Sada Thompson, a Tony- and Emmy-winning actress known for her portrayals of archetypal mothers, from the loving family caretaker and the world-weary, had-it-with-the-kids older woman to the brutalizing harridan and mythical adulteress and murderess, died Wednesday in Danbury, Conn. She was 83.

The cause was lung disease, said her daughter, Liza Sguaglia.

Ms. Thompson had an unusual stage career in that she became a star in New York but was not often on Broadway. She made her name in the 1950s as Off Broadway came to prominence, in plays like “The Misanthrope” and Chekhov’s “Ivanov,” and throughout her career she performed in regional theater productions.

But when she was on Broadway, she made an impression. She won a Tony in 1972 for playing four separate parts — three daughters and their aged mother — in the four vignettes that constitute George Furth’s “Twigs,” directed by Michael Bennett. Her tour de force performance was widely praised, but Ms. Thompson returned to Broadway only twice more, in short-lived shows.

By then she had established herself as “one of the American theater’s finest actresses,” as Walter Kerr described her in The New York Times. She had distinguished herself on Broadway in Edward Albee’s sardonic “American Dream,” in which she played Mommy, the cartoonishly overwhelming wife of a spineless husband, and in Samuel Beckett’s bitterly comic “Happy Days.” Here she played Winnie, a woman facing inevitable doom — she spends the first act buried up to her waist and the second act up to her neck — with determined good cheer.

“Yet beneath these bright superficials,” Clive Barnes wrote in The Times, “Miss Thompson was able to suggest something a good deal deeper, every so often permitting the enamel to crack, the brightness to darken, and letting us glimpse the piteous fears of mortality in Winnie’s heart.”

Away from Broadway, her repertory expanded and her reputation grew. In 1970, in what was probably her star-making performance, she opened Off Broadway in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,” Paul Zindel’s melodrama about a slatternly, self-deluding and tormenting mother of two troubled daughters and the elderly boarder she cares for to pay the rent.

In the summer of 1971 she appeared at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford. Conn., as Christine Mannon, the Civil War-era equivalent of the vengeful Clytemnestra, in “Mourning Becomes Electra” by Eugene O’Neill.

After “Twigs,” Ms. Thompson spent much of her time working in movies and especially on television. She played the country worrywart mother, Mrs. Webb, in the 1977 television film of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” with Hal Holbrook as the stage manager.

Most notably, from 1976 to 1980 she starred as Kate Lawrence, the matriarch of an upper-middle-class family in Pasadena, Calif., in a landmark show, created by Jay Presson Allen, who had adapted “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” for the stage, and produced by Mike Nichols. Its title — “Family” — announced its intention: to be a simple presentation of the fundamental unit of American life. It largely succeeded, melding ordinary daily conflicts with the heightened drama necessary for television entertainment.

“Family” dealt straightforwardly with issues like the marital problems of the Lawrences’ eldest daughter (played at the time by Meredith Baxter Birney); the discovery by the teenage son (Gary Frank) that his long-time best friend was gay; and the distress of the youngest daughter (Kristy McNichol) on overhearing her mother saying that she sometimes wished she hadn’t had her.

“ ‘Family’ represents an extremely difficult television project in that it is trying to salvage the familiar stuff of soap opera for the less superficial probings of the contemporary drama,” John J. O’Connor wrote in The Times during its first season, adding that Ms. Thompson and James Broderick, who played her husband, “achieved a remarkable combination of low-keyed intensity and powerful impact.”

Ms. Thompson was nominated for an Emmy four times in the show’s five seasons, winning in 1978.

Sada Carolyn Thompson was born in Des Moines on Sept. 27, 1927. When she was a girl, her family moved to Fanwood, N.J., where her father, Hugh, became an editor of Turkey World and other farm journals. Sada discovered the power of storytelling when her mother, Corlyss, took her to the movie “The Man Who Played God,” and she was turned toward acting when her parents took her to the Cole Porter musical “Red, Hot and Blue.”

“That was it,” Ms. Thompson recalled in 1971. “To me it was total enchantment. I had to be part of it.”

She graduated with a drama degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University), and she and some fellow students started a summer stock company in Mashpee, Mass. Eventually she and Donald Stewart, whom she met at school and married, moved to New York, where her first professional credit was in 1953, in the original reading of “Under Milkwood,” Dylan Thomas’s poetic rendering of life in a Welsh town, directed by Thomas himself.

“His idea of rehearsals was to hear one reading and say, ‘Perfect, let’s go out for a beer,’ but he was a kind, courteous gentleman,” she once said.

Ms. Thompson lived in Southbury, Conn. In addition to her daughter, of Burbank, Calif., her survivors include her husband, a former executive for Pan American Airlines, and a brother, David, of Gloversville, N.Y.

Her career was peppered with performances in classic works in far-flung theaters. She starred with Elizabeth Taylor in Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes” in London, toured Scandinavia with the Scandinavian Theater Company in Wilder’s “Skin of Our Teeth” and played Lady Macbeth at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego.

“I’d miss not being able to tell a story every night,” she once said, describing why she was loath to give up the stage or the screen. “That really thrills me, that is the greatest! Thousands of years ago, when some caveman told his family about the fight he had that day with a dinosaur, and, in the telling, became the dinosaur, and became himself in the fight — well, there’s your first actor.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/arts/sada-thompson-actress-known-for-maternal-roles-dies-at-83.html


"Lawrence Welk Show" star dies at 87

By RITA SHERROW World Television Editor
Published: 5/11/2011 1:31 PM
Last Modified: 5/11/2011 1:31 PM


Norma Zimmer, internationally known as the Champagne Lady on “The Lawrence Welk Show,” died Tuesday at her home in Brea, Calif. She was 87.


Zimmer, a 5-foot-2-inch blonde, was a featured soloist on the weekly “The Lawrence Welk Show” on commercial TV from 1960 to 1982. The series moved to Public Television in 1987 and continues to air on 276 PBS stations, including at 7 p.m. Saturdays and 5 p.m. Sundays on KOED, channel 11 in Tulsa.

The performer started in The Girl Friends Quartet, which sang with stars including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como, Nat King Cole and more. Her group sang on Crosby’s “White Christmas” album and she appeared alongside the actor in the 1950 film “Mr. Music.” She was also the voice of White Rose in the 1951 animated Disney film “Alice in Wonderland.”

According to press information, she often toured with her friend the Rev. Billy Graham on his evangelistic tours and was a guest soloist at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif.

She was born July 13, 1923 in Larson, Idaho and was reared in Seattle. She wed builder/property developer Randy Zimmer in 1944 and they were married 64 years until his death in 2008. They have two sons and three grandchildren.

“The Lawrence Welk Show” holds the record as the “longest-running, musical-variety weekly series on national television.” It premiered on KTLA in Los Angeles in 1950, then moved to ABC where it aired from 1955 to 1971.

In 1971, Lawrence Welk took it into syndication until 1982 when he retired. In 1987, the show was picked up by the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority. It celebrates its 25th year on public TV starting in September.

Funeral arrangements for Zimmer are pending, according to Susie Dowdy, national publicist for “The Lawrence Welk Show.”


BY Filip Bondy
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

The prolific, playful hand that brought to life cartoon characters Basement Bertha, Yuchie and General Von Steingrabber has been stilled.

Bill Gallo, sports cartoonist at the Daily News for more than half a century and whose career at the paper spanned 70 years, died of complications from pneumonia at 88 in White Plains Hospital late Tuesday night. His passing marks the close of what seemed always to be an endless supply of ink and fun in the pages of The News. Inside our building, Gallo would walk around the big newsroom talking sports, bouncing ideas off coworkers or showing off his latest, comical work to everyone's delight.

"My father is a lasting legend to New York, and to New York sports," said Gallo's son Greg. "He will be forever thought of as a great cartoonist for the Daily News, but he will also be remembered as the gentleman he was to all the people he came across, everybody in the streets of the city. People loved him because he was a special human being."

In recent months, while he fought off emphysema and a series of medical setbacks, Gallo continued to draw his cartoons and write columns from hospital beds and his home, surrounded by trays of colored pencils and erasers, dark pens and paint brushes sticking out of a Dixie cup. He would send his creations by overnight mail or ask a coworker to bring them to the office, checking in often by phone with editors.

"I'm just as enthusiastic about work today as I've ever been," Gallo said shortly before his death. "If I wasn't sick I'd be putting out some great stuff."


Former Toei topper dies
Shigeru Okada oversaw production in studio's heyday
By Mark Schilling
Variety

TOKYO -- Former Toei topper Shigeru Okada, who oversaw production of the studio's iconic samurai and yakuza pics through its 1950s and 1960s heyday, died on Monday of pneumonia in Tokyo at age 87.
Born in Hiroshima in 1924, Okada joined the predecessor to Toei soon after graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1947.

After Toei launched in 1951, Okada took charge of production at the company's Kyoto and Tokyo studios, with a keen eye for the B.O. main chance at a time when demand for local pics was still strong. Toei started churning out samurai swashbuckler and other action fare at a ferocious pace, with production hitting more than 100 pics annually. Soon Toei was atop the B.O. heap and Okada's corporate star was rising.

When television started luring away auds in the early 1960s, Okada and his team responded with a new line of so-called "ninkyo" (code of honor) gang pics starring Koji Tsuruta, Ken Takakura and other top male talent. Mostly set from the end of the feudal era to the dark prewar days, the pics featured loner outlaw heroes upholding traditional gang values such as loyalty and self-sacrifice against unscrupulous gangster enemies.

Though pure fantasy, the pics drew millions of male fans who enjoyed their retro swagger and style. And when the ninkyo boom began to fade at the end of the decade, Okada and uber-producer Koji Shindo deftly switched direction to gang pics that more accurately reflected ruthless contemporary realities. The culmination was the five-part "Battles Without Honor and Humanity" (1973-1974) series that, under helmer Kinji Fukasaku, depicted a violent gang war in Hiroshima with a documentary-like intensity, while luring back younger fans who had abandoned the genre as old-fashioned and formulaic. But a second four-part series (1974-1979) did not scale the same B.O. heights, a symptom of an industry-wide malaise that even Okada could not cure.

Okada served as Toei prexy from 1971 to 1993, then segued to the post of chairman and, in 2006, honorary chairman. As a manager, he was a relentless cost cutter, who viewed pics strictly as products and shifted strategy quickly to meet aud needs. Under Okada, Toei was an early entrant into the toon, TV and soft porn businesses, reaping profits while its more conservative rivals hesitated.

In his later years, Okada became a biz godfather, promoting Japanese pics as head of the industry org Motion Picture Producers Assn. of Japan. He often lent his salty, distinctive presence to industry gatherings, firing off quips to general laughter and applause, though his barbs could also sting. Asked to comment on Hiroyuki Sanada's title perf in "The Twilight Samurai" (2002), Yoji Yamada's Oscar-nommed period drama for rival Shochiku, Okada said "He's a lot better now than when he worked for us."

Okada's son Yusuke is now Toei prexy.