Rosenberg.

For 30 years, Berg’s company, Stonehenge Productions, produced dozens of movies of the week and mini-series, many of them adapted from best-selling books. Among them were “The Martian Chronicles,” by Ray Bradbury; “The Word,” by Irving Wallace; and “A Rumor of War,” by Phil Caputo.

Berg had a banner year in 1985, when both “Space” and “Wallenberg” were broadcast.

“Space,” an extravaganza that cost more than $30 million to produce, recounted the development of the space program, with fictional characters based on real-life astronauts like Alan B. Shepard Jr. and John Glenn, scientists like Wernher von Braun and NASA officials like Chris Craft.

“Wallenberg” was Berg’s adaptation of “Lost Hero,” a book by Frederick E. Werbell and Thurston Clarke, which told how Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, rescued nearly 100,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II, then disappeared into the Soviet gulag.

Berg’s production of “Wallenberg,” The New York Times said, “accomplishes what it sets out to do — to tell, endorse and celebrate the story of a genuine hero.”

Richard Joseph Berg was born in Manhattan on Feb. 16, 1922, the son of John and Sylvia Berg. His father was a paint salesman. Besides his son A. Scott Berg, who won a 1999 Pulitzer Prize for his biography “Lindbergh,” Berg is survived by his wife of 63 years, the former Barbara Freedman, and three other sons: Jeff, who is chairman of International Creative Management, the talent agency; Tony, a record producer and executive; and Rick, a manager and producer. He is also survived by seven grandchildren.

After graduating from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., in 1942, Berg went to Hollywood, where he hoped to become an actor. He found work only as a dialogue coach for movie cowboys. Not happy, he moved to Westport, Conn., where he ran an art gallery.

At night and on weekends, he began writing scripts on speculation for live television. More than a dozen of his original dramas appeared on programs like “Kraft Theater,” “Robert Montgomery Presents,” “Studio One,” and “Playhouse 90.” One of them, “The Drop of a Hat,” caught the attention of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Studios, which called Berg to Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1957.


John Hart, the other 'Lone Ranger,' dies at 91


The actor took over the TV role for 52 episodes when Clayton Moore walked out in a pay dispute. He also played the title role in the 1947 Columbia serial 'Jack Armstrong: The All-American Boy.'

By Dennis McLellan

September 22, 2009

Most TV fans of a certain age know the answer to the question, "Who played the Lone Ranger?"

Those who say Clayton Moore are correct, at least partially.

There was another actor who played the Masked Man on "The Lone Ranger" TV series, temporarily replacing Moore in the title role for 52 episodes beginning in 1952.

John Hart, 91, the handsome and athletic actor who also starred in the 1940s movie serial "Jack Armstrong: The All-American Boy" and the 1950s TV series "Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans," died Sunday at his home in Rosarito Beach in Baja California, said his wife, Beryl.

"He had dementia in his last years," she said Tuesday, "but he was very happy living by the ocean. He used to surf this whole coast in the late '30s and after the war."

A Los Angeles native who launched his Hollywood career with a few bit partsin Cecil B. DeMille's 1938 film "The Buccaneer," Hart played small roles in a string of films before being drafted into the Army in 1941.

Relaunching his career after the war, he played the title role in the 1947 Columbia serial "Jack Armstrong: The All-American Boy," which was based on the popular radio show.

Hart already had appeared in a couple of episodes of "The Lone Ranger" as a guest actor when Moore left the series, reportedly over a pay dispute.

"I don't know how many other actors they looked at, but I got the part," Hart said in an interview for the book "The Story of the Lone Ranger" by James Van Hise. "They didn't pay me much, either. It was unbelievable. But being an out-of-work actor, to have a steady job for awhile is great."

Hart said they shot each half-hour episode in two days.

When he began playing the role, he said in a 2001 interview with Tom Weaver for Starlog magazine, "I got a lot of bad advice about playing the part. I tried the bad advice for about one or two shows and then I said, 'The hell with that; I'll do it my own way.' They wanted me to be like a stiff Army major, and it was all wrong. So I just forgot that and slipped into the part, and everybody loved it."

For many "Lone Ranger" fans, Moore owned the iconic role, and Hart was placed in an unenviable position when he took it over.

"Tough job, but somebody's got to do it," said Boyd Magers, editor and publisher of Western Clippings, a western-film publication. "He walked right into it, and he played the Lone Ranger to the hilt. For those 52 episodes, he became the man behind the mask."

Hart was no stranger to horses, having worked as a cowboy during the summers while growing up.

"He worked very hard with Silver, the horse, who had been spooked previously, and was very large and very hard to handle," said Beryl Hart. "They hired him for a month to work with him.

"He said he could call Silver from one side of a corral and get him pounding toward him, this huge horse, and get him to stop on a dime right in front of him."

After Moore returned to "The Lone Ranger," Hart went on to star in the 1955 Columbia serial "The Adventures of Captain Africa."

He also starred in "Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans," a 1957 syndicated TV series shot in Canada with Lon Chaney Jr. as Chingachgook.

While shooting the series in Canada, Hart met his Canadian-born actress wife, then known as Beryl Braithwaite, when she landed a three-day acting job on the series.

Ten days later, the 20-year-old Braithwaite and the 39-year-old Hart were married.

Hart reconnected with "The Lone Ranger" when he played a newspaper editor in the 1981 movie "The Legend of the Lone Ranger," starring Klinton Spilsbury as the Masked Man.

Hart also played the Lone Ranger in a 1981 episode of "The Greatest American Hero" and in a 1982 episode of "Happy Days."

Hart was born Dec. 13, 1917, in Los Angeles and grew up in San Marino, where his mother was a drama critic for the Pasadena Star-News.

A graduate of South Pasadena High School, he appeared in a number of shows at the Pasadena Playhouse before landing a Hollywood agent. After working on "The Buccaneer," he was placed under contract at Paramount.

In the late `60s, Hart became a filmmaker, producing educational, sales and travel films. He later supervised post-production on the TV series "Quincy, M.E."

In addition to his wife of 52 years, Hart is survived by his daughter, Robyn Proiette.

Zakes Mokae, a Tony-winning South African actor whose partnership with his countryman, the playwright Athol Fugard, in plays like “The Blood Knot,” “Boesman and Lena” and “Master Harold ... and the Boys,” brought the insidious psychological brutality of apartheid to the attention of a world audience, died in Las Vegas on Friday. He was 75 and lived in Las Vegas and Cape Town.

The cause was complications of a stroke he had on May 6, said his wife, Madelyn. He had previously received diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, she said.

Mr. Mokae, who was black, and Mr. Fugard, who is white, were part of a drama collective in South Africa in the 1950s. In 1960, when they performed together in Mr. Fugard’s play about brothers with skins of different hues, “The Blood Knot,” it was the first time, Mr. Fugard said in an interview Monday, that black and white performers had appeared on the same stage in South Africa. The play not only defied a national taboo, but also propelled Mr. Fugard to international fame as a playwright and Mr. Mokae to a rich and varied career in theater, film and television.

The play’s local fame persuaded an English producer to open it in London, where Mr. Mokae continued to act in it, though Mr. Fugard did not. It was a sensation (despite a scathing review by Kenneth Tynan). As Mr. Fugard continued to explore the corrosive effects of racial separatism on the individual psyches of both blacks and whites in subsequent plays, Mr. Mokae took on key roles in several of them. In “Boesman and Lena,” about a mixed-race couple migrating from one bleak settlement to another, both emotionally embittered and inextricably yoked by their predicament, Mr. Mokae appeared in the 1970 American premiere Off Broadway, with Ruby Dee and James Earl Jones. Mr. Mokae first played an old black man, nearly incapable of communicating, who nonetheless befriends Lena, and later took over for Mr. Jones as Boesman.

In “A Lesson From Aloes” he played a political activist who confronts a white man, a former friend he fears may be a government informer, taking the role in regional theater and appearing as an understudy to Mr. Jones on Broadway.

And in 1982 he won a Tony for his performance as Sam, one of two servants working in a tea room in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in “Master Harold,” the first of Mr. Fugard’s works to have its world premiere outside of South Africa. In the play Sam looms as a surrogate father for a spoiled white teenager, whose frustrations with his actual parents result in the eventual manifestation of his ugly, racist upbringing. The play had its roots in his own childhood, Mr. Fugard said, and the character of Sam in two men he himself had known.

“I knew I wanted Zakes in that defining role in the play,” Mr. Fugard said.

Zakes Makgona Mokae (pronounced ZAYKES Muh-KWA-nuh Mo-KYE) was born in Johannesburg on Aug. 5, 1934. In vicious times in South Africa, he was jailed several times as a young man. He was playing saxophone in a jazz band in the late 1950s when he was introduced to Mr. Fugard by a black journalist, Bloke Modisane, who was helping Mr. Fugard create a theater that was specifically about South African life, a theater that did not exist at the time. He had had no previous acting experience, but Mr. Fugard, sensing a bond between them, cast him in two plays even before “The Blood Knot.” When “The Blood Knot” was revived by the Yale Repertory Company in the United States in 1985, with Mr. Fugard and Mr. Mokae again acting together, it was, Mr. Fugard said, among the most emotional occasions of his life.

After “The Blood Knot” opened in London, Mr. Mokae was barred from returning to South Africa. He did not return until 1982, when he learned his brother James was to be hanged for murders committed during a robbery, though it was unclear whether James was present during the killings. Mr. Mokae, who learned of the death sentence on the night he won his Tony Award, returned to Johannesburg in time to witness his brother’s execution.

In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1966, divorced in 1978 and then remarried in 1985, he is survived by two sisters and two brothers in South Africa; a daughter, Santlo Chontay Mokae, of Atlanta; and three grandchildren. Mrs. Mokae said they moved back to South Africa in 2005, while his mind was still mostly intact, “so he could live under freedom there and have some memory of it.”

Mr. Mokae’s many films included “The Comedians,” “Darling,” “Cry Freedom” and “A Dry White Season.” In 1993 he was nominated for a Tony for a supporting role in “The Song of Jacob Zulu,” a first play by a white playwright, Tug Yourgrau, about the South African trial of a black activist. Mr. Mokae played a man who had spent much of his life in prison.

“If you’re a black man in South Africa and you’ve never been in prison there’s something wrong with you,” Mr. Mokae said in an interview with The New York Times at the time, adding that a tirade spewed by his character had grown out of conversations he had with Mr. Yourgrau.

“Tug hasn’t been in prison a lot with black folks, so I had to talk about it with him,” Mr. Mokae said. “It’s true that when they count you at night they walk on your face with their boots. And they do it all night. All night, somebody’s being beaten. Somebody’s screaming. That stuff to me, it’s real. You have to tell a white person, ‘That’s what it is,’ so that he gets it, the filth and the stink, the kind of poetry that comes out of that.”

Frank (Junior) Coghlan Jr. (March 15, 1916 – September 7, 2009) was an American actor. He made 129 film and television appearances between 1920 and 1974.[1]

He was born in New Haven, Connecticut and during World War II enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a Naval aviator. Coghlan made a career of the Navy after the war and became a technical advisor to Hollywood films and television series made about the U.S. Navy. [2] Frank Coghlan died in his home in Saugus on September 7, 2009.

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http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090920a9.html

Body found on Mount Arafune may be missing cartoonist Usui


MAEBASHI, Gunma Pref. (Kyodo) A body thought to be that of missing
cartoonist Yoshito Usui, the creator of "Crayon Shinchan," was found on
a mountain straddling Gunma and Nagano prefectures Saturday morning,
police said.


The body, which was found by a climber at the base of a steep cliff on
Mount Arafune, will be recovered Sunday to determine if it is that of
the 51-year-old cartoonist, who went missing Sept. 11, the police said.


Usui told his family he was going hiking on Mount Arafune that morning
and would return to his home in Kasukabe, Saitama Prefecture, by
evening, the police said. His family reported him missing the next day.


The Saitama, Gunma and Nagano prefectural police forces have been
conducting a joint search for him ever since.


Usui started drawing "Crayon Shinchan," the story of feisty
kindergartner Shinnosuke Nohara and his family in Kasukabe, in a comic
book published by Futabasha Publishers Ltd. in 1990. The popular cartoon
series was adapted for both television and film.


The city of Kasukabe issued a special residence card to the Nohara
family to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the municipality, and has
also been using Shinchan as a mascot for its child-rearing campaign
since April.

Mary Travers, one-third of the hugely popular 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, has died.

The band’s publicist, Heather Lylis, says Travers died at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut on Wednesday. She was 72 and had battled leukemia for several years.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32886244/ns/entertainment-music/

Patrick Swayze succumbs to pancreatic cancer: ‘Dirty Dancing’ star, 57, battled disease since January 2008

Patrick Swayze, the hunky actor who danced his way into viewers’ hearts with “Dirty Dancing” and then broke them with “Ghost,” died Monday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57.

“Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months,” said a statement released Monday evening by his publicist, Annett Wolf. No other details were given.

Fans of the actor were saddened to learn in March 2008 that Swayze was suffering from a particularly deadly form of cancer.

He had kept working despite the diagnosis, putting together a memoir with his wife and shooting “The Beast,” an A&E drama series for which he had already made the pilot. It drew a respectable 1.3 million viewers when the 13 episodes ran in 2009, but A&E said it had reluctantly decided not to renew it for a second season.

Swayze said he opted not to use painkilling drugs while making “The Beast” because they would have taken the edge off his performance. He acknowledged that time might be running out given the grim nature of the disease.

When he first went public with the illness, some reports gave him only weeks to live, but his doctor said his situation was “considerably more optimistic” than that.

“I’d say five years is pretty wishful thinking,” Swayze told ABC’s Barbara Walters in early 2009. “Two years seems likely if you’re going to believe statistics. I want to last until they find a cure, which means I’d better get a fire under it.”

‘Dancing’ made him a star
A three-time Golden Globe nominee, Swayze became a star with his performance as the misunderstood bad-boy Johnny Castle in “Dirty Dancing.” As the son of a choreographer who began his career in musical theater, he seemed a natural to play the role.

A coming-of-age romance starring Jennifer Grey as an idealistic young woman on vacation with her family and Swayze as the Catskills resort’s sexy (and much older) dance instructor, the film made great use of both his grace on his feet and his muscular physique.

It became an international phenomenon in the summer of 1987, spawning albums, an Oscar-winning hit song in “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life,” stage productions and a sequel, 2004’s “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights,” in which he made a cameo.

Swayze performed and co-wrote a song on the soundtrack, the ballad “She’s Like the Wind,” inspired by his wife, Lisa Niemi. The film also gave him the chance to utter the now-classic line, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

And it allowed him to poke fun at himself on a “Saturday Night Live” episode, in which he played a wannabe Chippendales dancer alongside the corpulent — and frighteningly shirtless — Chris Farley.

A major crowd-pleaser, the film drew only mixed reviews from critics, though Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, “Given the limitations of his role, that of a poor but handsome sex-object abused by the rich women at Kellerman’s Mountain House, Mr. Swayze is also good. ... He’s at his best — as is the movie — when he’s dancing.”

Swayze followed that up with the 1989 action flick “Road House,” in which he played a bouncer at a rowdy bar. But it was his performance in 1990’s “Ghost” that showed his vulnerable, sensitive side. He starred as a murdered man trying to communicate with his fiancee (Demi Moore) — with great frustration and longing — through a psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg.

Swayze said at the time that he fought for the role of Sam Wheat (director Jerry Zucker wanted Kevin Kline) but once he went in for an audition and read six scenes, he got it.

Why did he want the part so badly? “It made me cry four or five times,” he said of Bruce Joel Rubin’s Oscar-winning script in an AP interview.

Henry Gibson, the quintessential character actor who played Nazis, priests, drunks and nosy neighbors during a 45-year career that included a stint as an original cast member on 'Laugh-In,' died Monday at his home in Malibu. His son, James, said Gibson died after a brief battle with cancer. He was 73.

Beginning with a role in 'The Nutty Professor' in 1963, Gibson worked steadily until just last year. His big break arrived in 1968 when he began a 3-year stint on 'Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In,' where each week he would hold a flower and read a poem.

The rest of the 1960s and 1970s were spent working on acclaimed TV shows, including 'Love, American Style,' and more meaty film projects like Robert Altman's 1975 country music opus, 'Nashville,' for which Gibson earned a Golden Globes nomination.

Arnold Laven, a director and producer of movies and TV shows who represented one-third of the prolific Levy-Gardner-Laven production team, died Sept. 13 at Tarzana Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 87.

During World War II, Laven -- who got his start as an assistant to Jack Warner at Warner Bros. -- served in the First Motion Picture Unit stationed at Fort (Hal) Roach (Studios) in Culver City making training films alongside the likes of Ronald Reagan, Clark Gable and William Holden.

There, he met Jules V. Levy and Arthur Gardner. After the war and stints as script supervisors and assistant directors, the three formed Levy-Gardner-Laven Prods. in 1951. It would become one of the longest-running partnerships in Hollywood history.

Their first feature, the Laven-directed "Without Warning" (1952), about a murderous gardener in Los Angeles, was made on a shoestring for $70,000 and launched the trio's journey. During the next three decades, Levy-Gardner-Laven would produce four television series and more than 20 features.

Laven's TV directing credits (both for and outside his production company) included episodes of such popular shows as "The Big Valley," "The Rifleman," "Mannix," "Ironside," "The Six Million Dollar Man," "The Rockford Files," "Fantasy Island," "Eight Is Enough," "ChiPs," "Hill Street Blues" and "The A-Team."

He directed such films as "Down Three Dark Streets" (1954), starring Edward G. Robinson; "Slaughter on 10th Avenue" (1957), toplined by Walter Matthau; "The Rack" (1956), starring Paul Newman; "Anna Lucasta" (1959), with Sammy Davis Jr. and Eartha Kitt; "Geronimo" (1962), starring Chuck Connors; and "Sam Whiskey" (1969) starring Burt Reynolds.

In 1957, Laven and his partners were developing a Western for Dick Powell's "Zane Grey Theater" and collaborating with a new screenwriter, Sam Peckinpah. The series, about a settler particularly adept at shooting a rifle, needed something to separate it from the many Westerns then on the air and in development.

Laven looked to his own relationship with his son Larry and told Peckinpah to foster a father-son relationship. The show, "The Rifleman," starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford, became one of the most successful of the 1960s.

Levy-Gardner-Laven also produced TV shows "The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor" and "The Big Valley," with Barbara Stanwyck.

Most recently, Laven helped with the launch of "The Rifleman" on Hulu to celebrate the show's 50th anniversary.

Levy died in 2003. Gardner, 99, still comes to work every day at Levy-Gardner-Laven offices in Beverly Hills, according to his son, Steven Gardner.

In addition to his son Larry, Laven's survivors include Wally, his wife of more than 58 years; daughter Barbara; and sister Rennie Skepner.


In 1980, he played an Illinois Nazi going after a pair of soul-singing louts in 'The Blues Brothers' and later in the decade played the villainous neighbor in Tom Hanks' hit 'The Burbs.'

Other memorable films include a 'Gremlins' sequel, Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Magnolia,' and most recently a turn as a clergyman who gets an earful from Vince Vaughn in 'Wedding Crashers.'

Until last year, he carried on a recurring role on 'Boston Legal.'

Born James Bateman in Germantown, Pa., Gibson began acting professionally at age 8. He is survived by his wife and three sons.

DETROIT - Monte Clark, who coached the Detroit Lions for seven seasons and was an assistant coach for Miami when the Dolphins went 17-0 in 1972, has died. He was 72.

The Lions say in a news release that Clark died Wednesday night of a bone marrow malignancy associated with lung and liver disease at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Clark coached Detroit from 1978-84 and compiled a 63-61-1 record in the regular season. He led the Lions to the playoffs in 1982-83, the first time the club made consecutive postseason appearances since its three straight playoff runs from 1952-54.

Survivors include Clark's wife of 52 years Charlotte, three sons and eight grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

Italian Job screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin dies aged 77;
Troy Kennedy Martin, screenwriter behind "The Italian Job"
as well as Z-Cars and Edge of Darkness on TV, dies of cancer ...
Guardian/UK
September 18, 2009

Troy Kennedy Martin, the screenwriter responsible for Edge of Darkness
and The Italian Job, died yesterday of liver cancer.

Kennedy Martin, 77, had a long career as a TV and film writer,
beginning in the late 1950s with his first TV play, Incident at Echo Six, for the BBC.

In the early 1960s he created the long-running BBC drama "Z-Cars",
which broke new ground in the degree of realism it brought to
the depiction of a northern police force at work.

Kennedy Martin moved into film writing with The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine, in 1967
and then Kelly's Heroes, a second world war action comedy featuring Clint Eastwood.

His later TV work included Reilly - Ace of Spies, for ITV; and Edge of Darkness,
the critically lauded 1985 BBC thriller starring Bob Peck as a policeman who becomes embroiled in an international conspiracy to convert nuclear waste into plutonium.

In 1962 Troy Kennedy Martin, who has died aged 77, created Z
Cars, writing the first nine episodes of the groundbreaking
realistic police series and returning in 1978 to polish off
the last one. In 1969 he scripted The Italian Job, which
remains one of the most popular British movies of all time.
At a screening years later, he observed the audience joining
Michael Caine in yelling out the familiar lines such as
"You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" Both of
these works are regarded as major events in screen history.
Innovative and influential, Kennedy Martin showed that
quality drama could be accessible. His nuclear thriller,
Edge of Darkness (1985), one of the key television works of
the decade, was repeated on BBC1 a mere 10 days after the
final episode had been transmitted on BBC2. His ITV
production Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983) was also highly
praised and was one of several works screened at his 2006
British Film Institute retrospective.

Kennedy Martin was born on the Isle of Bute, off the west
coast of Scotland. His father was an engineer and his mother
a teacher. Moving frequently because of the second world war
and his father's work, his was a talented and creative
family. His younger brother, Ian, is also a scriptwriter,
the creator of two other police series, Juliet Bravo and The
Sweeney, as well as many other works including the recent
critically acclaimed play Berlin Hanover Express. Their
surviving sister, Mo, was a member of the folk group the
Tinkers.

The family established themselves in north London, only to
have the household income, never large, halved by the death
of Troy's mother when he was 15. The Catholic church helped
to keep them afloat, and Troy went to Finchley Catholic
grammar school, followed by Trinity College Dublin.

According to Ian: "Troy's first plan after national service
would have been the Foreign Office, but he did not have the
right background. He must have picked up the idea that a
slim volume of poetry or novel would get him in." A novel
was in fact written, Beat on a Damask Drum (1959), but this
was not what kickstarted his career. "Troy wrote an article
about boy soldiers in Cyprus and the BBC asked him to come
in and talk about turning it into a play," his brother
recalled.

Based on his own experiences during national service as an
officer with the Gordon Highlanders, this became the
television play Incident at Echo 6, screened in 1958. It
began a long CV which is about to become even longer with
the release in January of the Mel Gibson film version of
Edge of Darkness. Although Kennedy Martin did not work on
the movie, it is based on his television series and has the
same director, Martin Campbell.


Other films included Kelly's Heroes (1970), Red Heat (1988),
Hostile Waters (1997) and Red Dust (2004). Two of his
Wednesday Plays went out in 1965 and a five-part adaptation
of Angus Wilson's The Old Men at the Zoo was transmitted in
1983. He also wrote episodes of many series such as Redcap
and The Sweeney, as well as the film Sweeney 2 (1978). Two
further scripts remain unfilmed: Troppo, a South Seas
environmental thriller, and Ferrari, which captured the life
of the motor racing champion Enzo Ferrari.

"Very often he wrote 'spec' - uncommissioned - scripts,"
recalls his agent, Elaine Steel. "With Edge of Darkness, the
BBC didn't know what they were getting. It started out as a
thing about the Knights Templar. When he was talking to
aspiring film writers, he would say that you shouldn't write
to a formula. You should start writing where you felt like
writing, and that might mean starting in the middle of the
script, as he sometimes did."

His work was powerfully - but not overtly - political. He
was not agitprop. He joined the Labour party and went on
anti-war marches. He was critical of the bureaucratic
direction he felt the BBC had taken over the last 30 years.
At a meeting during which the then director general, John
Birt, asked a gathering of scriptwriters for their thoughts,
he showed that, however affable in person he was, it was
just as well that he had not taken up diplomacy as the day
job. "Well, you see John, actually you're a Leninist," he
informed Birt. "You've replaced a rigid and uncreative
bureaucracy with an even more rigid and less creative
bureaucracy." Oddly enough, this did not torpedo his BBC
career.

A talented, generous and agreeable man, he was dedicated to
his work. He married the Z Cars cast member Diane Aubrey in
1967 and remained devoted to their two children after their
divorce. He moved out of the flat in Notting Hill, west
London, where he had lived during most of his career, and
spent his last two years in Ditchling, West Sussex, after
Luke Holland's television series A Very English Village had
alerted Kennedy Martin to the attractions of the area. Had
it not been for his sudden illness, he would have been
speaking to the local film society at its forthcoming 40th
anniversary screening of The Italian Job (he had no
connection with the less iconic remake of 2003, starring
Mark Wahlberg).

He is survived by his children Sophie and Matthew, his
grandchildren Tomas and Ella, his brother Ian and his sister
Maureen.

John Caughie writes: Troy Kennedy Martin's death is a
reminder of the importance of a tradition of popular and
risky television drama over the last 50 years. From his
six-part anthology Storyboard (1961), produced by his
co-conspirator James MacTaggart, Troy's aim was "to tell a
story in visual terms", breaking free of a theatrical
naturalism in which stories were told by actors talking
while the camera looked on. "We were going to destroy
naturalism, if possible, before Christmas." His article for
Encore in 1964, Nats Go Home!, was a manifesto for a
television drama that mattered, experimented, and aspired to
be bigger than the box that contained it.

The creative edginess of Edge of Darkness lies in a
narrative in which something real is at stake; a script that
takes risks with credulity; performances and a visual style
that keep faith with the risks; and an ethical seriousness
that inscribes what is at stake on the emotions. The sheer
volume and availability of television invite formulae and
familiarity. It requires a rogue imagination to shake the
routines loose, and Troy provided that kind of imagination.
Edge of Darkness embodies an avant-garde sensibility in a
popular thriller, stretching the conventions without quite
breaking them, and pushing on the boundaries of what popular
television can do.

Just before his diagnosis with a brain tumour and lung
cancer, Troy delivered four feature-length scripts for the
global warming thriller Broken Light, inspired by James
Lovelock's Revenge of Gaia.

Film and TV director Bernard Kowalski died Oct. 26th 2007. He was 78. Kowalski started out at AIP directing HOT ROD GIRL NIGHT OF THE BLOOD BEAST and ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES. He later went into TV but occasional returned to the big screen with unusual features like a STILETTO KRAKATOA-EAST OF JAVA MACHO CALLAHAN SSSSS and a few others. TV credits include episodes of THE UNTOUCHABLES MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE RAWHIDE and many made for TV films.


Director Senkichi Taniguchi who died Oct. 29th 2007 in Tokyo at the age of 95.



A childhood friend of Akira Kurosawa, Taniguchi made his directorial debut in 1947 with THE SNOW TRAIL which Kurosawa wrote. He later penned THE QUIET DUEL which Kurosawa directed. Both films starred Toshiro Mifune. His films included MAN AGAINST MAN, THE LOST WORLD OF SINBAD, THE GAMBLING SAMURAI, MAN IN THE STORM and KEY OF KEYS which Woody Allen later redubbed as WHAT'S UP TIGER LILY?.

Classic kung fu vet Wong Yue dies at age 53
News by Mark Pollard 2008.05.20

Following a recent decline in health amid growing substance abuse, Wong Yue, star of kung fu classics THE SPIRITUAL BOXER and DIRTY HO died on May 5th at the age of 53. The announcement was made on May 15th by his brother-in-law, famous action director Tony Ching Siu-tung, who put to rest early speculation that Wong has committed suicide.

According to Ching, Wong died from acute hepatitis. In addition to suffering from drug abuse, Wong had in recent years, undergone invasive surgery that may have weakened him further.

Wong began his film career at Shaw Brothers in the early 1970s. After initial roles in straight comedies and dramas, action director Lau Kar-leung began training him in kung fu and cast him in THE SPIRITUAL BOXER in 1975. It was a groundbreaking mix of sophisticated kung fu choreography and humor that catapulted the previously non-fighting actor into instant fame as the world’s first comedic martial arts star. He subsequently starred in a variety of kung fu classics for SB and independent filmmakers.

Much of Wong’s best performances were under the direction of his mentor Lau Kar-leung. Some of Wong Yue’s career highlights include starring roles in HE HAS NOTHING BUT KUNG FU (1977), DIRTY HO (1979), SWIFT SWORD (1980), KID FROM KWANGTUNG (1982), and CRAZY SHAOLIN DISCIPLES (1985).

John Phillip Law, 70; actor played opposite Fonda in 'Barbarella'
By Claire Noland, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
5:05 PM PDT, May 14, 2008
John Phillip Law, a tall, blond actor who cut a striking figure as the blind angel opposite Jane Fonda in 1968's "Barbarella" and in other film roles, has died. He was 70.

Law died Tuesday at his Los Angeles home, his ex-wife, Shawn Ryan, said. The cause of death was not announced.

Born in Los Angeles on Sept. 7, 1937, to L.A. County Deputy Sheriff John Law and actress Phyllis Sallee, Law decided to become an actor after taking drama classes at the University of Hawaii.

He moved to New York in the early 1960s, studied with Elia Kazan at the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater and landed bit parts on Broadway. He went to Europe and found work in a handful of Italian films, where he caught the attention of Norman Jewison. The director cast Law as Alexei Kolchin, a young Soviet submariner who wins the heart of a teenage baby-sitter in "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," his 1966 Cold War comedy set in New England.

Law's next break came in Roger Vadim's science-fiction fantasy starring Fonda, who was then married to the director. Equipped with oversize, feathery wings, Law's bronzed angel Pygar shields Fonda's gun-toting, go-go-boot-wearing heroine in her intergalactic adventures.

After gaining notice for his roles in "Hurry Sundown" (1967), "The Sergeant" (1968) opposite Rod Steiger, and "The Red Baron" (1970), Law starred as the ruthless Robin Stone in "The Love Machine," a 1971 version of Jacqueline Susann's pulp novel. The movie flopped.

Law, who mastered Italian and Spanish in his European travels, worked steadily in Hollywood and abroad, appearing in such action-adventure movies as "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1974), "The Cassandra Crossing" (1977) and "Tarzan the Ape Man" (1981), among others. He also had a stint playing Jim Grainger on the daytime television drama "The Young and the Restless."

At the beginning of his career in the '60s, Law lived in a 1924 Los Feliz mansion with his brother Tom, who had been the road manager for Peter, Paul and Mary. The brothers rented rooms to up-and-coming singers and artists, including Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and Tiny Tim, turning the home into a vibrant salon of emerging pop-culture icons. Life at the Castle, as it was known, was documented in “Flashing on the Sixties,” a 1987 collection of photos and text by Tom's former wife, Lisa Law.

Besides his brother, Law is survived by daughter, Dawn Law, and a grandson.

'MASH' writer Larry Gelbart dies at 81
Gelbart, who was diagnosed with cancer this year, died at his home in
Beverly Hills. He also wrote for Broadway and the movies, including
'Tootsie.'

By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times
September 11, 2009

Larry Gelbart, the award-winning comedy writer best known for
developing the landmark TV series "MASH," co-writing the book for the
hit Broadway musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum"
and co-writing the classic movie comedy "Tootsie," died this morning.
He was 81.

Gelbart, who was diagnosed with cancer in June, died at his home in
Beverly Hills, said his wife, Pat.

Jack Lemmon once described the genial, quick-witted Gelbart as "one of
the greatest writers of comedy to have graced the arts in this
century."

Gelbart's more than 60-year career began in radio during World War II
when he was a 16-year-old student at Fairfax High School in Los
Angeles. He wrote for "Duffy's Tavern" and radio shows starring Eddie
Cantor, Joan Davis, Jack Paar, Jack Carson and Bob Hope, with whom he
traveled overseas when Hope entertained the troops.

He moved into television with Hope in 1950 and spent the next few
years writing for the comedian as well as for Red Buttons' comedy-
variety series.

In 1955, Gelbart joined the fabled writing staff of "Caesar's Hour,"
Sid Caesar's post-"Your Show of Shows" TV comedy-variety series. Among
his fellow writers were Neil Simon and Mel Brooks.

In the writers' room, as colleague Carl Reiner later told Time
magazine, Gelbart "popped jokes like popcorn."

Indeed, after he went to work for "Caesar's Hour," Hope contacted
Caesar to say, "I'll trade you two oil wells for one Gelbart."

During his time on Caesar's show, Gelbart shared three Emmy
nominations for comedy writing -- in 1956, '57 and '58 -- and earned
the admiration of Brooks, who once described him as "the fastest of
the fast, the wittiest man in the business."

Moving to Broadway in 1961, Gelbart bombed with the musical "The
Conquering Hero," for which he wrote the book. The show closed after
eight performances.


But Gelbart returned to Broadway in triumph in 1962 with the hit
Stephen Sondheim comedy musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
the Forum." Gelbart and Burt Shevelove wrote the book, which they
based on the comedies of the ancient Roman playwright Plautus.


"Forum," whose cast included Zero Mostel, ran on Broadway for more
than two years and won a Tony Award for best musical, as well as a
Tony Award for Gelbart as coauthor.


Gelbart later wrote the 1976-'78 Broadway comedy "Sly Fox," his
updated adaptation of Ben Jonson's "Volpone"; the 1989 comedy
"Mastergate"; and the book for the 1989-'92 Broadway comedy musical
"City of Angels," the Tony Award best musical winner for which Gelbart
won a Tony for best book of a musical.


For films, he wrote the screenplay for "Neighbors" and co-wrote "The
Notorious Landlady," "The Wrong Box," "Not With My Wife, You Don't!,"
"Movie Movie" and "Blame It on Rio."


He also received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for "Oh, God,"
the 1977 comedy starring George Burns and John Denver. And he shared a
screenwriting Oscar nominationwith Murray Schisgal and Don McGuire for
"Tootsie," the 1982 comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange.


Among his other credits: He wrote the screenplays for the HBO movies
"Barbarians at the Gate" (1993), "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (1997)
and "And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself" (2003).


But most famously there was "MASH," the long-running series whose
blend of laughter and tragedy made TV history.


Set in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War,
TV's "MASH" grew out of director Robert Altman's hit 1970 movie
written by Ring Lardner Jr., which was based on the 1968 novel by
Richard Hooker (the pen name of Dr. Richard Hornberger, who had been a
military surgeon in Korea).


Gelbart and his family were living in London, and he was producing the
British TV show "The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine" in 1971 when
producer-director Gene Reynolds called him about writing a pilot
script for a TV series based on "MASH."


In writing the pilot, Gelbart recalled in his 1998 memoir "Laughing
Matters," he knew that it "was going to have to be a whole lot more
than funny. Funny was easy. How not to trivialize human suffering by
trying to be comic about it, that was the challenge."


"MASH" debuted on CBS in 1972, with Gelbart serving as executive
script consultant. He and Reynolds were both executive producers of
the show -- and shared Emmys -- when it won the award for outstanding
comedy series in 1974.


Gelbart's influence on "MASH," Reynolds told the New York Times in
1989, was "seminal, basic and enormous."


"Larry not only had the wit and the jokes," Reynolds said, "he had a
point of view. He not only had the ribald spirit, he had the
sensibility to the premise -- the wastefulness of war."


Looking at the show's success, Gelbart told the New York Times, "It
was a time -- it still is the time, to some degree -- of great
disillusionment. And the characters filled a hero vacuum. I think they
behaved in the way a viewer would like to think they would behave in a
stressful situation."


A sense of disillusionment, he said, was part of his own personality.


"I'm not a comfortable person," he said. "There are a lot of elbows
inside me bumping up against one another. I think that if you're a
reasonably well-informed, caring person, you think life is basically
sad . . . that this is a sad world we live in.


"The thing that most appealed to me about 'MASH' was not even the
movie. It was the theme song ['Suicide is Painless' written by Johnny
Mandel and Mike Altman], the movie music, which was written in a very
minor key and appealed to me emotionally. And I know that I pegged all
that comedy to that sound."


As for the regulation-breaking surgeon Hawkeye Pierce -- the lead
character played by Alan Alda -- Gelbart said, "I didn't have to think
of why he was saying what he said. He was saying what I felt. I mean,
he is an idealized me."


Hawkeye, he said, "is capable -- that is, at work, at what he does.
He's an idealist. He's a romantic. Somebody who cares about himself
and other people. He's often frustrated by whatever particular system
he finds himself fighting against."


"MASH" ran for 11 years. But Gelbart's involvement ended in 1976 after
four years and 97episodes. As he later told The Times, "After four
years, I had given it my best, my worst and everything in between."


The son of eastern European immigrants -- his barber-father was from
Latvia and his seamstress mother was from Dumbrova, Poland -- Gelbart
was born Feb. 25, 1928 in Chicago. Growing up on Chicago's mostly
Jewish West Side, he spoke only Yiddish until he was 4.


Gelbart, who studied clarinet for 10 years while growing up -- "I
wanted to be the next Benny Goodman" -- inherited his sense of humor
from his Polish-born mother.


"My mother was extremely witty and caustic," he told People magazine
in 1998, "and my father knew more jokes than anyone I've ever known."


In 1942, when he was 14, Gelbart's family moved to Los Angeles, where
his father's Beverly Hills clientele included actors and agents.


Gelbart had his father to thank for the launch of his comedy writing
career in 1944 at age 16.


One of his father's show-business customers was comedian Danny Thomas,
who had a weekly segment playing a Walter Mitty-type character on
"Maxwell House Coffee Time," a radio show starring comedienne Fanny
Brice.


After Gelbart's father boasted that his son had a gift for writing
comedy, Thomas told him, "Have the kid write something and let's see
just how good he is."


At the time, Gelbart recalled in his memoir, "My only real 'gift' was
for showing off, doing imitations, putting together sketches,
speeches, monologues at Fairfax High School."


But he wrote a sample comedy sequence for Thomas, who showed it to the
radio show's head writer, and Gelbart suddenly had an after-school job
writing comedy for "Maxwell House Coffee Time."


He was an 18-year-old staff writer on radio's popular "Duffy's Tavern"
when he received a post-war draft notice.


But his career was not sidelined by his military service: Assigned to
Armed Forces Radio Service, he continued to live at home while writing
for the star-studded AFRS variety show "Command Performance," as well
as continuing his other radio-writing jobs.


In December, 2008, the still-professionally active Gelbart found
himself the subject of an Internet hoax on the online bulletin board
alt.obituaries, which reported that he was "gravely ill . . . from a
massive stroke."


He was fine, of course -- and in fine comedic fettle. Referring to his
alleged pending demise, he e-mailed alt.obituaries: "Does that mean I
can stop exercising?"


But ever the re-writer, Gelbart came up with another witty response in
a brief chat with an inquiring Los Angeles Times reporter: "I was
dead, but I'm better now."

He continued writing until three weeks ago, said his wife.

Gelbart married his wife Pat, a Broadway actress and singer known
professionally as Patricia Marshall and the mother of three children
from a former marriage, in 1956. They had two children, Adam and Becky.

In addition to his wife and two children, Gelbart is survived by his
stepchildren, Gary and Paul Markowitz; six grandchildren and two great-
grandchildren.

Paul Burke, the New Orleans-born actor best known for his roles in the
"Naked City," "12 O'Clock High" and "Dynasty" television series, died
early Sunday in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 83.

Mr. Burke was born in 1926, the son of boxer Martin Burke. The family
owned the nightclub and restaurant Marty Burke's in the French Quarter
during World War II, and Mr. Burke spent much of his childhood around
the family business.


He made his way to Hollywood at the age of 19, where he studied acting
at the Pasadena Playhouse school of theatre arts.


At first, Mr. Burke was cast in small roles in films and became
protege to Warner Bros. director Lloyd Bacon. He travelled back and
forth between Hollywood and New York, playing guest roles in
television series. In 1957, Mr. Burke landed his first leading role as
Dr. Noah McCann in NBC's live television series "Noah's Ark."


He also did numerous guest roles in TV series and starred in several
other series including ABC's "Harbourmaster" and NBC's "Five
Fingers."


Mr. Burke was nominated for an Emmy twice for his role as Det. Adam
Flint in the Emmy Award winning series "Naked City," which he joined
in its second season when the format changed from half-hour to hour
long drama. With storylines inspired by real life crime and its
gritty, semi-documentary shooting style on location in New York City,
the series attracted the brightest up and coming talents of the New
York stage to guest roles -- Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, Jon Voight
among them.


Mr. Burke later went on to a starring role in ABC's popular series,
"12 O'Clock High" as Col. Joseph Anson Gallagher.


Throughout his career he was a staple in television series, utilized
most frequently by friend and colleague Aaron Spelling. In the 1980s
Mr. Burke found himself in one of the most widely watched series of
the time, "Dynasty," as the infamous Congressman Neal McVane who
framed Alexis for murder.


Though Mr. Burke spent much of his career in television, he also had
success in feature films. In 1967 the best-selling Jacqueline Susann
novel "Valley of the Dolls" was made into a movie and Mr. Burke was
cast as Lyon Burke, starring alongside Sharon Tate, Patty Duke and
Barbara Parkins.


His other roles in film include leading roles in "The Thomas Crown
Affair" with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and "Daddy's Gone A-
Hunting."


In 1979 Burke married television actress Lyn Peters whom he'd worked
with on "12 O'Clock High." In the past several years the couple had
retired permanently to their Palm Springs home.


Burke is survived by his wife, Lyn, and his three children from his
first marriage, Paula Burke-Lopez, Paul Brian Burke and Dina Burke-
Shawkat( the mother of Alia Shawkat of "Arrested Deveiopment")