John Hill, better known as "Gentleman" Jerry Valiant died on Thursday at age 68. Canadian-born Hill died in Indiana, where visitation will be held on Sunday afternoon. Read the obituary.
Hill was most-notably a WWWF tag team champion with Johnny Valiant in Vince McMahon, Sr.'s promotion during the 1970s. The tandem held the belts for seven months before dropping to Tito Santana & Ivan Putski.
Hill broke into wrestling in the 1960s as Guy Hill, then he turned into Guy Mitchell in Georgia Championship Wrestling. He settled into Indiana during the 1960s wrestling as the "Assassins" tag team with Joe Tomasso. Their manager? Legendary Bobby Heenan.
In the 1970s, he became "The Stomper" and feuded with The Sheik during the early 1970s when Sheik ran the Detroit territory and delivered plenty of bloodbaths. Hall also held the Detroit version of the World Tag Team Titles with Ben Justice.
Hill joined now-WWE in the late 1970s to be part of the famous "Valiant Brother" stable, culminating with their tag title victory in 1979.
Mark Evanier reports at
http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2010_03_13.html#018657
that comic book artist Violet (aka Valerie) Barclay died on 26 February
at the age of 88. A NYC School of Industrial Arts graduate, Barclay
inked pages for Timely (now Marvel) Comics from 1941 to 1949, a time
when very few women worked as artists in the field. (In 1947, Stan Lee
called her his "Glamourous Girl Inker.") After Timely, Barclay
freelanced for DC and other publishers until 1954, when she left
comics. She later did advertising art for leading clothing
manufacturers.
Film composer Paul Dunlap died on Mar. 11, age 90, in Palm Springs CA.
He composed the score for the Abbott & Costello (final) film, "Dance With
Me, Henry" (1956), and for many of The Three Stooges early-'60s films such
as: "The Three Stooges Meet Hercules" and "The Three Stooges in Orbit"
(1962), plus "The Three Stooges Go Around The World In a Daze" (1963).
A heads-up to Brent in the Three Stooges list for the info.
Reports: Merlin Olsen dies at 69
Posted by Michael David Smith on March 11, 2010 11:07 AM ET
Merlin Olsen, the Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive tackle who
played his entire 15-year career for the Los Angeles Rams, has died at
the age of 69, according to reports.
Howard Balzer of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reports that Olsen died
early this morning. The Cache Valley Daily, a newspaper based in
Olsen's hometown of Logan, Utah, reports that Olsen was diagnosed with
mesothelioma and had been undergoing several rounds of chemotherapy.
Olsen played college football at Utah State, and as a senior in 1961
he won the Outland Trophy as the nation's best lineman.
In 1962 the Rams selected him with the third overall pick in the NFL
draft and the Denver Broncos selected him with the second overall pick
in the AFL draft. He chose the Rams after the rival teams from rival
leagues engaged in a bidding war for his services.
Olsen was worth the money. He was chosen as Rookie of the Year in
1962, and he was selected to the Pro Bowl in each of his first 14 NFL
seasons. He retired after the 1976 season and was inducted into the
Hall of Fame in 1982.
Dorothy Janis, who made a few film appearances at the dawn of the sound era and was the widow of bandleader Wayne King, died Wednesday morning in the Phoenix area, according to musician Lew Williams, who received the news from Janis’ granddaughter. Janis, one of the last surviving performers to have played at least one major role in silent films, was either 98 or 100, depending on the source.
A pretty, petite brunette with sensuous lips — according to (possibly made-up) reports from the period, she was half-Native American — Dorothy Janis was born in Dallas on Feb. 19, 1910 or 1912. Her most notable movie role was that of the half-Pacific Islander, half-white heroine in W. S. Van Dyke’s The Pagan (1929), one of MGM star Ramon Novarro’s biggest box-office hits.
In the film, which has no dialogue but features a music score, Novarro got to sing Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown’s highly popular "Pagan Love Song," at times accompanied by Janis — who actually just mouthed the lyrics; another female voice was heard on the film’s soundtrack.
Shot on location in French Polynesia, the deceptively simple The Pagan also happens to be one of the best productions made during that difficult transition from silent to talking pictures. The paragraph below is from my Novarro biography Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro:
"Similar in theme to White Shadows in the South Seas, The Pagan presents European civilization as indisputably the villain—an uncommon approach in films of the period. On the surface, the story is about a carefree but wealthy half-caste, Henry Shoesmith, Jr., who attempts to please a ruthless white trader so he can romance the man’s ‘Christian duty,’ a pretty half-caste girl. On a deeper level, The Pagan deals with the subversion of the island’s way of life by white invaders, from their belief that the value of nature lies only in pounds and dollars to their imposition of an alien and unsuitable religion. Although both Novarro’s and Janis’s characters are part European, their behavior is all idealized Pacific Islander: playful and innocent. Renée Adorée’s Madge is the only good white character, though, significantly, she is a prostitute and an outcast in her own Euro-Christian society. Frances Marion and Novarro himself wrote the initial treatments—he expressly wanted to emphasize that the ‘pagan’ Henry Shoesmith behaved more like a Christian than the intolerant followers of Jesus—though Dorothy Farnum received the final adaptation credit. John Howard Lawson, one of the future Hollywood Ten, was responsible for the perceptive intertitles."
Before The Pagan, Janis had appeared in three minor releases: the oaters Kit Carson (1928) and The Overland Telegraph, and the drama Fleetwing (1928), playing opposite minor leading man Barry Norton. Her only talkie was Lummox (1930), starring the former wife of cowboy star William S. Hart and 1910s leading lady Winifred Westover, then attempting a motion-picture comeback. Though directed by the renowned Herbert Brenon, an Academy Award nominee in the first year of the awards, Lummox was not a success.
Janis’ only other film appearance was in Harry Garson’s The White Captive, shot on location in Southeast Asia for Universal. In the Sept. 27, 1930, issue of the Norwalk Hour, a brief note mentioned that Garson "reports some of the most remarkable jungle material ever secured and the first to be taken with sound equipment." Perhaps Garson was making that up, or perhaps his work was ruined either during the trip back to California or at some local lab, for The White Captive was deemed unreleasable. The film did, however, gain a certain degree of notoriety when the wife of technician Sidney Desmond Lund, with whom she had recently gotten married, filed a $25,000 lawsuit against Janis for stealing her husband’s affections during the months-long shoot. The lawsuit was eventually dropped.
Janis made no more films after that. At about the time of the scandal she met Wayne King, whom she married in 1932. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1985. "After I met Wayne," Janis would tell author Michael Ankerich nearly six decades later, "it was to heck with it all."
In the early ’90s, Ankerich published an account of his correspondence with the actress in Broken Silence: Conversations With 23 Silent Film Stars. With Ankerich as the middle man, about ten years ago I attempted to interview Dorothy Janis for my Novarro biography. Unfortunately, I never heard back from her.
Recently, thanks to Warner Home Video "on-demand" releases of rare films found in the Time Warner library, Janis was able to watch a good print of The Pagan once again. A family member told Lew Williams "she enjoyed it immensely."
With Dorothy Janis’ passing, I can think of only two surviving performers who had major adult roles in silent feature films: Barbara Kent (Lonesome) and Miriam Seegar (Valley of the Ghosts).
Corey Haim Found Dead
Posted Mar 10th 2010 8:08AM by TMZ Staff
Corey HaimActor Corey Haim died this morning of an apparent overdose, according to LAPD. He was 38.
Police tell us they were called to St. Joseph's hospital in Burbank, CA shortly before 4AM PT to investigate.
Haim shot to fame in the 80s -- when he co-starred in a number of films, including "The Lost Boys," with Corey Feldman.
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