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."
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