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.

---

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")