Film Review Daily
In Memoriam
Michael Darvell
examines the
lives of the recently deceased, including
Mark Blum, Lucia Bosè, Stuart Whitman, Max von Sydow, Michael Medwin, Frances Cuka,
Lynn Cohen, John Shrapnel, Kirk Douglas, Charles Wood, Nicholas Parsons, Terry Jones,
Derek Fowlds, Tony Garnett, Ivan Passer, Buck Henry, Elizabeth Sellars, Jerry Herman,
Sue Lyon, Tony Britton, Claudine Auger, Nicky Henson, John Briley, Anna Karina, Danny
Aiello, René Auberjonois, Michael J. Pollard, Nik Powell and Robert Evans.
JULIE ADAMS (17
October 1926-3 February 2019)
The American actress Julie Adams, who has died aged 92, was born in
Iowa, grew up in Arkansas and moved to
California at age nineteen. Dividing her time between secretarial work and acting lessons, she was spotted by
Paramount
Pictures for Red, Hot
and Blue (1949) with 
Betty
Hutton and Victor Mature. For a while she was in B-westerns
for Lippert Productions. As a fairly stunningly beautiful young woman,
Adams secured a seven-year contract with
Universal-International where she worked with Rock Hudson, Tyrone
Power, Glenn Ford and Van Heflin plus James Stewart
(with Hudson and Kennedy) in Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River.
Following more westerns, including The Lawless Breed
and The Man from the
Alamo, she subsequently appeared in Jack Arnold’s 3-D
horror exploitationer Creature
from the Black Lagoon (1954). A change of first name to
Julia made little difference to her career and she survived as
not much more than just eye candy decoration for genre westerns,
comedies and crime dramas in such pictures as The Looters, Six Bridges to
Cross, The Private War of Major Benson and Slaughter on Tenth
Avenue. After that, television came to her
rescue . She retired in 2018 following work on a short
film, The Lucky
Southern Star, based on her own life story. Julie Adams
was briefly married to the writer and producer Leonard Stern in the
early 1950s and then she married the actor Ray Danton in 1955, with
whom she has two sons, Steve and Mitchell. They divorced in 1978 and
Danton died in
1992.
DANNY AIELLO (20 June 1933-12 December 2019)
The Italian-American actor Danny Aiello, who has died aged 86 after a
brief illness, was a brilliant performer who, for many years, was
usually cast as a typically thuggish gangster in many Hollywood films.
Born into a New York family, his father was a labourer and his mother a
seamstress who mostly raised her large family on her own. Danny worked
early on as a shoeshine boy, a newspaper seller and a bus driver.
Encouraged by his movie heroes Bogart and Cagney, he also went in for
petty crime. On leaving the US Army, he married and settled back in New
York in a slew of menial jobs including work as a bouncer in a comedy
club where he first took to performing but without any training. At the
age of 40 he got his first film role in Bang the Drum Slowly, a
baseball drama with Robert De Niro. 
This led to a part in Coppola’s The
Godfather Part II, and then Martin Ritt’s The Front, with Woody Allen
playing a blacklisted writer in the 1950s. After some TV and stage work
he was in Fingers with Harvey Keitel, Robert Mulligan’s Bloodbrothers
with Paul Sorvino and Richard Gere, James Caan’s Hide in Plain Sight
and Fort Apache, The Bronx with Paul Newman. By 1984 he was appearing
with those other great heavies Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, James Russo,
Burt Young and William Forsythe in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in
America. Woody Allen put him in The Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio
Days, but he may be better remembered for playing the Father in
Madonna’s 'Papa Don’t Preach' video, although appearing opposite Cher in
the triple Oscar-winning Moonstruck also helped his public profile. The
January Man was Pat O’Connor’s take on the NYPD with Kevin Kline, but
it was Spike Lee who gave Aiello his first top-billed film part as Sal
the pizzeria owner in Do the Right Thing (1989) for which Aiello was
Oscar-nominated. Then there was Eddie Murphy’s Harlem Nights, Adrian
Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, Hudson Hawk with Bruce Willis, he was Jack Ruby,
Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassin, in John Mackenzie’s Ruby, Tony in Luc
Besson’s Leon, and Major Hamilton in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter as
well as many more films and TV series. He never stopped working and
there are several of his latest films still to be released. Other work
that Aiello engaged in was singing jazz and standard songs on tour and
also recording them. He was a prolific donor to charities including the
Salvation Army, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, the Frances Aiello
Day Treatment Centre for the blind and deaf, and Covenant House, a
mobile food and shelter unit for the homeless. Aiello was married to
film producer Sandy Cohen from 1955 until his death. They have four
children, Danny (a stuntman who died of pancreatic cancer in 2010),
Rick, Jamie and Stacy. The title of Danny Aiello’s autobiography (2014)
is I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else....
MICHAEL
ANDERSON
(
The London-born
director Michael
Anderson, 
who
has died aged 98, came from an acting family and was himself an
actor in Housemaster (1938) and In Which We
Serve (1942). Beginning as an assistant director on Spy for a Day (1940) and other films,
his debut as a producer, co-writer and co-director with Peter Ustinov
was on Private Angelo (1949). He
established
himself as an international director with Hell
is Sold Out, Will Any Gentleman?,
The Dam Busters,
1984 and Around
the World in Eighty Days. High
profile titles followed, including Yangtse
Incident, Chase a Crooked Shadow
and The Wreck of the Mary Deare. In the 1960s he directed All the Fine Young Cannibals, The Naked Edge, Operation
Crossbow, The
Quiller Memorandum and The Shoes of
the Fisherman. Later films included Doc
Savage, Conduct Unbecoming,
BIBI ANDERSSON (11 November 1935-14 April 2019)
The
Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, who has died aged 83, became known to
the world as one of Ingmar Bergman’s leading ladies. She worked on
stage and on television as well as in films. She began her career
playing small parts and doing commercials until she gained a 
place
at the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s acting school in Stockholm in 1954.
Following a short relationship with Bergman she joined him at the Malmṏ
City Theatre and then appeared in his film Smiles of a Summer Night, which Stephen Sondheim later used as the basis of his musical A Little Night Music. Although she made films with other directors, the very beautiful Andersson did her best work with Bergman, appearing in The
Seventh Seal, Rabies, Wild Strawberries, So Close to Life, The
Magician, The Devil’s Eye, Now About These Women, Persona, The Passion
of Anna, The Touch, Scenes from a Marriage and the TV short Mr Sleeman Is Coming. She also worked with other notable Swedish directors including on Alf Sjṏberg’s Last Pair Out (written by Bergman) and The Island, Stig Olin’s You Are My Adventure, Alf Kjellin’s The Pleasure Garden (also written by Bergman), Vilgot Sjṏman’s The Mistress and My Sister My Love, and Lars-Magnus Lindgren’s Black Palm Trees. Outside of Sweden, Andersson was in Square of Violence with Broderick Crawford, Duel at Diablo with James Garner, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s A Question of Rape, John Huston’s The Kremlin Letter with Richard Boone, Story of a Woman with Robert Stack, a TV movie of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, VortQuality
work in a film that nevertheless fails to hang togetherQuality work in
a film that nevertheless fails to hang togetherex with Rod Taylor, Andrḗ Cayatte’s Question of Love, Anthony Page’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, An Enemy of the People with Steve McQueen, Robert Altman’s Quintet with Paul Newman, Airport ’79 with Alain Delon, Exposed with Rudolf Nureyev, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast and Stephen Poliakoff’s TV movie The Lost Prince. Her last work, in 2010, was a TV series called Arn.
She then retired, following a stroke. Bibi Andersson was married three
times: to the writer-director Kjell Grede, the politician Per
Ahlmark, and Gabriel Mora Baeza. She has one child from her first
marriage.
SUSAN ANSPACH
(
The American actress Susan Anspach,
who has died aged 75, made her
RENḖ AUBERJONOIS (1 June 1940-8 December 2019)
The
American actor René Auberjonois, who has died from cancer at the age of
79, was never a real household name but he kept busy on stage, in films
and on television for over fifty years, and in the process often turned
quirkiness into an art form. He became famous through his appearances
in the films of Robert Altman, but from the age of sixteen trained and
gained experience in the theatre. His family were near neighbours of
producer-director John Houseman who found him an apprenticeship at his
Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. Later on he taught under
Houseman at the Juilliard School. 
Theatre
work in Washington, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York
followed and at 28 he played the Fool opposite Lee J. Cobb’s King Lear.
He was in the musicals Coco (winning a Tony Award), Big River and City of Angels and in plays, including Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor. Robert Altman discovered Auberjonois in a flop musical and put him into M*A*S*H as Father Mulcahy, and then in Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Images and The Player. He was also in Martin Ritt’s Pete ‘n’ Tillie, Robert Wise’s The Hindenburg, James Frawley’s The Big Bus, John Guillermin’s remake of King Kong, Irvin Kershner’s Eyes of Laura Mars, Alex Cox’s Walker, Police Academy 5, Nigel Finch’s The Lost Language of Cranes, Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, Inspector Gadget, Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot, Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and Blood Stripe (directed by his son Remy Auberjonois). He was in four films during 2019: The Circuit, Windows on the World, Raising Buchanan and First Cow. His last film, Ralph Soll’s Cortex, is in post-production. René Auberjonois’s career was mainly in television, including Rhoda, Starsky and Hutch, The Rockford Files, The Good Wife and over 170 episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as the shape-shifting Odo, his most famous TV part. He also did much voice-over work for animated series including Snorks, Batman: The Animated Series, Pound Puppies, Avatar the Last Airbender and The Smurfs. Auberjonois’ wife was Judith Mahalyi who he married in 1963. They have two children, son Remy and daughter Tessa.
STÉPHANE
AUDRAN (
The French actress Stéphane Audran,
who has died aged 85 after
a long illness, was born Colette Suzanne Dacheville in Versailles. She
came to fame in the
films of her second husband, Claude Chabrol, who directed her in 24
films and
two television programmes. She often played strong women with an air of
mystery
or of the criminal about them. Audran began her career in the theatre
during
the 1950s, but without much success. 
It
was only when she entered films in Le jeu de
la nuit in 1957, then Secrets of a
French Nurse and The Lovers of
Montparnasse, before Chabrol cast her in his second feature, Les Cousins
(1959), with Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy. Then came many more
Chabrol
films, including Les bonnes femmes,
Les godelureaux, with Brialy, L’oeil du malin, Bluebeard,
Paris vu par, Blue Panther, Line of Demarcation, Le
scandale, Les biches, La femme infidèle, La rupture, Juste avant la
nuit (Bafta
award), Les noces rouges, Blood
Relatives, Violette Nozière (French César Award) and many
others. One
Chabrol film that made a difference to Audran’s career was the
Hitchcockian
murder mystery Le boucher
(1970), with Jean Yanne in the
villainous title role. She was also delightful in Babette’s
Feast, Gabriel Axel’s drama about a French refugee taken
on as a cook in
CLAUDINE AUGER (28 April 1941-18 December 2019)
Although the French actress Claudine Auger, who has died aged 78 following a long illness, 
made
just a few English-speaking films, she will always be remembered for
being the first French actress to become a Bond girl. In 1965 she
played Domino in Thunderball with Sean Connery, doing all her own underwater swimming stunts. Director Terence Young also used her in Triple Cross
(1966) with Christopher Plummer and Yul Brynner. In 1958 she had been
crowned Miss France but then went on to study acting at the Paris Drama
Conservatoire. Most of her career was spent in French, Italian and
Spanish films and some television series including some at the BBC. In
her lifetime she clocked up over eighty appearances, working with many
celebrated directors including Jean Cocteau, Marcel Carnḗ, Mario
Monicelli, Jean Girault, Jacques Deray, Pierre Etaix and Ettore Scola.
Her first film was Christine in 1958 with Alain Delon, then she did Testament d’Orphḗe for Cocteau. In 1962 she was in the ‘Envy’ section of the portmanteau film The Seven Deadly Sins directed by Edouard Molinaro, a film that had seven directors. Her first US film was Robert Parrish’s In the French Style (1963) with Jean Seberg. After Triple Cross she acted with Peter Cushing in Black Jack and in 1992 was in Andrew Birkin’s Salt On Our Skin with Greta Scacchi. Her last appearance was in a French TV adaptation of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black
in 1997. Claudine Auger was married twice, first to the writer,
director and editor Pierre Gaspard-Huit for ten years from 1959. She
married the British businessman Peter Brent in 1984 (but he died in
2008). At the age of 49 she gave birth to a daughter, Jessica.
CHARLES
AZNAVOUR
(22 May 1924-
The singer, songwriter and actor
Charles Aznavour, who has
died aged 94, was born Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian in 
His
father, a singer in restaurants, encouraged young Charles to
perform. He left school at age nine and was soon appearing in films and
on
stage. He was discovered by Edith Piaf in his early twenties, toured
with her
and started writing songs. He had an attractive tenor voice that could
also go
down to baritone level. He was also a great linguist, speaking and
singing in
French, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German and Armenian. Many
famous
singers performed his songs all around the world. He was not so much
the new
Chevalier but more the Sinatra of France. He was still touring and
singing
until a couple of weeks before he died. Apart from his singing career
he was a
force to be reckoned with in the cinema and proved to be an actor of
great
range. He entered films in 1936 and made a few films in the 1940s and
’50s
until Jean Cocteau cast him (uncredited) in Testament
d’Orphée in 1960. François Truffaut gave him two parts in Tirez sur le pianiste. After that
Aznavour appeared in both French and American films, including Georges
Franju’s
La tête contre
les murs, Taxi for
Tobruk, with Hardy Kruger, Christian Marquand’s Candy, Lewis Gilbert’s The
Adventurers, Michael Winner’s The
Games, Peter Collinson’s And Then
There Were None, Douglas Hickox’s Sky
Riders, Volker Schlöndorff’s The
Tin Drum, Chabrol’s The
Twist, etc. In all, Aznavour made nearly eighty appearances
in
films and television series. And of course many of his songs (‘She’,
‘Dance in
the
BERNARDO
BERTOLUCCI (16 March 1941-26 November 2018)
The
Italian film director and screenwriter Bernardo Bertolucci, who has
died aged 77 from lung cancer, was originally something of a literary
hero, having written from the age of fifteen. 
He
won several literary awards and had plans to be a poet, like his father
Attilio (who helped Pier Paolo Pasolini publish his first novel). The
connection led to Bernardo working with Pasolini on his first film, Accattone, in 1961.
The following year saw Bertolucci’s dḗbut as a director, La commare secca, a
thriller about a murdered prostitute, with a screenplay by Pasolini. Before the Revolution
followed, along with other films including Partner, based on
Dostoyevsky’s novel The
Double. The
Conformist,
adapted from Alberto Moravia’s novel, gave Bertolucci a worldwide
audience and several awards. Jean-Louis Trintignant played the fascist
killer Marcello. Bertolucci then adapted a Jorge Luis Borges political
story for The Spider’s
Stratagem (1970) and in the same year made Last Tango in Paris,
his most controversial film, with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider.
Budgeted at $1.25 million, it reaped over $96 million at the box office
and boosted the sales of butter. The director went on to make more
films including 1900,
with Robert De Niro, La
Luna with Jill Clayburgh, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man
with Ugo Tognazzi and Anouk Aimḗe, and The Last Emperor
with Peter O’Toole, which won nine Oscars. After that the rest of his
output, The Sheltering
Sky, Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty, Besieged and The Dreamers,
did not fare that well at the box-office. However, his work was much
appreciated at film festivals where he won nearly fifty awards and had
over thirty more nominations. His last film was Me and You
in 2012. Bernardo Bertolucci was first married to the Italian actress
Adriana Asti and from 1978 to the screenwriter and director Clare
Peploe. They had no children.
VERNA
BLOOM (7 August 1938-9 January
2019)
The
American actress Verna Bloom, who has died aged 80 from complications
with dementia, had a fairly short career in movies, just ten titles in
toto, 
but
she also had a career in television and the theatre. She was born to
Russian Jewish parents in Massachusetts, graduated from Boston
University and later studied at the Herbert Berghof Studio for actors
in New York. She worked at the Bar Harbour Theatre in Maine and also
co-founded the Trident Playhouse in Denver. Replacing Glenda Jackson in
the Broadway production of Marat/Sade
led to her first big screen appearance in Medium Cool,
Haskell Wexler’s film about the 1968 Democratic National Convention,
with Robert Forster. Peter Fonda directed her in his Western The Hired Hand and
then Clint Eastwood cast her in his High Plains Drifter
(1973). She appeared with Robert Duvall in Howard Koch’s cop movie Badge 373 and later
on was one of many budding stars in the original National Lampoon's Animal House
directed by John Landis. Other names included Tom Hulce, Kevin Bacon,
John Belushi, Peter Riegert, Karen Allen, Donald Sutherland and John
Vernon. She worked with Eastwood again on Honkytonk Man,
appeared in The Journey
of Natty Gann and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. She
played Mary, the mother of Jesus, in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ
(1988), her last film. In between movies, Verna Bloom worked on TV in Bonanza, Kojak, Police Story,
Cagney and Lacey, The Equalizer, Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman
and The West Wing,
among others. She was married twice, first to Richard Collier and then
to the writer Jay Cocks from 1972. They have one child.
MARK BLUM (14 May 1950-26 March 2020)
The
American actor Mark Blum, who has died aged 69 from the Coronavirus,
became an actor almost by chance. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he
attended Columbia High School where he took part in theatre activities
but with the intention of becoming a lawyer. 
Gradually
acting took over and he studied his craft at the Universities of
Pennsylvania and Minnesota. He toured with the National Shakespeare
Company and ultimately reached Broadway in The Cherry Orchard, Arnold Wesker’s version of The Merchant of Venice and, later on, Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns, Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and other plays. His first film was in 1983 but he wasn’t really noticed until he appeared in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) with Madonna. Blum’s next film was Just Between Friends with Mary Tyler Moore, and then came the huge sleeper hit that was Crocodile Dundee with Paul Hogan, followed by Blind Date with Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger and The Presidio with Sean Connery. He also won the Obie for his part in Albert Innaurato's play, Gus and Al, in which he played Al. A mix of television and undistinguished movies dogged Blum’s career, until films such as I Don’t Know How She Does It with Sarah Jessica Parker and Blumenthal with Brian Cox came along. Otherwise it was more TV, in particular a recurring role in the Amazon Prime series Mozart in the Jungle (2014 to 2018), until his final feature film, Amy Miller Gross’s The Pleasure of Your Presence
with Alicia Silverstone and Tom Everett Scott, which awaits release.
Mark Blum was married to the actress Janet Zarish from 2005.
LUCIA BOSÈ (28 January 1931-23 March 2020)
The
Italian actress Lucia Bosè, who has died aged 89, after contracting the
Coronavirus, started her working life in a Milanese bakery before
winning the Miss Italia beauty contest at the age of 16. Born Lucia
Borloni to parents Domenico and Francesca, she became famous during 
Italy’s period of Neorealism cinema in the 1950s. Her first film was Under the Olive Tree for Giuseppe De Santis, playing opposite Raf Vallone. Then she worked for Michelangelo Antonioni in Chronicle of a Love. More films followed from Mario Soldati, Luciano Emmer and others until Antonioni cast her again in La Signore Senza Camelie.
She worked constantly apart from ten years from the mid-1950s when she
brought up her children. Among her films released worldwide were Juan
Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist and Luis Buñuel’s That Is the Dawn. In 1960 she was uncredited in Jean Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphḗe and later on appeared in the Taviani Brothers’ Under the Sign of Scorpio, played La matrona in Fellini Satyricon and had another uncredited role in The Picasso Summer,
a Ray Bradbury story, with Albert Finney, Yvette Mimieux and Graham
Stark! She played George Sand opposite Christopher Sandford as Chopin
in A Winter in Mallorca, worked with director Mauro Bolognini in Metello, appeared opposite Farley Granger in Something Creeping in the Dark, was directed by Liliana Cavani in The Guest, appeared with Jeanne Moreau in Marguerite Duras’ Nathalie Granger, and was directed by Moreau for Lumiere. She acted with Rod Steiger in The Heroes, played the vampiric Countess Bathory in The Legend of Blood Castle, and worked with Bolognini again in Down the Ancient Stairs. The best of her later films was probably Francesco Rosi’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold
in 1987. She married and divorced the Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel
Dominguin. They have three children, Miguel, Lucia and Paola.
JOHN BRILEY (25 June 1925-14 December 2019)
The screenplay, theatre and television writer John Briley, who has died aged 94, was 
born
in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. He first worked in public relations for
General Motors and then joined the US Air Force, eventually being
posted to Britain at RAF Northolt. It was there that he began his
writing career. After gaining a PhD in Elizabethan drama at the
University of Birmingham, he left the air force and joined MGM Studios
as a staff writer. He wrote the Spike Milligan comedies Invasion Quartet (1961) and Postman’s Knock (1962) and then adapted the John Wyndham sci-fi novel Children of the Damned. This was followed by Hammerhead and Pope Joan with Liv Ullmann. That Lucky Touch starred Roger Moore and Susannah York, while Richard Burton was in The Medusa Touch. Both Eagle’s Wing and Enigma starred Martin Sheen after which came Briley’s most successful screenplay for Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, for which Briley won an Academy Award. He worked with Attenborough again on Cry Freedom, the Steve Biko story. Before that he wrote Marie for Sissy Spacek and adapted the James Clavell novel Tai-Pan. Following Sandino with Kris Kristofferson he wrote Christopher Columbus: The Discovery for Marlon Brando. His last film was Molokai
in 1999. He had many unproduced film scripts and also wrote for
television and published several novels. John Briley married Dorothy
Louise Reichart in 1950 and they have four children.
TONY BRITTON (9 June 1924-22 December 2019)
The
British actor Tony Britton, who has died aged 95, had a long career in
which he mastered the art of stage acting, along with television
appearances and film work. He was one of those actors who always seemed
to be around, a reliable and very capable performer who could master
serious drama and comedy with equal aplomb. After leaving school he was
determined to become an actor, joining rep companies in Somerset while
also working as an estate agent and at an aircraft factory. During
National Service he formed a theatre group and worked at Manchester’s
Library Theatre as well as in Edinburgh. 
He
made his West End debut in 1952 and then joined the Shakespeare
Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. More West End work followed
and then he entered films, while his television career also took off.
His first film was an uncredited role in Waterfront (1950) with Robert Newton. Then came Cage of Gold with Jean Simmons and Salute the Toff with John Bentley. Then TV took over for most of the 1950s, including the Francis Durbridge serial The Other Man. His next film was Ken Annakin’s comedy Loser Takes All, with a rather lame script by Graham Greene. The Birthday Present (1957) was rather a good drama with Britton as a man who smuggles an expensive watch through customs. Behind the Mask was a hospital drama with Michael Redgrave, and Operation Amsterdam was an OK war film with Peter Finch. Other films included The Heart of a Man with Frankie Vaughan and The Rough and the Smooth with Najda Tiller. The Boulting Brothers made Suspect
with a script by the novelist Nigel Balchin and Britton was in a few
other minor flicks when TV took over again, demonstrating Britton’s
subtle comedy technique in Happy Ever After, Ooh La La!, And Mother Makes Five, Robin’s Nest, Don’t Wait Up, etc. There were other TV series and some more films such as Disney’s Dr
Syn, Alias the Scarecrow, There’s a Girl In My Soup, Sunday Bloody
Sunday, Mr Forbush and the Penguins, The Day of the Jackal, Night Watch with Elizabeth Taylor, The People That Time Forgot with Patrick Wayne, Agatha with Vanessa Redgrave and Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife,
Britton’s last film (in 2012). Tony Britton married and divorced Ruth
Hawkins and then married the Danish sculptor Eva Skytte Birkefeldt, who
died in 2008. He is the father of the TV presenter Fern Britton, the
scriptwriter Cherry Britton and the actor Jasper Britton.
JOSEPH
CAMPANELLA
(
You may not know the name but will
recognise the face of the
Sicilian-American actor Joseph Campanella, who has died aged 93 from
Parkinson’s disease. Early teenage work as a radio sports announcer led
to his
studying drama at
DIAHANN CARROLL (17 July 1935-4 October 2019)
From
the age of six, music was an important part of the life of the actress
and singer Diahann Carroll, who has died at the age of 84 from
complications following cancer. Early on she was a member of her Harlem
church choir in New York, then studied voice and piano with an operatic
career in mind, after securing a scholarship to the Metropolitan Opera.
However, as a teenager she won a radio talent competition and later on
began a nightclub act, appearing at the Latin Quarter. At age nineteen
she was on Broadway in the Harold Arlen-Truman Capote show House of Flowers and subsequently Richard Rodgers’ No Strings, from which she sang ‘The Sweetest Sounds’ and won a Tony Award. She was cast in Preminger’s films of Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess, but between movies appeared on television (Peter Gunn, Naked City, Julia, The Love Boat, etc). Other films Carroll made include Goodbye Again, Paris Blues, Hurry Sundown, The Split and Claudine (as Claudine), after which she took on television in such blockbusters as Dynasty and The Colbys, as well as a TV movie of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a sequel series of Alex Haley’s Roots: The Next Generation and Grey’s Anatomy. Then it was mostly television again apart from Mo’ Better Blues, The Five Heartbeats and Eve’s Bayou with Samuel L. Jackson. Her final film was The Masked Saint
in 2016. She also had a recording career and often guested on TV shows
with Andy Williams, Judy Garland, Danny Kaye and Carol Burnett. Diahann
Carroll was married four times, latterly to the singer Vic Damone but
had also been engaged to both Sidney Poitier and David Frost. She is
the mother of the journalist and screenwriter Suzanne Kay Bamford, from
her first marriage to the record producer Monte Kay. Carroll founded
the charity Celebrity Action Council, working with women in
rehabilitation.
SEYMOUR CASSEL (22 January 1935-7 April 2019)
The American actor Seymour Cassel, who has died from complications following Alzheimer’s 
disease
at the age of 84, studied at the Actors’ Studio and then appeared
in John Cassavetes’ first film, the extraordinary Shadows (1958). He worked many times with Cassavetes, co-starring with him in The Webster Boy and Too Late Blues, as well as on an episode of The Lloyd Bridges Show and the TV movie Nightside. He later appeared in Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Minnie and Moskowitz, Opening Night and Love Streams. Faces
(1968) was his favourite Cassavetes film, on which he was also second
cameraman and for which he was Oscar-nominated. He notched up over 200
film and TV roles including on film Coogan’s
Bluff, The Last Tycoon, Valentino, Convoy, California Dreaming, Tin
Men, Track 29, Dick Tracy, In the Soup, Honeymoon in Vegas, Indecent
Proposal, Hand Gun, It Could Happen to You, Trees Lounge, The Royal
Tenenbaums and many many more. His last film, Time Framed,
has yet to be released. He married actress Elizabeth Deering, who
worked with him on four Cassavetes films. They have two children and
Cassel also has a daughter from a previous relationship. Cassel had a
colourful life, including drink and drugs problems, for which he was
jailed. He was suspended from the Screen Actors Guild for sexual
harassment.
ANNE V.
COATES (
The British film editor Anne V. Coates, who has died at the age of 92, was the niece of film mogul J. Arthur Rank. Her first film job was at Elstree repairing Rank’s early religious films on their return from church screenings. She eventually secured a job at Pinewood, becoming assistant on Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948). After several more films as an assistant editor, she was the (uncredited) assembly cutter on Disney’s The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men in 1952. From then on she was never out of work and edited The Pickwick Papers, The Horse’s Mouth, Tunes of Glory and many other British films. Lawrence of Arabia was her greatest achievement, but she also worked on Becket, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Murder on the Orient Express, The Eagle Has Landed, The Elephant Man, Greystoke, Chaplin, Erin Brockovich and very many others, notching up over fifty titles. She was working right up to the end of her life, on Fifty Shades of Grey and A Dolphin in Our Lake, which is in pre-production. Anne V. Coates was married to the film director Douglas Hickox and they have three children.
LARRY COHEN (15 July 1936-23 March 2019)
The
American screenwriter, producer and director Larry Cohen, who has died
aged 82, began his career in television but graduated to films, in
particular low-budget horror, sci-fi and exploitation. 
As a writer, his output was prolific on TV beginning in 1958 in such series as Kraft Theatre, Surfside 6, Sam Benedict, The Doctors and the Nurses, The Fugitive, The Defenders, Custer, The Invaders and Columbo, alongside many others. His first feature film as a writer was Return of the Seven, director Burt Kennedy’s 1966 sequel to The Magnificent Seven. I Deal in Danger, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting and El Condor
followed, but from 1972 Cohen started directing and producing his own
screenplays, beginning with Blaxploitation titles such as Dial Rat (aka Bone), The Godfather of Harlem and Hell Up In Harlem and then the film he became most noted for – It’s Alive, the story of a baby turned monster. He went on to direct The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, a very sobering drama-doc with Broderick Crawford. It Lives Again followed along with Full Moon High, Blind Alley, Q: The Winged Serpent, It’s Alive III, A Return to Salem’s Lot, The Stuff, Wicked Stepmother (Bette Davis's last film), The Ambulance and Original Gangstas, the last feature directed by Cohen in 1996. After that he continued writing for films including Phone Booth, Captivity, a remake of It’s Alive and Messages Deleted,
his last script (in 2010). Larry Cohen was married twice, first to the
actress and producer Janelle Webb who had five children, and then to
the actress Cynthia Costas. Both wives appeared in Cohen’s 1990 film The Ambulance.
LYNN COHEN (10 August 1933-14 February 2020)
Television viewers and filmgoers may well remember the American actress Lynn
Cohen from her roles as the appalling Ukrainian housekeeper Magda in Sex and the City on TV (and in the
cinema), and as Mags Flanagan in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. However,
the actress, who has died aged 86, appeared widely on television and in films
as well as doing much theatre work, including Peter Hall’s production of Tennessee
Williams’ Orpheus Descending with
Vanessa Redgrave, and Chekhov’s Ivanov.
Born Lynn Harriette
Kay in Kansas City, Cohen studied acting at the Michael Howard Studios in New
York City where she began playing in off-Broadway productions from the 1970s
but, apart from a small role in Without a
Trace (1983), her first major film appearance was in Woody Allen’s 1993
comedy Manhattan Murder Mystery. This
was followed by her playing Maman in Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking and Sharon Pollack’s Everything Relative. Morgan J. Freeman directed her in Hurricane Streets, 
and then she was back
with Woody Allen for Deconstructing Harry.
Often called on to play mothers, she was the mother in Andrea Clark’s My Divorce and played more mothers in Dani
Levi and Maria Schrader’s The Giraffe,
Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock, Ethan
Hawke’s The Hottest State and later
on she was Philip Seymour Hoffman’s mother in Synecdoche, New York. She played Grandmom in Enid Zentells’ Evergreen (2004) and another grandmother
in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe
(2007). She also played Golda Meir, the Prime
Minister of Israel, in Steven Spielberg’s Munich.
Other films in the 2000s included Invincible with Mark Wahlberg, Delirious with Steve Buscemi, Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me with Colin Firth and Bette Midler, Deception with Hugh Jackman, Eagle Eye with Shia LaBeouf, Staten Island with Ethan Hawke, Everybody’s Fine with Robert De Niro, and The Extra Man with Kevin Kline. Among many other films Lynn Cohen was the star of The Romance of Loneliness, and she obviously made a great impression as Mags in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in 2013. She then made another score of features over the next seven years before her death. In between her film career were TV shows such as NYPD Blue, Law and Order, Nurse Jackie, Damages, and others including, of course, thirteen episodes of Sex and the City plus the two feature films. Lynn Cohen made many short films in her time (there are still three in the can), while two more features, The Riverside Bench and Six Dinner Parties are in post-production. Lynn Cohen married Gilbert Frazen in 1957, but they divorced in 1963, having had one child. Her second husband, Ronald Cohen, survives her.
VALENTINA CORTESE (1 January 1923-10 July 2019)
The
Italian actress Valentina Cortese, who has died aged 96, had to wait
till after World War II before she became recognised as an actress of
renown. After studying at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in
Rome, from 1941 she began to appear in Italian films including The Hero of Venice, First Love and Girl of the Golden West. Her first big break came in 1946 and Rome Open City,
an early neorealist film from Marcello Pagliero in which Cortese played
a working girl forced to prostitute herself to earn a living.
Among her other films was an Italian version of Les Misḗrables, and then in 1948 came The Glass Mountain,
Henry Cass’s British film shot in Italy, which dealt with a British Air
Force pilot (Michael Denison) shot down in Italy but rescued by a local
girl (Cortese) with whom he falls in love. The romantic theme of the
film and Nino Rota’s legendary score ensured its 
box-office success.
Black Magic with Orson Welles followed and then Hollywood beckoned as director Jules Dassin put her in Thieves’ Highway with Richard Conte and Lee J. Cobb. In the USA, Cortese made East of the Rising Sun (aka Malaya), Shadow of the Eagle and The House on Telegraph Hill
in which Robert Wise cast her as a concentration camp survivor opposite
her future husband Richard Basehart. She then made Thorold Dickinson’s
thriller Secret People in 1952, after which she resumed her career in Italy. Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed her in The Barefoot Contessa with Humphrey Bogart, and she worked with Michelangelo Antonioni on Le Amiche. Mostly working in Italian films or others set in Italy, she was in Square of Violence with Broderick Crawford, Barabbas and The Visit, both with Anthony Quinn, Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare, Maximilian Schell’s First Love, Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky, François Truffaut’s Day for Night, James Goldstone’s When Time Ran Out... with Paul Newman and Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
She
also worked in theatre in Italy, playing in Shakespeare, Chekhov,
Brecht, Pirandello, Schiller and even Pinter. Her last film was
Zeffirelli’s Sparrow in 1993. She also played Herodias in his TV series Jesus of Nazareth. Nominated for an Academy Award for Day for Night,
Cortese lost out to Ingrid Bergman but she did win a Bafta, the
National Society of Film Critics’ Award and the New York Film Critics’
Circle Award. She received the Milano International Film Festival
Lifetime Achievement Award and was made Commander of the Order of Arts
and Letters, France. Valentina Cortese married and divorced the actor
Richard Basehart, who died in 1984. They had a son, Jackie, who died in
2015.
FRANCES CUKA (21 August 1936-16 February 2020)
Although
never a household name, the actress Frances Cuka, who has died aged 83
following a stroke and cancer, will always be remembered for creating
one of the iconic stage roles in the history of the British theatre. As
Jo in Shelagh Delaney’s groundbreaking 1958 play A Taste of Honey for 
Joan
Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at Stratford East, she portrayed a
teenager who becomes pregnant by a black sailor but is then cared for
by a gay boyfriend, a scenario that the middle-class theatre-going
public had never encountered before. Sadly Cuka did not get the film
role, which went to Rita Tushingham, but she did get to play Jo on
Broadway. Born in London to a family of Czech extraction, Frances Cuka
was educated in Brighton and studied acting at the Guildhall School.
She made her stage debut in Warrington and various other rep theatres.
After Stratford East, she worked at the Royal Court in London and also
for the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Aldwych. Her first film
was Over the Odds in 1961 and she went on to appear in Scrooge (as Mrs Cratchit) with Albert Finney, Henry VIII and His Six Wives (as Catherine of Aragon), Hide and Seek for the Children’s Film Foundation, The Watcher in the Woods with Bette Davis, Bob Rafelson’s Mountains of the Moon, Afraid of the Dark with James Fox, Snow White: A Tale of Terror with Sigourney Weaver, François Ozon’s Swimming Pool with Charlotte Rampling, Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist (as Mrs Bedwin), and Closer to the Moon with Vera Farmiga. Frances Cuka appeared in many television series and TV movies such as Henry IV Part II (as Doll Tearsheet), Minder, Trial & Retribution, The Bill and Holby City, among others. She was originally cast as Peggy Mitchell in EastEnders but the part eventually went to Jo Warne and ultimately Barbara Windsor. Her last TV appearances were in the Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner,
playing, hilariously, the Jewish grandma Nelly Buller and showing her
great talent for comedy. Frances Cuka was a fine but perhaps underrated
actress of great versatility. She remained unmarried, despite having
two long-running partnerships.
VIC DAMONE
(
The popular American singer Vic
Damone, who has died aged
89, was born Vito Rocco Farinola. 
He
won a talent contest in 1945 and
immediately began singing in clubs and subsequently became a recording
artist.
His first film as an actor was Rich,
Young and Pretty in 1951, an MGM musical with Jane Powell
with whom he also
made Athena and Hit
the Deck. He was in Stanley Donen’s Deep
In My Heart, a biopic on composer Sigmund Romberg and he
played
the Caliph in Vincente Minnelli’s Kismet
with Ann Blyth and Dolores Gray. He appeared (uncredited) as himself in
Viva
DORIS DAY (3 April 1922-13 May 2019)
The
American actress and singer Doris Day, who has died aged 97 from
pneumonia, was one of Hollywood’s true icons. She was born Doris Mary
Ann Kappelhoff to William, a music teacher, and his wife Alma. 
The
parents separated when Doris was still young and so she lived with her
mother and older brother Paul. Wanting to be a professional dancer,
Doris formed a dance act with a friend but a bad car accident scuppered
her potential career so, having a good singing voice, she took music
lessons and was soon touring with bands of the day. She sang with Les
Brown’s Band from the age of seventeen and was discovered by Warner
Bros and given a contract for Romance on the High Seas in 1948. She went on to act and sing in many more Warners musicals including Tea for Two, Lullaby of Broadway, On Moonlight Bay and By the Light of the Silvery Moon. Her big hit was Calamity Jane in 1953 with great songs including the Oscar-winning ‘Secret Love’. She also had dramatic roles in Storm Warning and The Winning Team (both with Ronald Reagan), Love Me or Leave Me with James Cagney, and Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much,
with another Academy Award winning song, ‘Que Será Será’ ('Whatever
Will Be Will Be'). Fans will remember Doris for her series of romcoms
with Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, James Garner and Rod Taylor in the 1960s.
She was Oscar-nominated for Pillow Talk
with Rock Hudson but didn’t win and was never nominated again, although
she did win Golden Globes, Laurel Awards and Lifetime Achievement gongs
from the Cecil B. DeMille Award, the American Comedy Awards and the Los
Angeles Film Critics. She was also a popular singer and recording
artist with many albums and hit singles to her name. She married four
times: first to the musician Al Jorden who fathered her only son Terry,
then to another musician, George Weidler, then to the producer Martin
Melcher who left her penniless when he died, and finally to Barry
Comden, a head waiter. With her four husbands and her son gone, she
spent her last years working for her own Doris Day Animal Foundation.
With her passing it seems that something essentially of Hollywood has
now gone. Doris Day represented a time and a way of life in the movies
that are just no longer there.
BRADFORD
DILLMAN
(
The American actor Bradford Dillman
has died aged 87 from complications
following pneumonia. After leaving the Marine Corps, he studied at the
Actors
Studio and made his stage debut in 1953. His Broadway debut was playing
Edmund
in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into
Night (1956), with Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Jason
Robards Jr and
Katharine Ross. After three years of television from 1955, 
Dillman
secured a contract
with 20th Century Fox. He appeared in A
Certain Smile (for which
he won
the ‘New Star of the Year’ Golden Globe), based on the Françoise Sagan
novel.
Then came In Love
and War with Robert Wagner. Compulsion
was Richard Fleischer’s take on the Leopold and Loeb murder
case, in which Dillman co-starred with Dean Stockwell and Orson Welles.
All
three actors won awards at
STANLEY DONEN (13 April 1924-21 February 2019)
KIRK DOUGLAS (16 December 1916-5 February 2020)
FREDA DOWIE (22 July 1928-10 August 2019)
The
British character actress Freda Dowie, who has died aged 91, was
brilliant at playing ordinary but not always happy women with sad
lives. She was outstanding as the Mother in Terence Davies’ film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) 
which
the director based on his own Liverpool childhood. Dowie’s performance
at the hands of her abusive husband (Pete Postlethwaite) was a moving
portrayal of a brutally wasted life. It won her a nomination in the
European Film Awards. Her long, fifty-year career was full of such real
performances, mostly on television. She was in many TV series,
seemingly born to appear in classic, period dramas such as Doctor Faustus, Antigone, The Bacchae, Maupassant, North and South, Cranford (1972), I, Claudius, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Pickwick Papers, Alice in Wonderland, Middlemarch, and two TV versions of Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie. However, she was equally at home with modern drama such as Doomwatch, Crown Court, Angels, Lovejoy, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Our Friends in the North, The Bill, Heartbeat and EastEnders, etc. She had a select roster of feature films including Subterfuge (1968) with Gene Barry and Joan Collins, The Omen (as a nun), Francisco Lara Polop’s The Monk (as another nun), Michael Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss and also his Jude, Dan Zeff’s Black Eyes (as Gran), and Jaume Balaguero’s Fragile
(2005) with Calista Flockhart. Freda Dowie was divorced from her first
husband, John Goodrich. From 1970 she was married to the
writer-producer-director David Thompson.
GLYNN EDWARDS
(
The British character actor Glynn
Edwards, who has died aged
87, was born in 
but
grew up in
R. LEE ERMEY
(
The American actor Ronald Lee Ermey,
who has died from
pneumonia at the age of 74, was a former military man whose film career
matched
his own life. A former member of the US Marine Corps who served in
ROBERT EVANS (29 June 1930-26 October 2019)
The
American actor and director Robert Evans, who has died aged 89, first
had some modest success as a player but later became a celebrated
Hollywood film producer. While Evans was at Paramount Pictures, the
studio had such successes as The
Detective, Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Rosemary’s Baby, The
Italian Job, True Grit, Plaza Suite, Love Story, The Godfather I & II, 
Chinatown, Serpico, Save the Tiger, The Great Gatsby and The Conversation,
etc. Born Robert J. Shapero to the Harlem dentist Archie Shapera and
his wife Florence, Robert Evans started work as a teenager on radio
before his first failed attempt to get into movies. However, several
years on he was discovered by the actress Norma Shearer looking for
someone to play her husband Irving Thalberg in the Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces, starring James Cagney. Then Darryl Zanuck at Fox cast him as a bullfighter in The Son Also Rises. After appearing in The Fiend Who Walked the West with Hugh O’Brian and The Best of Everything
with Suzy Parker, jump several years when Evans joined Paramount as a
producer of the hit films listed above. More successes from Evans
included Marathon Man, Black Sunday and Urban Cowboy. Less profitable were Popeye and The Cotton Club. A sequel to Chinatown, The Two Jakes, took several years to complete, then there was Sliver, Jade, The Phantom, The Saint and a remake of Neil Simon’s The Out-of–Towners
with Steve Martin, none of which were particularly good. After 2000,
Evans worked on TV projects and also wrote a documentary feature called
The Kid Stays in the Picture, based on his own autobiography. His last major film as a producer was How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days in 2003, while his final film as executive producer is The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro,
from a novel by Paul Theroux, which is yet to be completed. Robert
Evans was married seven times, to the actresses Sharon Hugueny, Camilla
Sparv, Ali MacGraw (one child, the actor-director Josh Evans), Phyllis
George, Catherine Oxenberg (annulled after twelve days) and Leslie Ann
Woodward. His last wife was Lady Victoria White. All his marriages
ended in divorce.
FENELLA
FIELDING
(
The London-born actress Fenella
Fielding, who has died aged
90 from complications following a stroke, was most famous for her deep
and
seductively sexy voice and the way she swooped up and down her vocal
range,
savouring every syllable and every possible double
entendre. 
The
daughter of Romanian and Lithuanian parents, Fenella began
her career in amateur theatre and cabaret in the early 1950s, becoming
popular
in Peter Cook and Harold Pinter’s
ALBERT
FINNEY (9 May 1936-8 February 2019)
The Salford-born actor Albert Finney, who has died from a chest
infection, aged 82, was a stage performer who graduated to the cinema
and television with great popular success. He studied acting at Rada
and on graduating joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. He had been
directed by Charles Laughton, an actor he admired immensely, in Jane
Arden’s The Party
in 1958. At Stratford the following year, he took over the role of Coriolanus from
Laurence Olivier. Tony Richardson from the Royal Court Theatre in
London cast Finney in his first film, The Entertainer in
1960, which was quickly followed by Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
which started a new trend in realism in British films. He won several
awards for his portrayal of factory worker Arthur Seaton, including a
Bafta for Most Promising Newcomer. The Oscar-winning film of Tom Jones followed,
after Finney had turned down the title role in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.
Other more commercial films followed, including The Victors, Night Must Fall,
Two for the Road and The
Picasso Summer, the last scripted by Ray Bradbury. Then
Finney directed and starred in Charlie
Bubbles with Liza Minnelli from a script by playwright
Shelagh Delaney. Then he played Ebenezer in the musical film of Scrooge, followed
by Gumshoe,
Stephen Frears’s debut as a director in which Finney played a
bingo-caller with fantasies of becoming a private eye. It was produced
by Memorial Enterprises, the company Finney set up with the actor
Michael Medwin, which also produced Charlie Bubbles,
Lindsay Anderson’s if...
and O Lucky Man!
plus other film and theatre productions. Although Finney secured five
Academy Awards nominations, for Tom
Jones, Murder on the Orient Express, The Dresser, Under the Volcano
and Erin Brockovich,
he never won. He turned down offers of both a CBE and a knighthood, as
he disagreed with the UK honours system.
Finney’s film career continued with, among other titles, The Duellists, Wolfen, Loophole,
Annie, Shoot the Moon, Orphans, Miller’s Crossing, The Browning
Version, A Man of No Importance, Traffic, Big Fish, A Good Year,
two Jason Bourne films and Skyfall,
the Bond movie that was Finney’s last film (in 2012). During his
career, he also continued to work on stage for the National Theatre in
plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Congreve, Strindberg, Beckett, Marlowe,
John Osborne and Peter Nichols, and starred in Yasmina Reza’s Art, his
final work on stage (in 1997-98). On television he made his mark as
Churchill in Hugh Whitemore’s The
Gathering Storm, winning a Bafta, an Emmy and a Golden
Globe. On TV he later played Pope John Paul II, was in The Endless Game
mini-series, Kingsley Amis’s The
Green Man, and Karaoke
and Cold Lazarus
by Dennis Potter, Nostromo,
A Rather English Marriage and My Uncle Silas by
H.E. Bates. Albert Finney has a son, Simon, a film cameraman, by his
first wife, actress Jane Wenham. He was also married to the actress
Anouk Aimḗe, and he married Pene Delmage in 2006.
PETER FONDA (23 February 1940-16 August 2019)
The
American actor, writer and director Peter Fonda, who has died aged 79
from lung cancer, was the son of actor Henry Fonda and the brother of
Jane Fonda. His first work as an actor was with the Omaha Playhouse,
after which he moved to New York to be an apprentice at the Cecilwood
Theatre. 
He made his professional stage debut on Broadway and then moved to Hollywood. After some TV work, his first film in 1963 was Tammy and the Doctor with Sandra Dee and then he was in Carl Foreman’s epic war film The Victors with Vince Edwards, Albert Finney, George Hamilton and George Peppard. He then worked with Roger Corman on Wild Angels, about biker gangs, and also Corman’s drug-filled The Trip. Other early films with Fonda include Robert Rossen’s Lilith and Easy Rider
which he co-wrote with director and actor Dennis Hopper, and which was
an enormous hit worldwide, grossing some 60 million dollars from a
$400,000 outlay, and which earned Fonda, Hopper and Terry Southern
Academy Award nominations. He was also in Hopper’s The Last Movie
which, with guest appearances by many celebrated stars, was a disaster.
Fonda directed three films himself, the first of which, The Hired Hand, in which he also starred, was very good. He was in Robert Wise’s Two People with Lindsay Wagner, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry with Susan George, Peter Collinson’s Open Season, Race With the Devil, Val Guest’s The Diamond Mercenaries with Telly Savalas, Jonathan Demme’s Fighting Mad, his own film Wanda Nevada with Brooke Shields, The Cannonball Run with Burt Reynolds, plus many other films that were mostly potboilers. He made The Rose Garden for the Dutch director Fons Rademakers, and Deadfall (1993) for Christopher Coppola. He played both Dracula and Dr Van Helsing in Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, worked with John Carpenter on Escape from L.A., and was nominated for an Oscar as best actor for Ulee’s Gold. He was in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey with Terence Stamp in 1999 and then continued to act in films and on TV during the 2000 decade including the remake of 3:10 to Yuma. His final three films, The Magic Hours, The Last Full Measure and Skate God
are yet to be released. Peter Fonda was married three times and is
father to two children, the actress Bridget Fonda and the
cinematographer Justin Fonda.
MICHAEL D.
FORD (1928-31
May 2018)
The British-born art director and set
decorator, 
who
has
died aged 90, trained at
Czechoslovakian film director, writer
and actor Miloš Forman,
who has died age 86, following a short illness, had international
success in
the mid-1960s with his quirky Czech comedies A
Blonde in Love and The
Fireman’s Ball. Both were nominated for Academy Awards. When
his country
was invaded in 1968 he fled to the
ROBERT FORSTER (13 July 1941-11 October 2019)
The
American actor Robert Forster, who has died aged 78 from brain cancer,
had an up-and-down career with highlights, bad times and missed
opportunities. 
He
had plans to become a lawyer, having studied psychology at university,
but he was sidetracked into being an actor, although while looking for
theatre work he was also teaching to make some money. He appeared in
his local East Rochester theatre in West Side Story and subsequently reached Broadway in 1965 which led to a contract with 20th Century Fox. His first film was John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando. Television followed before Robert Mulligan’s The Stalking Moon with Gregory Peck, Justine with Anouk Aimee and Dirk Bogarde, and Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool in which Forster was the star. Pieces of Dreams, Cover Me Babe and Journey Through Rosebud were less interesting projects until he played the title character of the private eye in the TV series of Banyon. He was in Richard Fleischer’s The Don Is Dead with Anthony Quinn and then a run of routine fare: Stunts, Avalanche, Disney’s The Black Hole, Alligator, Heartbreak High, Vigilante, Walking the Edge and The Delta Force with Chuck Norris. Forster produced, directed and starred in Hollywood Harry, his one and only time as a director. More routine films and TV shows followed until Quentin Tarantino cast him in Jackie Brown
(1997) in which Forster played a good guy after having played many
bad’uns. It was probably his best film. After that he did a TV move of Rear Window and the Gus Van Sant remake of Psycho (as a doctor). The rest of Forster’s career included David Lynch’s TV movie of Mulholland Dr., Me, Myself and Irene with Jim Carrey, a Charlie’s Angels sequel, Firewall with Harrison Ford, Lucky Number Slevin with Josh Hartnett, The Descendants with George Clooney, and a whole slew of television including the 2017 sequel to Twin Peaks. Two of Robert Forster’s last films were El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) and What They Had
(2018), in the latter playing the husband of a woman (Blythe Danner)
suffering from Alzheimer's - for which he received some of the best
reviews of his career. Forster was married twice and is father to three
daughters, Elizabeth, Kate and Maeghen from his first marriage. He also
has a son, Robert, from a previous relationship.
DEREK FOWLDS (2 September 1937-17 January 2020)
The
British actor Derek Fowlds, who has died aged 82 from heart failure and
sepsis, will be remembered mainly for his television work, although his
career embraced theatre and films as well. In the late 1960s, he was
the human element in the BBC children’s Basil Brush Show,
constantly being upstaged by the eponymous foxy puppet. In the 1980s he
was Bernard Woolley, private secretary to politician Jim Hacker (Paul
Eddington) often in cahoots with the departmental personal
under-secretary 
Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne) in both series of Yes, Minister and later Yes, Prime Minister. From the 1990s onwards Fowlds played policeman Oscar Blaketon in over three hundred episodes of Heartbeat
for Yorkshire Television. Born in Balham, south London, the boy Derek
was educated in Hertfordshire where he began performing, although he
also had aspirations of becoming a footballer. A job with a printing
firm led to amateur dramatics and an eventual place at Rada. At first
he worked in rep and later in London at the Royal Court and Hampstead
until his West End debut in 1971. He had started in television in 1960
and his first film part was an uncredited role in Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). Small parts followed in We Joined the Navy, with Kenneth More, Philp Leacock’s Tamahine, Doctor in Distress and Hot Enough for June, both with Dirk Bogarde, East of Sudan with Anthony Quayle, Hotel Paradiso with Alec Guinness, Frankenstein Created Woman with Peter Cushing, and The Smashing Bird I Used to Know with Dennis Waterman. However, most of the time Fowlds was involved in TV series including Z Cars, The Liver Birds and sixty-four episodes with Basil Brush. He played various characters in After That, This, written by Eleanor Bron, John Bird and John Fortune. After that it was mostly television culminating in Yes, Minister, followed by Affairs of the Heart written by the actor Paul Daneman, a futuristic thriller series Rules of Engagement, Chancer with Clive Owen, Firm Friends with Billie Whitelaw and, ultimately, Heartbeat,
in which he demonstrated his versatility as both a dramatic and a comic
actor. His last film appearance was a cameo in Ray Cooney’s Run For Your Wife (2012) and his final TV parts were in Casualty (2013) and Doctors
(2017). Derek Fowlds was first married to Wendy Tory and then to
actress and presenter Lesley Judd. Both marriages ended in divorce. He
has two sons from his first marriage, the cameraman Jamie and actor
Jeremy.
LIZ FRASER
(
Born Elizabeth Joan Winch, the
actress Liz Fraser, who has
died aged 88 from complications following an operation, was never a
star but
always enlivened any production in which she appeared. She had a
natural talent
for playing ordinary women coupled with a real flair for comedy, but
she could
also be a good character actress. 
She
trained at the London School of Dramatic
Art and, following a spell in repertory theatre, took minor film parts
in Touch and Go (1955) with Jack
Hawkins
and The Smallest Show on Earth
(1957).
Television followed (Whacko-O!, The Sky
Larks, Dixon of Dock Green)
and odd
film parts such as Davy, with Harry
Secombe,
RAY GALTON
(
See the obituary below for Alan Simpson, the writing partner of Ray Galton, who died 8 February 2017
BRUNO GANZ (22 March 1941-16 February 2019)
The
Swiss-born actor Bruno Ganz, who has died aged 77 from cancer, was
recognized as one of the best actors working in the German language on
stage, in cinema and on television. His main love was for the theatre
and with Peter Stein he founded the Schaubṻhne ensemble in Berlin in
1970. He worked in cinema from 1960 but was not a great success until Summer Guests
in 1976, but then he went on to work with directors of the New German
Cinema, such as Werner Herzog, Volker Schlṏndorff and Wim Wenders, as
well as Eric Rohmer, Francis Ford Coppola, Franklin J. Schaffner,
Ridley Scott, David Hare and Stephen Daldry, among many others. Jeanne
Moreau directed him in Lumiere in 1976 and he was in Rohmer’s The Marquise of O... in the same year. Wenders cast him in The American Friend, and he was also in Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman and The Absence, Schaffner’s The Boys from Brazil, Herzog’s Nosferatu (as Jonathan Harker), Mauro Bolognini’s The Lady of the Camellias, Schlṏndorff’s Circle of Deceit and Wenders’ Wings of Desire, one of the few films for which UK audiences will remember him in particular. He was also in the sequel Faraway, So Close!
Bruno Ganz (right) with the editor of Film Review Daily
The other outstanding performance given by Ganz was as Adolf Hitler in the Oscar-nominated Downfall,
Oliver Hirschbiegel’s portrayal of the Chancellor’s last days towards
the end of World War II. Ganz, more than any other actor attempting the
part (Alec Guinness, Anthony Hopkins, Frank Finlay, et al), captured
the maniacal hysteria of the man that was totally believable. In a film
career that encompassed nearly sixty years and over 120
performances in cinema and TV alone, Ganz as Hitler will outlive all
his other work. Among the many other films he made were Ridley Scott’s The Counsellor, David Hare’s Strapless, Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, Daldry’s The Reader, Atom Egoyan’s Remember and Unknown, the action thriller with Liam Neeson.
More recently he was in Sally Potter’s The Party and Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built (2018). In the same year he also he appeared as Sigmund Freud in The Tobacconist, I, Witness and Terrence Malick’s Radegund,
which is still in post-production. Among the awards he accumulated were
the Austrian Iffland-Ring, a diamond ring given to an actor deemed to
be the best in the German-speaking theatre, an award that is kept until
the recipient dies; the German Order of Merit and the French Lêgion
d’honneur. He also won many individual awards for his stage and film
work. Bruno Ganz married his wife Sabine in 1965 and, although they
later separated, they remained married until his death. They have one
son, Daniel.
TONY GARNETT (3 April 1936-12 January 2020)
The
British former actor and producer Tony Garnett, who has died at the age
of 83 following a short illness, was one of the most creative and
successful film and TV producers who always sought for the truth about
love, relationships and social politics. He is best-known for the BBC’s
Wednesday Play series, when he worked with director Ken Loach, starting with Cathy Come Home in 1966 and then In Two Minds, the David Mercer screenplay the following year. After that there were The Golden Vision 
and The Big Flame.
All these television films broached social problems such as housing
shortage, manic depression, football mania and redundancy. Garnett
produced ten of the Wednesday Plays and five in the Play for Today
series, working with writers such as Les Blair, Charles Wood, Jim
Allen, Peter Nichols and Nemone Lethbridge, and directors including Roy
Battersby, Roland Joffẻ and Jack Gold. He had been a script editor for
Ken Loach on Up the Junction and for Gareth Davies on the two Dennis Potter Nigel Barton
plays. Before his TV career started, he had studied psychology at
University College, London, and then became an actor, working in rep,
before breaking into TV in 1958. He was in An Age of Kings. Emergency – Ward 10, Z Cars, Compact, Dixon of Dock Green, The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre and other series until 1965. He played one of The Boys on trial in Sidney J. Furie’s courtroom drama. Turning producer he co-adapted with Loach and Barry Hines, the latter’s novel Kes, which became a huge hit, winning two Baftas and a nomination for Garnett. After that came the documentary The Body, Loach’s Family Life, Days of Hope, The Price of Coal and Black Jack. He directed his own films Prostitute and Handgun and produced Follow That Bird, a Sesame Street spin-off, Julien Temple’s Earth Girls Are Easy, with Geena Davis, Fat Man and Little Boy (aka Shadow Makers) with Paul Newman, The Turnaround with Clive Owen and Beautiful Thing,
based on Jonathan Harvey’s gay play. He set up his own company, World
Productions, and had great success with many TV series such as Cardiac Arrest, Between the Lines, Ballykissangel, This Life, The Cops and Rough Diamond,
his last work in 2007. Tony Garnett married Topsy Jane Legge in 1963
but they later divorced. They have a son Will. His second marriage to
Alex Ouroussoff, who has a son Michael, also ended in divorce. He is
survived by his partner Victoria Childs.
JOHN GAVIN
(
The
American actor John Gavin, who has died aged 86, was born Juan Vincent
Apablasa, a fifth-generation Angeleno of Mexican, Chilean and Spanish
descent. Having served in the US Navy, he was discovered by Universal
Studios and given a contract as he was a handsome hunk who 
resembled
one of their other stars and so could be promoted as the next Rock
Hudson. Gavin’s first films were B-pictures, Raw Edge and Behind the High Wall
(both 1956), followed by Four
Girls in Town and Quantez.
He then appeared in A
Time to Love and a Time to Die (Golden Globe award, 1958),
which was directed by Douglas Sirk, who then gave Gavin his first lead
role in Imitation of
Life
(1959), with Lana Turner. He never quite made it into the Rock Hudson
league but was usefully employed as a supporting player in many films,
including Hitchcock’s Psycho
(1960) playing Janet Leigh’s lover, Kubrick’s Spartacus, Midnight Lace
with Doris Day, A
Breath of Scandal with Sophia Loren, Romanoff and Juliet
and Tammy Tell Me True,
both with Sandra Dee, and with Susan Hayward in Back Street. After
that, television occupied Gavin (Destry,
Convoy,
etc) until he worked on Thoroughly
Modern Millie with Julie Andrews and The Madwoman of Chaillot
with Katharine Hepburn. He was all set to play James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever
(1971) but Sean Connery decided to return to the part. Instead, Gavin
made some more minor films and TV appearances and his last screen work
was on the Hart to Hart
and Fantasy Island
series in 1981. He had done some theatre work including Seesaw and a tour
of The Fantasticks,
and was heading for Broadway in a revival of Cole Porter’s Can-Can
when President Reagan asked him to be the ambassador to Mexico, a job
that Gavin had always wanted. He held the post from 1980 to 1986, after
which he became a successful businessman chairing many company boards
and was CEO for The Century Council, a non-profit organisation fighting
alcoholism. John Gavin was married twice, first to Cecily Evans, with
whom he had two children, and then the actress Constance Towers from
1974 until his death.
EUNICE GAYSON
(
British actress Eunice Gayson, who
has died aged 90, was
born Eunice Sargaison 
in Purley, Surrey. She trained as an opera
singer before
her screen debut in Between Ourselves,
a BBC TV movie in 1948, then appeared in the film My
Brother Jonathan with
Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray. Continuing on both the small and large
screen,
she appeared in the films It Happened in
Soho, The Huggetts Abroad, Dance Hall, Down Among the Z Men, Miss Robin
Hood,
Street Corner, Dance Little Lady, Out of the Clouds, Zarak, Carry On
Admiral and Hammer’s The
Revenge of Frankenstein. She also
appeared on stage in The Sound of Music
and Into the Woods. In 1962 her
career took a turn for the best when she became the first official Bond
Girl in
Dr No. “I admire your courage,
Miss…”
says 007 across the gaming table. She replies: “Trench, Sylvia Trench.
I admire
your luck, Mr…”. He replies: “Bond, James Bond,” thereby starting a new
line in
catchphrases. She had been up for the part of Moneypenny but it went to
Lois
Maxwell. After Eunice Gayson repeated the role of Trench in From Russia With Love, it was back to TV
until she retired from the screen in 1972. She was married to writer
and
producer Leigh Vance and to the actor Brian Jackson, with whom she had
a
daughter, Kate, who in 1995 appeared as ‘casino girl’ in GoldenEye
with Pierce Brosnan as Bond.
LEWIS GILBERT
(
The British film director Lewis
Gilbert, who has died at the
age of 97,
was at the forefront of the
WILLIAM
GOLDMAN (12 August 1931-16 November 2018)
The
Hollywood screenwriter, novelist and playwright William Goldman, who
has died from colon cancer and pneumonia at the age of 87, began his
working life in advertising 
but
quickly took up writing novels and plays before graduating to scripting
films. His first film, Soldier
in the Rain
(1963) with Steve McQueen, was based on his own novel but not scripted
by him. His first screenplay was adapted from Victor Canning’s novel Masquerade, with
Cliff Robertson. He then wrote The
Moving Target (aka Harper)
for Paul Newman, based on the Ross Macdonald thriller. Goldman adapted
his own novel for No
Way to Treat a Lady, with Rod Steiger, and in 1969 his
original screenplay for Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Newman and Robert
Redford, was an enormous hit, winning him his first Oscar. His
adaptation of The Hot
Rock (aka How
to Steal a Diamond in Four Uneasy Lessons), again with
Redford, followed. He contributed to Papillon with
McQueen, then wrote The
Stepford Wives, The Great Waldo Pepper, All the President’s Men
(second Academy Award), Marathon
Man, A Bridge Too Far, Magic, Heat, with Burt Reynolds, The Princess Bride, Misery
and Absolute Power
among many other screenplays, including Chaplin and Maverick. William
Goldman was also noted for writing two very critically scathing but
highly entertaining books about Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade
and its sequel, Which
Lie Did I Tell? He was married to Ilene Jones for thirty
years from 1961 and they have two daughters, Jenny and Susanna.
CLAUDE GORETTA (23 June 1929-20 February 2019)
The
Swiss-born film writer and director Claude Goretta, who has died of
natural causes at the age of 89, admitted that he never studied film
formally but learned the art of the cinema just by watching good films.
He founded the Geneva University film society and was a film reviewer
for Swiss newspapers. With four other directors, Jean-Jacques Lagrange,
Jean-Louis
Roy, Michel Soutter and Alain Tanner, he formed the production company
Groupe 5, in order to get funding from Swiss TV for their own cinema
films. In the 1950s he and Tanner worked at the BFI in London, doing
subtitling and archive work. The BFI Experimental Film Fund then
sponsored their short and wordless documentary Nice Time,
about life around Piccadilly Circus at night. Goretta subsequently
joined Swiss Television and from 1957 made shorts and documentaries.
Much of his work was politically and socially motivated, carrying an
edge not always appreciated by his Swiss compatriots. The first feature
film that he wrote, produced and directed was The Madman (Le fou) in 1970, with François Simon, followed by The Invitation (Academy Award nominated), The Wonderful Crook (with Gérard Depardieu) and then The Lacemaker,
which made his name worldwide. It starred a young Isabelle Huppert as a
reserved girl battling with her emotions. The part won her a Bafta for
most promising newcomer. The Wedding Day was based on a Maupassant novel, La Provinciale had Nathalie Baye as a girl moving to Paris to seek her fortune (and Bruno Ganz along the way) and The Death of Mario Ricci
starred Gian Maria Volontè as a journalist investigating the death of a
labourer working on the Mont Blanc tunnel. In 1985 Goretta adapted
Monteverdi’s opera for his film of Orfeo. Other films that he wrote and directed include If the Sun Never Returns, Enemies of the Mafia and L’ombre,
with Jacques Perrin, which was his last film for the cinema in 1992. He
carried on working on television movies including episodes of Maigret with Bruno Cremer and his final work was on a TV biography of Jean-Paul Sartre in 2006.
LESLIE
GRANTHAM (
The actor Leslie Grantham, who has
died from cancer aged 71,
will forever be remembered for his role of
‘Dirty’ Den Watts in the BBC soap EastEnders.
He only took to acting
following a conviction for murder. While in prison he was encouraged to
perform
and after ten years inside he studied at the
CLINTON GREYN (29 September 1933-19 March 2019)
The Welsh actor Clinton Greyn, who has died aged 85, 
was
mainly a stage actor who also worked in films and
television. His career began in repertory until his West End debut
in 1960 in Durrenmatt’s The Visit,
with Lunt and Fontanne. Following further provincial theatre work, he
arrived in films in an uncredited role in Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960). Television included Z Cars, Compact and The Newcomers, until a role in Vittorio De Sica’s Woman Times Seven, with Shirley MacLaine. Further films included Peter Yates’s Robbery, Herbert Ross’s Goodbye, Mr Chips, Henry Hathaway’s Raid on Rommel, The Love Machine, Swedish Fly Girls and Jack Cardiff’s Penny Gold,
Greyn’s last film in 1973. The rest of his career was on stage or
television. With an interest in architecture, Greyn designed and built
his own London flat. He was married twice and has a son from his first
marriage.
KENNETH HAIGH
(
The Yorkshire-born actor Kenneth
Haigh has died at the age
of 86. 
If for nothing else, he will have a
permanent place in the annals of the
British stage, as he was the first actor to play Jimmy Porter, the
anti-hero of
John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in
Anger, at
VALERIE HARPER (22 August 1939-30 August 2019)
The
American actress Valerie Harper, who has died aged 80 from brain
cancer, began her career as a dancer at Radio City Hall, progressing to
acting and comedy on stage and television. She will, however, be best
remembered as the titular star of her TV comedy show Rhoda, a spin-off from 
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
in which she played a Jewish girl with romantic problems. Her mother
was the always brilliant Nancy Walker who, as Ida Morgenstern, was
possibly the most annoying Jewish mother ever. Together Harper and
Walker were a great team, batting comic lines off each other during the
show’s run from 1974 to 1978. Prior to that, Valerie Harper had been on
TV in The Doctors, Columbo and Story Theatre, etc. She had already been in films from 1956 (Rock, Rock, Rock! and Li’l Abner) but her first part of note was as Bean’s wife in Freebie and the Bean (1974), starring Alan Arkin. After Rhoda she was in Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, The Last Married Couple in America with George Segal, and Stanley Donen’s Blame It On Rio with Michael Caine. In 2007 she played Golda Meir in Golda’s Balcony after which came the rather more forgettable Certainty, Shiver and The Town That Came A-Courtin’. Otherwise it was more television including The Love Boat, City, Perry Mason, Missing Persons, Melrose Place, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives and Valerie,
a short-lived series in which she played a working mother looking after
her kids while hubby was away. There was also a TV movie, Mary and Rhoda, with Tyler Moore and Harper in 2000. Her last work was voice-overs for The Simpsons and American Dad! She won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her performance in Rhoda.
Valerie Harper, an avid supporter of equal rights charities, was first
married to the actor Richard Schaal and then, from 1987, to the
actor-producer Tony Cacciotti. She became the mother of Cristina
Cacciotti, the daughter she adopted with her second husband.
BARBARA
HARRIS (
The American actress Barbara Harris,
who has died aged 83
from lung cancer, always made a good impression whatever she appeared
in. 
Much
of her career was spent in the theatre but she was in some films and on
television, too. She began acting as a teenager in Chicago, along with
Mike
Nichols, Elaine May and Edward Asner. Later, her husband Paul Sills, to
whom
she was married from 1955 to 1958, founded the Compass Players which
later spawned
the
SHINOBU
HASHIMOTO
(
The Japanese screenwriter Shinobu
Hashimoto, who has died at
the age of 100, was prolific in his output for directors such as Akira
Kurosawa
and Masaki Kobayashi. However, he may well live in the legends of film
history
for his Seven Samurai
script becoming the inspiration for The
Magnificent Seven. Rashomon
was the first screenplay by Hashimoto, co-written with director
Kurosawa in
1951. 
It
is about a samurai’s wife who is raped by a bandit who then kills the
husband. The story was told from four different viewpoints. It was
later taken
up by the
RUTGER HAUER (23 January 1944-19 July 2019)
The
Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, who has died aged 75, was born to the actors
Teunke and Arend Hauer who ran their own acting school in Utrecht.
Being often separated from his parents while they were on tour, Rutger
became something of a rebel and ran away to sea (literally) to work on
a freighter. Returning home, he studied at night school while working
in the building industry. He then took drama classes, wrote poetry and
joined the Navy. For five years he worked in a pantomime company before
pursuing a serious acting career. His first work for Dutch TV was in
Harry Kṻmel’s Monsieur Hawarden, but his scenes were deleted. Then he played the title role in Floris, a television series directed by Paul Verhoeven and then Verhoeven cast him in his feature film, the very successful Turkish Delight.
More TV and Dutch film work followed until Hauer appeared in Adrian Hoven’s Hard to Remember, 
Ralph Nelson’s The Wilby Conspiracy with Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine, Verhoeven’s Katie Tippel and Herbert Curiel’s The Year of the Cancer. He played Floris again in a TV sequel and was in Fons Rademakers’ epic film Max Havelaar. Hauer was back with Verhoeven again for Soldier of Orange amongst several other films. Hauer made an impression in Nighthawks with Sylvester Stallone and also in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner as the blond, renegade replicant Roy Batty, for which role he wrote much of his own dialogue. Blade Runner did it for Hauer and he became a truly international star player in Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, Sam Peckinpah’s The Osterman Weekend, Philippe Mora’s A Breed Apart and Precious Find, as well as Richard Donner’s Ladyhawke. Flesh + Blood was the last time Hauer and Verhoeven worked together on what was a difficult project.
But there was still much to come from Hauer including The Hitcher, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Ermanno Olmi’s Golden Lion-winning The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Phillip Noyce’s Blind Fury, Lina Wertmṻller’s Up to Date, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Nostradamus (as the Mystic Monk), Partners in Crime, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Sin City, Batman Begins, Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D, and Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers,
the last named arguably the best film Hauer made among many years of
hack feature work and TV series (the results of which rarely reached
the UK). There are still four films with Hauer awaiting release along
with a television mini-series of A Christmas Carol in which Hauer plays the Ghost of Christmas Future - opposite Guy Pearce as Scrooge.
Often
playing sinister or psychopathic villains, Hauer was the winner of many
awards around the world, among which he received a Golden Globe for his
performance in Jack Gold’s TV movie of Escape from Sobibor.
Rutger Hauer was married first to Heidi Merz, with whom he had a
daughter, the actress Aysha Hauer, and then from 1985 he married Ineke
ten Kate who he had been with since 1968. He was an avid
environmentalist and founded an Aids Awareness group which received the
proceeds from the publication of his autobiography. During his career
he gave master classes for students of film-making, and for many years
he was the face in the commercials for Guinness, Ireland’s favourite
stout.
DAVID HEDISON (20 May 1927-18 July 2019)
The
American actor David Hedison, who has died aged 92, was born Ara David
Heditsian of Armenian descent to Albert David Heditsian, a jeweller,
and his wife Rose Bogosian, in Providence, Rhode Island. His parents
wished him to join the family business, but Hollywood beckoned and,
after serving in the US Navy, young Al (as he was called) joined a
local acting school in Manhattan after enrolling at Brown University. 
He then
went on to study at the HB Studio in Greenwich Village and at the
Actors’ Studio. He received an award for his part in A Month in the Country
off-Broadway which led him to receive offers in films, although not
before he had worked as a radio announcer. His first major film role,
after some television work and a part in The Enemy Below with Robert Mitchum, was playing scientist Andrḗ Delambre in The Fly (1958). That was followed by Son of Robin Hood (actually shot on Wimbledon Common), The Lost World, Raoul Walsh’s Marines, Let’s Go with Tom Tryon and George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told.
By then he was known as David Hedison and as such landed a major TV role - Captain Crane - in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
(over a hundred episodes, 1964-68) and that is mainly what he is still
remembered for. He did more television and then played James Bond’s
friend Felix Leiter in Live and Let Die (1973) with Roger Moore. Television took up the rest of the 1970s until Andrew V. McLaglen’s North Sea Hijack and Bryan Forbes’s The Naked Face, both with Roger Moore again. He played Felix Leiter once more with new Bond Timothy Dalton in Licence to Kill, but otherwise he was mainly in demand for many of the popular TV series: Cannon, Benson, Charlie’s Angels, Hart to Hart, Dynasty and The Colbys, Fantasy Island, The Fall Guy, The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote. His career ended on a low note in Eric Stoltz’s 2017 film Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk. David Hedison was married to the producer Bridget Hedison who died in 2016. They have two daughters, Alexandra and Serena.
KATHERINE HELMOND (5 July 1929-23 February 2019)
Although
she had appeared in many television series and a number of films, the
American actress Katherine Helmond, who has died from Alzheimer’s aged
89, only really became known to UK audiences through the comedy series Soap, a send-up of the TV soap opera genre which aired from 1977. 
Helmond
was in all 88 episodes playing the ditzy mother Jessica Tate. She began
acting in school plays in Galveston, Texas, joined a local theatre
group during high school until her New York debut in the 1950s. Summer
stock occupied her till her TV debut in Car 54, Where Are You? An early film was The Hospital
(1971), Paddy Chayefksy’s hilarious and Oscar-winning take on the
medical profession, starring George C. Scott. Mostly on TV in Gunsmoke, The Bob Newhart Show, The Snoop Sisters, Mannix, Barnaby Jones and The Six Million Dollar Man, etc, plus television movies such as The Legend of Lizzie Borden as Lizzie’s sister Emma, Helmond also made the occasional film such as Robert Wise’s The Hindenburg, Hitchcock’s Family Plot and Baby Blue Marine with Jan-Michael Vincent (q.v.). Then came Soap, which led to Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, playing Mrs Ogre opposite John Cleese, and also Gilliam’s Brazil as Jonathan Pryce’s mother. She repeated her Soap role in the spin-off series Benson, some episodes of which she also directed. She also made Shadey, Snoo Wilson’s screenplay with Antony Sher. More TV included The Love Boat, Coach, Everybody Loves Raymond and Who’s the Boss? which she also directed. Of her remaining film appearances, Overboard with Goldie Hawn, Lady in White, and Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas were arguably the most interesting. She also played gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in the TV movie Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story, with Sherilyn Fenn as Liz. Helmond’s last work was voice-overs on the Cars animated films, and Frank and Ava, a 2018 film about Sinatra and Gardner. She won Golden Globes for Soap and Who’s the Boss?
and was nominated many times for Emmy Awards. She kept on working in
theatre and was nominated for a Tony Award, while her last stage
appearance was in The Vagina Monologues.
An early marriage to actor George Martin ended in divorce. Then she was
married to David Christian from 1962 until her death. She had no
children.
BUCK HENRY (9 December 1930-8 January 2020)
The American actor and screenwriter Buck Henry, who has died from a heart
attack at the age of 89, began writing for the Dartmouth College magazine alongside children’s
author Dr Seuss, novelist Budd Schulberg and the playwright Frank D. Gilroy. 
An
interest in acting at Harvard Military Academy led to work on Broadway. Later
on he joined The Premise, an off-Broadway improv group, and he continued to
write mainly comic material. In television he worked on Saturday Night Live, for the Steve Allen and Garry Moore shows, and
Get Smart (with Mel Brooks). His entry
into the cinema was the story for Theodore J. Flicker’s The Troublemaker (1964) in which Henry also acted. His first
screenplay was The Graduate (1967,
with an Oscar nomination), then came Candy,
Catch-22, The Owl and the Pussycat and What’s
Up Doc? (the last two with Barbra Streisand), The Day of the Dolphin
with George C. Scott, First Family
with Bob Newhart, which he also directed, Protocol
with Goldie Hawn, To Die For with
Nicole Kidman, Town and Country with
Warren Beatty, The Humbling (aka The Last Act) with Al
Pacino and Greta Gerwig, and a film of Get
Smart with Steve Carell, to which there is a sequel on the way. Buck Henry
often acted in his own screenplays, including The Graduate, Candy, Catch-22, The Owl and the Pussycat and The Day of the
Dolphin. Other films he appeared in include Milos Forman’s Taking Off, John Cassavetes’ Gloria, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, Heaven Can Wait (which he also
co-directed with Warren Beatty), Paul Bartel’s Eating Raoul, The Player (as himself) and Short Cuts, both by Robert Altman, Gus Van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Grumpy Old Men
with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and many more films and TV shows. He
produced Captain Nice and Quark for television. Buck Henry was
married to Irene Ramp and Sally Zuckerman. He has a single daughter.
NICKY HENSON (12 May 1945-15 December 2019)
Although
British actor Nicky Henson, who has died aged 74 following a long fight
with cancer since 2003, was never a big star in the conventional sense,
he was, however, a prominent leading man in the theatre, on film and on
television. He was the son of the comedian and director Leslie Henson
and his third wife Harriet ‘Billie’ Dell. Henson Sr was previously
married to the actresses Madge Saunders and Gladys Henson, so perhaps
it was inevitable that Nicky should study stage management at Rada. His
theatre debut was in revue in 1963 and he was chosen by Frank Dunlop
when he formed The Young Vic company in 1970 where he appeared in all
kinds of plays, from Moliere to Osborne, from Shakespeare to Beckett
and from Genet to Stoppard. He played at many other theatres and in his
time was a member of both the National and Royal Shakespeare companies.
He was Mordred in the Drury Lane production of Camelot, appeared in
summer shows at the London Palladium and was in the musical version of
The Canterbury Tales. Early on Henson had been part of the Wombats pop
group, so in essence he was the perfect theatrical all-rounder. From
1961 he was in TV and may well be best remembered for his part in an episode of Fawlty Towers as a
visiting lothario who falls foul of Basil, but worse things could have
happened. His first film was Father Came Too! with Leslie Phillips and
he went on to make Doctor in Clover, Michael Winner’s The Jokers, Clive
Donner’s Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, 30 Is a Dangerous Age,
Cynthia with Dudley Moore and the cult horror film Witchfinder General
with Vincent Price. Other of his films included Crooks and Coronets,
Mosquito Squadron, There’s a Girl In My Soup, Jack Cardiff’s Penny Gold
and The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones – in the title role. His later films
included Flyfishing, Vera Drake, Syriana, Blitz, We Still Kill the Old
Way, We Still Steal the Old Way and Tango One, his last film in 2018.
Before that he had appeared in both EastEnders and Downton Abbey. Nicky
Henson was first married to the actress Una Stubbs with whom he had two
sons, Christian and Joe. Following a relationship with Susan Hampshire,
he married the ballet dancer Marguerite Porter with whom he had one son, Keaton.
BERNARD
HEPTON (
The Yorkshire-born actor Bernard
Hepton, who has died aged
92, began his career on stage at the Bradford Civic Playhouse, then
worked in
York and subsequently ran both the Birmingham Rep and Liverpool
Playhouse. 
He
joined the BBC in 1964 as an actor and director but it was for acting
that he
became known and for most of his working life television reigned. He
was in TV
movies from 1955: You Never Can Tell, A
Man for All Seasons, Summer and Winter, etc, plus such series
as Great Expectations (as Wemmick),
The Newcomers, Middlemarch, The
Troubleshooters, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (as Cranmer), Z Cars and The
Organisation, among many more. He will be remembered
particularly for Colditz (as the
Kommandant), Churchill’s People, Sadie,
Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Secret Army, An Inspector Calls, Mansfield Park,
Bleak
House and The Old Devils.
For the
cinema his first film was A Boy, a Girl and a Bike in 1949. He was a
soldier in Olivier’s Richard III,
and
later on was in Get Carter. He
played
Cranmer again in the film of Henry VIII
and His Six Wives, was a diner in Kubrick’s Barry
Lyndon, and a passenger on Voyage
of the Damned. During the 1980s he voiced a part in the
animated Plague Dogs and appeared
in Gandhi, The Holcroft Covenant, Shadey
and Stealing Heaven. His last films
were Eminent Domain (1990) and The Baroness and the Pig (2002), plus a
TV serialisation of Jane Austen’s Emma
in which he played Mr Woodhouse in 2008. Bernard Hepton was married
twice, to the actresses Nancie Jackson and Hilary Liddell, both of whom
predeceased
him.
JERRY HERMAN (10 July 1931-26 December 2019)
The
American theatre composer and lyricist Jerry Herman, who has died aged
88, was a student of design and architecture at first but later
graduated to the theatre. 
Early experience saw him directing shows at youth summer camps. After University he moved to New York and put on I Feel Wonderful,
a revue he wrote as a student. More revues followed and eventually he
was commissioned to write a show about the founding of Israel, Milk and Honey, which ran for over 500 performances. After his next show, Madame Aphrodite, flopped, producer David Merrick offered him Hello, Dolly!, Herman’s first and biggest hit that won ten Tony awards in 1964 with Carol Channing. Mame, with Angela Lansbury, was another hit, but Dear World flopped as did Mack and Mabel, Herman’s personal favourite show. The Grand Tour also bombed but La Cage aux Folles
was an enormous hit. After that he wrote little else and returned to
the world of design, although there were three compilations of his
work, namely Jerry’s Girls, An Evening With Jerry Herman and Showtune. His two biggest hits were filmed but Hello, Dolly!, with Barbra Streisand, cost too much to recoup its investment. Mame
on Broadway (with Angela Lansbury) won the show a Tony award, but as a
film was a real fiasco (with Lucille Ball). He later wrote a television
show, Mrs Santa Claus, for
Lansbury. Unmarried, Jerry Herman’s life partners were Martin
Finkelstein, who died in 1990, and Terry Marler, with him at the time
of his death.
JOHN
HILLERMAN (
The American actor John Hillerman,
who has died aged 84, was
a dab hand at playing 
rather prissy, stuffed-shirt roles. For
his most famous
and longest running TV part of Jonathan Higgins, which he played in Magnum, P.I. as well as in Simon & Simon and in Murder, She Wrote, the Texas-born actor
assumed an English accent (which he perfected by studying Laurence
Olivier in Hamlet). In the late
1950s and early
’60s Hillerman tried stage acting in
GLYN HOUSTON (23 October 1925-30 June 2019)
The
Welsh-born actor Glyn Houston, who has died aged 93, was the brother of
fellow actor Donald Houston, who became a popular film star, whereas
Glyn generally played minor roles often of men in authority. He began
his working life as a milkman then during World War II worked for 
the
Bristol Aeroplane Company, was a gunner in the Fleet Air Arm, a docker
and a military policeman. Later his brother helped him get a job with
the Guildford Repertory Theatre. In 1950 Basil Dearden wrote a part for
him as a barrow boy in The Blue Lamp, after which he appeared in many films, although often uncredited. He was in Trio, Wide Boy, Girdle of Gold, The Great Game, The Cruel Sea with Jack Hawkins and Turn the Key Softly with Joan Collins. Among the major films of the 1950s he appeared in were Mark Robson’s Hell Below Zero, Joseph Losey’s The Sleeping Tiger, Lewis Gilbert’s The Sea Shall Not Have Them, Guy Green’s Lost and the Boulting Brothers’ Private’s Progress. On television he did Colonel March of Scotland Yard, The Grove Family, Theatre Royal, How Green Was My Valley, and many other series that kept him busy throughout his career. Other films he made include The Long Arm, High Flight, The One That Got Away, A Night to Remember, A Cry From the Streets, Nowhere to Go, Tiger Bay and Jet Storm. In the 1960s he appeared in some Norman Wisdom films, as well as The
Battle of the Sexes, Sink the Bismarck!, Circus of Horrors, Payroll,
The Wind of Change, The Green Helmet, Flame in the Streets, Mix Me a
Person, One Way Pendulum and The Secret of Blood Island. From the 1970s onwards Houston mainly confined his work to television, apart from the odd movie such as The Sea Wolves, Conspiracy, Old Scores and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, in which he played Grewgious. His last TV appearances in the 1990s were in The Bill and The Sherman Plays. Glyn Houston was married to the actress Shirley Lawrence and they have two children.
MICHAEL
HOWELLS (13 January 1957-20
July 2018)
You may never have heard of the
production and fashion designer
Michael Howells, who has died aged 61, but his work on films and for
television
will be familiar to many. His last work was for the award-winning ITV
series
TAB HUNTER
(
The American actor Tab Hunter, who
has died aged 86 of cardiac
arrest, was born Arthur Kelm, although his mother Gertrude Gelien gave
her son
her maiden name when his parents split up. 
He
joined the Coast Guard at 15 by
lying about his age. After discharge, he returned to
GLORIA JEAN
(
The American actress and singer
Gloria Jean (neé Schoonover),
who has died from pneumonia at the age of 92, found early fame on
account of her
high soprano voice 
which drew attention when she was just
three years old,
singing on radio with Paul Whiteman’s Band. Having trained as a
coloratura, at
age twelve she auditioned for Universal Studios who were looking for a
replacement for Deanna Durbin. Gloria’s first film was The
Under-Pup with Robert Cummings in 1939, followed by If I Had My Way with Bing Crosby, and A Little Bit of Heaven with Robert Stack.
However, she may well be remembered for Never
Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), mainly because she played
the daughter
of W. C. Fields, who also had a hand in writing this crazily surreal
comedy (under
the name of Otis Criblecoblis). More films followed in which Gloria
exercised
her vocal muscles, such as Wake Up and
Dream with the Andrews Sisters, She’s
My Lovely, A Date With an Angel
and Mister Big, all with Donald
O’Connor, When Johnny Comes Marching Home
with Allan Jones, and other second features of the same ilk. She
appeared as
herself in the wartime morale-boosting Follow
the Boys with George Raft and continued making minor but
entertaining
musical features during the 1940s, including Follow
My Rhythm with Mel Tormé and Ghost
Catchers with the comedians Olsen & Johnson. However,
for
most of the 1950s she appeared on television. In 1961 Jerry Lewis found
Gloria
working in a restaurant and cast her in The
Ladies Man although most of her scenes were deleted. After
episodes of The Dick
Powell Theatre and Saints and
Sinners,
she retired from acting, married (and divorced) husband Franco Cellini
and then
began working for a cosmetics firm until 1993. She had one son, Angelo,
and three
grandchildren with whom she lived in
JÓHANN
JÓHANNSSON
(
The Icelandic composer Jóhann
Jóhannsson, who has died at
the premature age of 48, was a prolific musician who notched up over
forty film
scores since his first film in 2000, The
Icelandic Dream. For many years he worked on films and
television in
FREDDIE JONES (12 September 1927-9 July 2019)
The
celebrated British character actor Freddie Jones, who has died aged 91,
was a late starter in the acting profession. For ten years he worked as
a laboratory technician in a ceramics factory before switching from
amateur dramatics to the professional stage. He obtained a scholarship
to drama school and then acted at Lincoln rep before joining the Royal
Shakespeare Company in 1962 for plays by David Rudkin, Harold Pinter,
Samuel Beckett, Maxim Gorky and Shakespeare. Rarely a star in films or
on TV, he nevertheless contributed a wealth of off-the-wall characters
throughout his acting career.
He made his mark in Peter Brook’s RSC production of the Marat/Sade both on stage and on film in 1967. Before that he had launched his television career in Androcles and the Lion, Z Cars, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, etc, and later played Claudius in The Caesars among many other series. He had a small part in his first film, Joseph Losey’s Accident (1967). Next came John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd, The Bliss of Mrs Blossom with Shirley MacLaine, Otley with Tom Courtenay, and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed for Hammer. On stage in 1980 he created ‘Sir’ in Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, his best defining part, based on Donald Wolfit. The film, however, went to Albert Finney.
Between his many TV appearances Freddie Jones 
also made films including Doctor in Trouble, The Man Who Haunted Himself, with Roger Moore, Kidnapped with Michael Caine, Antony and Cleopatra with Charlton Heston, Sitting Target with Oliver Reed, Son of Dracula with Harry Nilsson, The Satanic Rites of Dracula with Christopher Lee, Juggernaut with Richard Harris, Vampira with David Niven, and Zulu Dawn with Burt Lancaster. He made three films with David Lynch, The Elephant Man, Dune and Wild at Heart and, among many others, did Firefox with Clint Eastwood, Peter Yates’s Krull, Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On (Jones’s favourite), Firestarter with Drew Barrymore, Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes, Bill Douglas’s Comrades, Giles Foster’s Consuming Passions, Terry Jones’s Erik the Viking, Timothy Forder’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (as Sapsea), Gabriel Axel’s Royal Deceit, Hugh Hudson’s My Life So Far, Spike Milligan’s Puckoon, Ladies in Lavender with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith and The Libertine with Johnny Depp.
Apart from his other television work, Freddie Jones played the cantankerous old Sandy Thomas in over six hundred episodes of Emmerdale
from 2005 to 2018. He earned five Bafta nominations between 1965 and
1970 and won the title of ‘The World’s Best Television Actor of the
Year’ at the Monte Carlo TV Festival in 1969. Freddie Jones was married
to the actress Jennie Heslewood and they have three children, the
actors Toby and Casper, and writer-director Rupert.
TERRY JONES (1 February 1942-21 January 2020)
The
Welsh comic writer, actor, producer and director Terry Jones, who
has died from dementia at the age of 77, was one of the
founding members of the BBC TV comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus
(1969-74). However, before that he had written for and sometimes
performed in many other television programmes, including John Bird’s The Late Show (1966), 
The Frost Report, Twice a Fortnight, with Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Michael Palin etc, Complete and Utter History of Britain, with Palin, among others, and Do Not Adjust Your Set, with Eric Idle and Palin, etc. Then Monty Python
came along, with four series written and performed by Jones, Graham
Chapman, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, John Cleese and Terry Gilliam.
Although Python more or less took over his life, he did also contribute to The Two Ronnies. The Punch Review, The Mermaid Frolics and Ripping Yarns, the last written with Palin and in which they both appeared. There was also a compilation of Python sketches, And Now For Something Completely Different (1971), which was released in the cinema. After that came the Python movies which Jones co-wrote and directed – Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. In all these Jones also acted, often playing old women, most notably in Life of Brian as Brian’s Mum (“He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”). He also wrote and sometimes directed other films, including Erik the Viking, Labyrinth (directed by Jim Henson), Consuming Passions, a film of his play written with Palin, The Wind in the Willows and Absolutely Anything (2015), his last film. He also wrote children’s books and made many historical TV documentaries. As an actor he was also in Jabberwocky, The Great Muppet Caper, The Creator (as God), Locked Out, King Guillaume and The Secret Policeman’s Ball,
etc. Terry Jones was first married to Alison Telfer and they have two
children, Sally and Bill, and then to Anna Sӧderstrӧm and they have a
daughter, Siri.
SHASHI KAPOOR
(
The Indian actor-producer-director
Shashi Kapoor has died,
aged 79, from liver cirrhosis. He was one of the sub-continent’s
busiest and
most famous actors in both Indian and other films. 
Kapoor
made over 160 movies,
often playing the handsome hero, although most of his Hindi films never
reached
the UK. He did, however, appear in twelve films in English. His career
began in
the 1940s, when he travelled around
ANNA KARINA (22 September 1940-14 December 2019)
Before
she became an actress, the Danish-born Anna Karina, who has died from
cancer at the age of 79, had studied dance and painting and also became
a successful model in Paris for Coco Chanel and Pierre Cardin. Then
director Jean-Luc Godard met her and 
offered her a cameo in his first feature film, Breathless (A bout de souffle)
in 1960. But she refused to appear naked in the film and lost the role.
However, ironically enough, she was in another Godard feature, Une femme est une femme, playing a striptease artist. Then she appeared as an actress in a silent movie section of Agnès Varda’s Cleo de cinq à sept,
along with Godard. She became a muse for Godard and also his wife from
1961 until 1967 when they divorced. They were part of the French
'Nouvelle Vague', the New Wave in French cinema and she was directed
again by Godard in Vivre sa vie, Le petit soldat, Bande à part, Alphaville, Made in USA, Pierrot le foux and a section of The Oldest Profession.
Karina also worked extensively with other French and Italian directors
including Jacques Rivette, Jacques Baratier, Roger Vadim, Jean Aurel,
Maurice Ronet, Valerio Zurlini, Visconti, Fassbinder, Pierre
Granier-Deferre, Volker Schlṏndorff, Andrḗ Delvaux and Dennis
Berry whom she later married. She appeared in a number of
English-speaking films including She’ll Have to Go (1962) with Bob Monkhouse and Hattie Jacques, The Magus with Anthony Quinn and Michael Caine, Before Winter Comes with David Niven and Topol, Laughter in the Dark with Nicol Williamson, Justine with Dirk Bogarde, The Salzburg Connection with Barry Newman, an international version of Treasure Island with Vic Tayback, Martin Landau, Jean-Pierre Lḗaud and Melvil Poupaud, and The Truth About Charlie with Mark Wahlberg, Thandie Newton and Tim Robbins, as well as Agnès Varda and Charles Aznavour. She directed herself in both Living Together and her last film, Victoria, which she shot in 2008. Along the way she had made TV appearances including an episode of the BBC’s Z Cars and the US TV series I Spy. Serge Gainsbourg wrote a musical for her in 1967 called simply Anna.
Her birth name was Hanne Karen Blarke Bayer. After divorcing Godard,
she married actor-director Pierre Fabre, then actor-director-writer
Daniel Duval and finally Dennis Berry from 1982 until her death.
JEREMY KEMP (3 January 1935-19 July 2019)
The
British actor Jeremy Kemp, who has died aged 84, following a long
illness, was often seen in sinister or military character parts,
playing Germanic or heavy roles both in films and on television. 
Following
National Service with the Gordon Highlanders and the Black Watch, he
studied at the Central School of Speech & Drama and then went into
rep. He was a member of the Royal Shakespeare and Old Vic companies
before joining the BBC Drama Repertory Company. Kemp’s first film was
an uncredited role in Powell & Pressburger’s The Battle of the River Plate in 1956, followed by many television appearances, including Z-Cars in which he played PC Bob Steele for over thirty episodes. During that time he also appeared in many films, including Cleopatra,
Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, Operation Crossbow, Cast a Giant Shadow,
Assignment K, The Strange Affair, A Twist of Sand, The Blue Max,
Darling Lili, Pope Joan and The Games. More films followed before his appearance in the popular TV series of Colditz, playing Squadron Leader Tony Shaw. Kemp worked steadily in such films as The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, A Bridge Too Far, Caravans, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Return of the Soldier and Top Secret! as well as the TV mini-series The Winds of War, Sadat, Peter the Great, War and Remembrance, Star Trek, etc. Jeremy Kemp’s last films were Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994 and Angels and Insects
in 1995. He battled with illness for a long time and latterly had been
living in the Denville Hall home for retired actors in north-west
London..
MARGOT KIDDER
(
The Canadian actress Margot Kidder, 
who
has died at the age
of 69, suffered mental health problems for most of her life. She always
wanted
to be a film star and, in moving to
GARY
KURTZ (
The American
filmmaker Gary Kurtz, who has died aged 78 from cancer, 
was
involved in various
aspects of cinema although mainly as a producer and assistant director
or
second unit director. His film career began in 1965 as assistant
director on
Monte Hellman’s Ride in the Whirlwind
with Jack Nicholson. Working on some fairly lowbrow movies, he was
involved
with such forgettable productions as Voyage
to the Prehistoric Planet, Beach Ball, Queen of Blood, Blood Bath, The
Hostage
and two more Monte Hellman pictures, The
Shooting and Two-Lane Blacktop.
And then he met George Lucas… and life changed for the better, with American Graffiti
- an immense global success – which he co-produced with
Francis Ford Coppola. He stayed with Lucas for the first two Star Wars films. After that he was
producer for The Dark
FRANCIS
LAI (
The French
composer Francis Lai, who
has died age
86, 
began playing in regional orchestras in
his teens and then moved from Nice
to Marseilles in the 1950s where he found jazz. He subsequently moved
to
CLAUDE
LANZMANN (
The French filmmaker and journalist
Claude Lanzmann, who has
died aged 92, was the son of a Jewish family who had emigrated to 
Claude joined the French Resistance
movement and fought with his father
and brother in
MICHEL LEGRAND (24 February 1932-26 January 2019)
The
French film composer, jazz musician and conductor Michel Legrand, who
has died aged 86, was born into a musical family. At age ten he studied
at the Paris Conservatoire under Nadia Boulanger and other celebrated
musicians and began composing and also playing piano and several other
instruments. From 1947 he became interested in jazz and worked as an
accompanist for many French singers. His first album, I Love Paris,
sold over eight million copies. More albums followed and he managed to
persuade musicians of the calibre of Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan
Getz, Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, Diana Ross and Stephane Grappelli to
work with him. 
Legrand became involved in French cinema at the time of the Nouvelle Vague with the likes of directors Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy. He came to fame with Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (aka The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) (1964) in which the whole film was sung, earning him three Oscar nominations, including best original song for ‘I Will Wait for You’, which was subsequently taken up by many popular singers. Moving to Hollywood, he won his first (of three) Academy Awards for ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ from The Thomas Crown Affair. His other Oscars were for Summer of ’42 and Yentl. In his long career in writing for films and television, Legrand notched up over two hundred soundtrack scores in some sixty years from 1955 right up until he died. His last film, Morning Shine, awaits release. Many of the early films, such as those from the 1950s, never reached the UK. However, he became a global name from the time of Demy’s Lola (1961), Bay of Angels, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, and through his work on Godard’s Une Femme est une Femme and Vivre sa Vie and Agnès Varda’s Cleo de 5 ă 7. In Hollywood, he made his mark with Sweet November, The Thomas Crown Affair, Ice Station Zebra, Play Dirty, The Happy Ending (in which his song was ‘What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?’, written with Alan and Marilyn Bergman), Summer of ’42, The Go-Between, Le Mans, A Time for Loving, Portnoy’s Complaint, Lady Sings the Blues, Bequest to the Nation, A Doll’s House, 40 Carats, F for Fake (with Orson Welles), Gable and Lombard, The Other Side of Midnight, The Hunter, Yentl, Atlantic City, Never Say Never Again, Prêt-ẚ-Porter, Les Misḗrables – the list goes ever on – right up to The Other Side of the Wind, the recently completed ‘lost’ Orson Welles film. He was nominated for several Grammy awards, Emmy awards and won a Tony award for his theatre musical Amour on Broadway in 2002. He premiered his musical Marguerite, written with Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schőnberg and lyricist Herbert Kretzmer in London in 2008. Michel Legrand was married three times and has three children.
SUZANNA LEIGH
(
The British-born actress Suzanna
Leigh, who has died in 
began her career as a child performer.
Born Sandra Eileen Anne
Smith, she changed her name on the advice of her godmother Vivien
Leigh. Her
first film appearance was in The Silken
Affair (1956) an uncredited role with David Niven. She was
also uncredited
in Man from
Tangier, in tom thumb
(in the Dancing Shoes sequence), and in Oscar
Wilde with Robert Morley. Bomb in
the
High Street, The Pleasure Girls
and Boeing, Boeing (in
EDWARD LEWIS (16 December 1919-27 July 2019)
The film producer and writer Edward Lewis, who has died aged 99, 
was
notable for choosing prestige properties to film. His CV probably
contains more good films that many other producers would have loved to
have on their roster. After he wrote and produced his first film The Lovable Cheat in 1949, then came The Admiral Was a Lady, after which he worked on some TV series until his next films, Run For the Hills, Lizzie and The Careless Years. All these titles were second features, but his movie in 1960 was an epic by comparison, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus,
which Lewis co-produced with its star, Kirk Douglas, and for which he
employed the Hollywood blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. There followed
a skew of very interesting projects including The
Last Sunset, Lonely Are the Brave, The List of Adrian Messenger, Seven
Days in May, Seconds, Grand Prix, The Fixer, The Extraordinary Seaman,
The Gypsy Moths, I Walk the Line, The Horsemen, The Iceman Cometh,
Executive Action and Missing,
among many others. With his wife Mildred, who died earlier this year,
Lewis wrote books, plays and musicals. Edward and Mildred Lewis have
two children.
PEGGY LIPTON (30 August 1946-11 May 2019)
The American actress and singer Peggy Lipton, who has died from cancer aged 72, made her name in the television cop show The Mod Squad in over a hundred episodes from 1968. 
The
show dealt with social problems and without the use of guns. Later on
she played Norma Jennings in David Lynch’s bizarre television
series Twin Peaks and its film versions, Fire Walk With Me and The Missing Pieces.
Her parents had encouraged Peggy to be a model as a teenager and to
take drama lessons with Uta Hagen. She began her acting career in
several popular TV shows until her first film, Disney’s Mosby’s Marauders in 1967, then Blue with Terence Stamp, after which The Mod Squad and other TV shows kept her busy till Franc Roddam’s War Party in 1988. Other films include Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects with Charles Bronson, True Identity with Lenny Henry, The Postman with Kevin Costner, The Wonder of Sex with Drew Barrymore, Jackpot with Daryl Hannah, When In Rome with Kristen Bell, and A Dog’s Purpose
directed by Lasse Hallstrṏm, her last feature film. In between movies,
she did more television and her last work was on another Twin Peaks
TV series (in 2017). For a time she was a singer and issued several
records. Peggy Lipton was married to the musician Quincy Jones from
1974 to 1989. They have two daughters, Rashida and Kidada, both
actresses. In 2004 Peggy was first diagnosed with the colon cancer that
finally took her in 2019.
SONDRA
LOCKE (28 May 1944-3 November 2018)
The
American actress and director Sondra Locke, who has died aged 74 from
cardiac arrest (following cancer), started making home movies 
with
her schoolboy friend Gordon Anderson. She then worked in promotions for
television, in modelling and on voiceovers. Acting began with a
Nashville community theatre group. In 1967 she married Gordon, although
he was gay and the marriage never consummated. Auditioning for Warner
Bros, Sondra landed the part of Mick in the film of Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Then came Willard,
Cover Me Babe, A Reflection of Fear, The Second Coming of Fear
and some TV series. Her career took an upward turn when she appeared
with Clint Eastwood in The
Outlaw Josey Wales and she eventually became his partner.
Locke made more films with Eastwood – The Gauntlet, Every Which Way
But Loose, Any Which Way You Can, Bronco Billy and Sudden Impact. Then
more television came along and she also pursued a directing career from
the late 1980s and through the ‘90s, making Ratboy, Impulse, Trading Favours
and a TV movie, Death
in Small Doses.
After fourteen years together, Locke and Eastwood had a very public
breaking up and she wrote a book about their troubled life together
called The Good, the
Bad and the Very Ugly. Without Eastwood, her work suffered
and she didn’t act after 1986 until her return to the screen in 2000 in
Clean and Narrow
and The Prophet’s Game.
Her last film came seventeen years later with Ray Meets Helen,
Alan Rudolph’s romantic drama which co-starred Keith Carradine. By the
time of her death, Sondra Locke was still married to Gordon
Anderson.
JULIA LOCKWOOD (23 August 1941-24 March 2019)
The
British actress Julia Lockwood, who has died aged 77 from pneumonia,
was the daughter of the stage and film actress Margaret Lockwood.
Having seen her mother playing Peter Pan, Julia couldn’t wait to follow
her in the same role. She played Wendy when her mother was Peter in
1957 but eventually got to play the title role four times. She made her
debut on film at the age of four (with her mother) in Hungry Hill and then in The White Unicorn, again with her mother. Julia was Heidi on television and also appeared in The Royalty, Don’t Tell Father, Compact, Birds on the Wing, etc. Between stage work Julia made films including My Teenage Daughter with Anna Neagle, The Solitary Child with Barbara Shelley, Please Turn Over with Ted Ray and No Kidding
with Leslie Phillips. When she married the actor Ernest Clark in 1972,
she retired to raise her three children. She also had a son from a
previous relationship.
CAROL LYNLEY (13 February 1942-3 September 2019)
The
American actress Carol Lynley, who has died from a heart attack aged
77, started her working life as a child model for the Sears, Roebuck
Company in New York. As a teenager she appeared in television series
until her first film, Walt Disney’s The Light in the Forest (1958) with Fess Parker. 
She had appeared on Broadway in the play Blue Jeans
as a young girl finding herself pregnant, so she also made the film
version, co-starring with the young Brandon De Wilde. The same year,
1959, also saw her in Holiday for Lovers with Jane Wyman and Clifton Webb. Her career continued with a mix of film and TV work, including Don Siegel’s Hound Dog Man with Fabian, Return to Peyton Place, as Alison Mackenzie, Robert Aldrich’s The Last Sunset, with Rock Hudson and Kirk Douglas, Franklin J. Schaffner’s Woman of Summer with Joanne Woodward, Under the Yum Yum Tree with Jack Lemmon, and Otto Preminger’s The Cardinal. She worked with Preminger again on Bunny Lake Is Missing, a mystery story filmed in Britain. Other films she graced were Shock Treatment, The Pleasure Seekers and Harlow in which Lynley played a version of the 1930s star Jean Harlow. The Shuttered Room was David Greene’s horror film shot in Britain with Oliver Reed and Gig Young. Danger Route
was one of Seth Holt’s last films, a spy story with Richard Johnson.
After more television work, Carol Lynley’s career comprised mostly
second-rate films and TV movies, apart from The Poseidon Adventure, a remake of The Cat and the Canary, and a version of H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, with Jack Palance. Carol Lynley married and divorced the actor-producer Michael Selsman with whom she has a daughter, Jill.
SUE LYON (10 July 1946-26 December 2019)
The
American actress Sue Lyon, who has died aged 73, had the most
extraordinary entrance into the world of cinema when she was cast by
Stanley Kubrick for the title role in his 1962 film of the Vladimir
Nabokov novel Lolita. She was
then a budding TV performer before landing the controversial part of a
young girl attracted by the film’s hero, Humbert Humbert (James Mason).
Perfectly
cast, Lyon won a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer but was
seldom able to repeat her first talented success. Her career had begun
as a model at age 13 while still at school in LA. Spotting her on The Loretta Young Show,
Kubrick chose Lyon from hundreds of contenders for the part of Lolita.
Then she appeared in John Huston’s film of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana, alongside Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr. She played one of the missionaries in John Ford’s last film, Seven Women, with Anne Bancroft, Margaret Leighton and Flora Robson. Apart from Tony Rome with Frank Sinatra, her career took a downward turn: The Flim-Flam Man (a.k.a. One Born Every Minute) with George C. Scott, the Western Four Rode Out, as the hero’s wife in Evel Knievel, a horror film, Crash!, with Josḗ Ferrer, and End of the World with Christopher Lee. After a few European titles and TV work, she retired from the screen in Alligator
(1980). Sue Lyon had five husbands but most of her marriages lasted
little more than a year. The filmmaker Hampton Fancher was the first,
then the photographer Roland Harrison, with whom she had a daughter,
Nona, then Gary ‘Cotton’ Adamson, Edward Weathers and finally the radio
engineer Richard Rudman (from 1985 to 2002). With Harrison
she adopted a 14-year-old boy, Robert. Lyon had met and married
Adamson while he was in jail for murder, after which she began working
for prison reform and convicts’ conjugal rights.
JOHN MAHONEY
(
Lancashire-born actor John Mahoney,
who has died from throat
cancer 
at the age of 77, was best known for his
role as Martin Crane, Kelsey
Grammer’s father in the television series Frasier.
When Mahoney’s sister married an American, he decided to emigrate to
the
DUSAN
MAKAVEYEV (13 October 1932-25 January 2019)
The
Serbian screenwriter and director Dusan Makaveyev, who has died at the
age of 86, will be remembered for his important contribution to
Yugoslavian cinema from the 1960s onwards, which was part of a
critical, anarchistic experimental film movement called Black Wave. 
He
will be particularly celebrated for his film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism
(1971) which put him on the global cinema map. However, on account of
its coverage of sexual and communist politics, in a documentary study
of the life of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, it mixed fact and fiction
in a satirical way that unhinged the Yugoslavian authorities, and they
banned the film for some sixteen years. Makaveyev’s cinema career began
in the mid-1950s with a number of short films until his first feature
in 1965, Man Is Not a
Bird. This was followed by Love Affair, or the Case of the
Missing Switchboard Operator and Innocence Unprotected.
After W.R.: Mysteries
of the Organism was banned by the oppressive political
movement in his home country, Makaveyev moved to Canada to make Sweet Movie in
1974. It was another explicit film about sex which thereby limited its
release to art house cinemas. Montenegro
(1981) was made in Sweden with Susan Anspach and Erland Josephson. It
was about a housewife who, seeking sexual liberation, tries to pep up
her life by eating all her family’s food, setting light to her bed and
poisoning the dog. The
Coca-Cola Kid
(1985), a satire on global branding, was made in Australia with Eric
Roberts and Greta Scacchi. Eventually returning to Yugoslavia in 1988,
Makaveyev made Manifesto
(1988), a more conventional comedy-drama based on a book by Emil Zola
about revolutionaries trying to assassinate a despotic European king.
The cast included Alfred Molina, Simon Callow, Lindsay Duncan and Eric
Stoltz, but it received only a limited release. Makaveyev went on to
make more shorts, TV documentaries and two more features until his last
in 1996. He was a vital voice in political cinema, albeit one that at
times found difficulty in being heard. Dusan Makaveyev was married to
Bojana Marijan, who often worked with him as an assistant or second
unit director, writer and producer.
DOROTHY
MALONE (
The strikingly
beautiful American actress Dorothy Malone,
who has died aged 92, had a long, fifty-year career in films and
television, yet
without realising her true potential as an actress. Discovered by an
RKO scout,
she began her film career with uncredited roles in films from 1940,
including Higher and Higher and Step Lively (both with Frank Sinatra), Show Business
(with Eddie Cantor), and Hollywood
Canteen (with Bette Davis). 
She
was at times under contract to Warners and
Universal, but her first name check came in Too
Young to Know (1945) and
then she
appeared in Night and Day, the
bowdlerised biopic about Cole Porter with Cary Grant. She made more of
an
impression with Bogart in The Big Sleep,
playing a bookshop owner, but then spent the rest of the 1940s in minor
Westerns
and other programmers. Television called from 1951, but she continued
in movies
including Scared Stiff and Artists and Models, both with Dean
Martin and Jerry Lewis, Law and Order,
Loophole, Pushover,
Don Siegel’s Private
Hell 36, Young at Heart
with
Sinatra and Doris Day, Raoul Walsh’s Battle
Cry, and Sincerely Yours
with
Liberace, among many others. More television cropped up until she
gained the
best role of her film career, as Marylee Hadley in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956), for which
she won an Oscar for best supporting actress, eclipsing her co-stars
Rock
Hudson, Robert Stack and Lauren Bacall. Sirk also cast her in The Tarnished
Angels the following year. Among
the
other films she made are Man of a
Thousand Faces, Too Much, Too Soon,
Warlock, The
Last Voyage, The Last
Sunset, and the iconic Beach Party.
However, Dorothy Malone may well be best remembered for her portrayal
of
Constance Mackenzie in the TV series of Peyton
Place, which ran for over 400 episodes from 1964 to 1968.
Following that it
was mostly television (Rich Man, Poor
Man, Ironside, Ellery Queen, Police
Woman, The Streets of San Francisco,
etc), interspersed with the odd film
such as Golden Rendezvous with
Richard Harris and all-star Winter Kills,
plus the inevitable horror movies. Her last film was Basic
Instinct (1992). Dorothy Malone’s marriages were none too
successful. Her first husband, Jacques Bergerac, actor and ex-spouse of
Ginger
Rogers, gave her two daughters in the five years they were married. Her
match
with the businessman Robert Tomarkin was annulled after four months and
her
final marriage to motel executive Charles Huston Bell ended in divorce
after
less than two years. She had three grandchildren.
TERENCE MARSH
(
The Academy Award-winning production
designer Terence Marsh,
who has died at the age of 86, began his career as a 
draughtsman
at Pinewood
Studios. Films he worked on early in his career include The
Prince and the Showgirl, Miracle
in Soho, The League of Gentlemen,
The
Singer Not the Song and Lawrence of
Arabia. This last involved recreating the city of
PENNY
MARSHALL (15 October 1943-17 December 2018)
The
American actress turned producer and director, Penny Marshall, who has
died aged 76 from complications with diabetes, began her working life
as a secretary and in appearances on TV commercials. Her brother, film
director Garry Marshall, cast her in How Sweet It Is! in
1968, 
at a time when she was mainly working in
TV (Barefoot in the
Park, The Magical World of Disney, The Super, The Bob Newhart Show
and The Odd Couple
etc). She played Laverne in Happy
Days, and also in the two spin-off series Laverne and Shirley
and Mork and Mindy
plus other small parts in films including Movers and Shakers
with Walter Matthau, The
Hard Way with Michael J. Fox and Get Shorty with
John Travolta, among others. She continued acting in films and on TV,
with her final appearance being in The
Odd Couple on TV in 2016. Marshall began directing in 1979
with the TV series Working
Stiffs and went on to make feature films of Jumpin’ Jack Flash
with Whoopi Goldberg, Big
with Tom Hanks (the first film by a woman director to take over $100
million at the box-office). She also directed Awakenings, with
Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, A
League of Their Own, with Hanks again, and Madonna, Renaissance Man
with Danny DeVito, The
Preacher’s Wife with Denzel Washington and Whitney
Houston, and Riding in
Cars With Boys with Drew Barrymore, plus some more
television work. Rodman,
her documentary about professional basketball player Dennis Rodman, is
due for release in September of 2019. Her job as a producer included
some of her own films plus Calendar
Girl, Getting Away With Murder, With Friends Like These..., Risk,
Cinderella Man and Bewitched.
Penny Marshall was married twice, first to the director Rob Reiner and
then to the football player Michael Henry, with whom she had a
daughter, Tracy. Both marriages ended in divorce. Following a bout of
lung cancer, she wrote a memoir called My Mother Was Nuts.
MARDIK MARTIN (16 September 1934-11 September 2019)
The
Hollywood screenwriter Mardik Martin, who has died from a stroke at the
age of 85, was chiefly known for his work with director Martin
Scorsese. 
Born
in Iran, but raised in Iraq, Martin was an American of Armenian
descent. He left Iraq to go to New York where he met fellow student
Martin Scorsese at New York University. He graduated with a Master’s
degree in screenwriting in 1968 and then taught at NYU for five years.
He and Scorsese began making films together, the first a student short
in 1964 called It’s Not Just You, Murray! Martin then did treatments for Scorsese’s documentaries Italianamerican, The Last Waltz and American Boy. Season of the Witch was the film that ultimately became Mean Streets. Together they worked on New York, New York which Martin wrote with Earl Mac Rauch and Raging Bull which he wrote with Paul Schrader. Martin also wrote Valentino with director Ken Russell, worked as a Hollywood script doctor and appeared as an actor in Scorsese’s New York, New York, Raging Bull and The King of Comedy. He also wrote an autobiographical documentary Mardik: Baghdad to Hollywood in 2008. His final work in 2014 was as co-writer on Fatih Akin’s The Cut,
a film about the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. From
2014 he taught at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of
Southern California. Mardik Martin was the winner of a Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Arpa International Film Festival in
Hollywood in 2007.
PETER MAYHEW (19 May 1945-30 April 2019)
The
British actor Peter Mayhew, who has died aged 74 from a heart attack,
was a hospital porter before being discovered by film producer Charles
Schneer who was looking for a tall actor to play Minoton in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. At seven foot 
three
inches tall, Mayhew fitted the bill and was later asked to play
Chewbacca, a big hairy but friendly Wookiee monster in the first Star Wars
film (1977). For the actor this part changed his life and for the next
38 years he mostly played the same role in five of the main Star Wars films plus appearances in various television spin-offs. He also played Chewbacca in other TV shows such as Donnie and Marie, The Muppet Show, The Late Show with David Letterman and Glee, as well as other parts in other series including a giant in Hazell, The Tall Knight in Dark Towers and various roles in The Kenny Everett Show. While much of his film career was with Star Wars, he was also cast in a few other movies including the role of The Mechanic in David McGillivray’s screenplay for Terror, a Dead Man in Yesterday Was a Lie and Uncle Clyde in Killer Ink,
his last appearance (in 2016). Peter Mayhew married his wife Angelique
in 1999 and they have three children. They lived in Texas where Mayhew
was a naturalised US citizen from 2005. He became a businessman and
wrote two children’s books about giants.
JOHN McENERY (1 November 1943-12 April 2019)
The
British actor John McEnery, younger brother of fellow actor Peter
McEnery, has died at the age of 75. Born in Birmingham, he began acting
at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, after training at the Bristol Old
Vic. Much of his career was in theatre, 
where
he did his best work. In his time he was a member of the National
Theatre, the Nottingham Playhouse, the Royal Shakespeare Company,
Shakespeare’s Globe and the Young Vic. He entered films in 1965 playing
extras in Olivier’s Othello, then did a TV movie of the National Theatre’s Much Ado About Nothing, followed by the role of Mercutio in Zeffirelli’s film of Romeo and Juliet. He appeared with his brother in David Hart’s The Other People and then with Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar in The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun. Bartleby
(1970) gave McEnery the title role opposite Paul Scofield in a film of
the Herman Melville story. In France – and in French – he was in Gḗrard
Brach’s The Boat on the Grass (scripted by Roman Polanski), followed by Nicholas and Alexandra, as Kerensky, The Ragman’s Daughter, written by Alan Sillitoe, Fury, by Edward Bond, David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, with John Hurt, The Land That Time Forgot, Losey’s Galileo with Topol, and an uncredited part with his then-wife Stephanie Beacham in David McGillivray’s screenplay for Pete Walker’s Schizo. After that and between stage roles, John McEnery mainly worked on television in Our
Mutual Friend, Will Shakespeare, The Word, Nicholas Nickleby, Jamaica
Inn, Sins, Poirot, The Buddha of Suburbia, The Broker’s Man, The Bill, and Elizabeth I with Helen Mirren, etc. Other films he made include The Duellists, Little Dorrit, The Krays, The Fool, Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (as Osric), Black Beauty, When Saturday Comes and Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003), his last film. His final TV appearances were in episodes of Silent Witness, Wallander and New Tricks. John McEnery was married to the actress Stephanie Beacham from 1973 to 1978, by whom he has two daughters, Phoebe and Chloe.
ALLYN ANN
McLERIE
(
The Canadian-born actress, 
dancer
and singer Allyn Ann
McLerie, who has died at the age of 91, studied at the Actors Studio
and was on
stage before she graduated to films and television. She was in One Touch of Venus, Miss
Liberty, Where’s
Charley?, Redhead,
MARK MEDOFF (18 March 1940-23 April 2019)
The American writer, producer, director and actor Mark Medoff, who has died aged 79 from complications with cancer, 
made his name as a dramatist producing some thirty plays. He also worked on many films, but his greatest success was his play Children of a Lesser God,
about the relationship between a deaf woman and her speech therapist.
The play was an enormous hit and the subsequent film version was also a
success. Medoff insisted that the leading female role be played by a
deaf actress. In the US it was premiered by Phyllis Frelich, in London
it was Elizabeth Quinn and for the film (with William Hurt) the role
went to Marlee Matlin, who won an Oscar, the first time an Academy
Award had been presented to a deaf actor. Medoff had written plays
since the mid-1960s and he was also a teacher in New Mexico where he
founded the American Southwest Theatre Company. He did the screenplay
for own play When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? with Marjoe Gortner, Candy Clark and Peter Firth. He also scripted Good Guys Wear Black for Chuck Norris and later worked on Off Beat with Judge Reinhold, Clara’s Heart with Whoopi Goldberg, City of Joy with Patrick Swayze, Homage with Blythe Danner, plus Santa Fe, The Heart Outright and, at the time of his death, Walking With Herb,
a serious comedy about a guy with personal problems, an abiding theme
of Medoff’s writing. He also produced and directed some of his own
screenplays and at times appeared in them as an actor. Mark Medoff was
first married to Vicki Eisler. He married his second wife, the actress
and costume supervisor Stephanie Thorne in 1972 and they have three
daughters, Jessica, Debra and Rachel.
MICHAEL MEDWIN (18 July 1923-26 February 2020)
SYLVIA MILES (9 September 1924-12 June 2019)
Greenwich
Village-born actress Sylvia Miles, who has died aged 94, had a long,
sixty-two-year career right up to her death. She will be best
remembered for her role in Midnight Cowboy for which she was Academy Award nominated. She studied at the Actors Studio, 
working on stage and in revue from 1947 until her first television appearance in 1950 on The Bob Hope Show. In 1960 she appeared in the pilot for The Dick Van Dyke Show but didn’t make the series. Her first film was Murder, Inc in 1960 with Stuart Whitman, then Delmer Daves’ Parrish with Troy Donohue, and in 1964 Pie in the Sky (aka Terror in the City) with Lee Grant. In between films she was in TV shows such as Route 66, The Defenders, Naked City and N.Y.P.D. Then came John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy and Sylvia Miles’ Oscar-nominated performance as call girl Cass. After that she never seemed to stop working. The Last Movie was Dennis Hopper’s follow-up as the director of Easy Rider. Then there was Ernie Pintoff’s Who Killed Mary Whats’ername?, and Paul Morrissey’s Heat, Andy Warhol’s parody of Sunset Boulevard. Sylvia earned another Oscar nomination in the remake of Farewell, My Lovely with Robert Mitchum. Then came 92 in the Shade with Peter Fonda, The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday with Lee Marvin and Oliver Reed, Michael Winner’s horror shocker The Sentinel and many more. Sylvia graced the all-star adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun, she was in Michael Apted’s Critical Condition with Richard Pryor, and played Dolores the Realtor in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Working with women directors she was Hannah Mandelbaum the matchmaker in Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey, played Meryl Streep’s mother in Susan Seidelman’s She-Devil, and appeared in Sally Kirkland’s The Boys Behind the Desk and Alison Thompson’s High Times’ Potluck. Go Go Tales was Abel Ferrara’s stripclub comedy with Miles as a monster landlady, and she was back for Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel, Money Never Sleeps. Her last TV show was an episode of Life on Mars in 2008 and she was filming Eric Spade Rivas’ Japanese Borscht
at the time of her death. Sylvia Miles was married three times, to
William Miles and the actors Gerald Price and Ted Brown. All three
marriages ended in divorce. She once attracted notoriety by dumping a
plate of food over the head of John Simon, the theatre critic of New York magazine, for his giving her a bad review in 1973.
JEAN-PIERRE MOCKY (6 July 1929-8 August 2019)
The
French film actor-writer-producer-director Jean-Pierre Mocky, who has
died aged 90, was a hard-working filmmaker of nearly 70 films as well
as TV work. Born Jean-Paul Mokiejewski in Nice to Polish parents, his
father was Jewish, his mother Catholic. They sent Jean-Pierre to
Algeria 
during
the Nazi occupation of France by lying about his age. Mocky’s career
began as a film and stage actor in 1946, working with Cocteau,
Visconti, Fellini, and appearing in Antonioni’s I vinti (The Vanquished, 1953). His first screenplay was an adaptation of Hervḗ Bazin’s novel La tête contre les murs (The Keepers,
1959) for Georges Franju, in which he also appeared, and he often acted
in the films he later wrote and directed. His first as director was Les dragueurs (1959) about a couple of shy young men looking for girls in night-time Paris.
Mocky was well-named as his films were often satirical or dealt with unorthodox problems including the loss of virginity (The Virgins) a fight for power (Snobs), splitting up of relationships (A Couple), aristocrats adapting to poverty through theft (Heaven Sent), falsifying important documents (Order of the Daisy), murderous orgies (Solo), real estate swindles (Chut!),
and so on. Not all of his films were seen in the UK, although Mocky
attracted the cream of the French acting profession, working with the
likes of Bourvil, Charles Aznavour, Jacques Charrier, Gḗrard Blain,
Jean-Louis Barrault, Fernandel, Jean Poiret, Claude Rich, Michel
Serrault, Michel Simon, Philippe Noiret, Marie-Josḗ Nat, Jeanne Moreau,
Catherine Deneuve, Stḗphane Audran, Toto and Jane Birkin, etc. From
2007 to 2019 he directed and hosted fifty-two episodes of stories for
TV called Myster Mocky prḗsente. His last feature film, Tous flics!,
is due to be released in 2020. Jean-Pierre Mocky was married four times
and claimed to have fathered seventeen children, his first born when he
was 13!.
LILIANE
MONTEVECCHI
(
The French actress, singer, dancer
and cabaret artist Liliane
Montevecchi, who has died from colon cancer aged 85, was the epitome of
the
sophisticated entertainer. 
She
began her career aged 18 as a dancer with Roland
Petit’s company in
STEPHEN MOORE (11 December 1937-4 October 2019)
Equally
well-known on stage, television and radio, British actor Stephen Moore,
who has died at the age of 81, graced some films in a career that
included working for the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare
Company and the Royal Court. On stage he tackled Shakespeare,
Ayckbourn, Sam Shepard, Howard Brenton, David Hare, Dostoevsky,
Chekhov, O’Neill and John Osborne among other playwrights’ work. 
He will be remembered, however, for originating the role of Marvin, the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and stayed with the piece throughout its many manifestations on radio,
TV and audio recordings. His first TV work was the voice of flute in
Czech animator Jirί Trnka’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then, after several television movies and series, he was in Lindsay Anderson’s long ‘short’, The White Bus (1967), written by Shelagh Delaney. Other films that Stephen Moore made include The Last Shot You Hear, Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far, Don Siegel’s Rough Cut, with Burt Reynolds, Where the Boys Are, with Lorna Luft, Richard Eyre’s Laughterhouse, and Christopher Morahan’s Clockwise with John Cleese from a Michael Frayn screenplay. Under Suspicion was a thriller with Liam Neeson, Brassed Off was Mark Herman’s comedy-drama about a Northern brass band, and The Boat That Rocked
was a Richard Curtis comedy about pirate radio. Other notable TV
appearances by Stephen Moore were in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Three Men in a Boat, two series of Adrian Mole programmes, Middlemarch (as Mayor Vincy), Harry Enfield and Chums (as Kevin’s Dad), Jack Rosnethal’s Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, Doctor Who and Holby City. His last appearance was in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show
in 2016. Stephen Moore married four times and is the father of the
actress Robyn Moore, the actor Guy Moore and Hedda Moore by his first
wife Barbara Mognaz; the father of the actress Charlotte Moore by his
second wife Celestine Randall; and the father of Sophie George-Moore by
his fourth wife Noelyn George.
PATRICIA
MORISON
(
The American actress Patricia
Morison, who has died from
natural
causes aged 103, will be best remembered for creating the role of Lili
Vanessi in Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me,
Kate and later taking over in The
King and I. However, early on she had a film career, on
account of her
great beauty and her long black hair. After a spell in the theatre,
Morison
made her feature film debut in Persons in
Hiding (1939), a B-picture from Paramount Pictures who put
her under
contract. Unfortunately, she never landed great parts and was
restricted to
mainly playing femmes fatales in
minor movies. During World War II she entertained the troops and
returned to
films for Hitler’s Madman, The Fallen Sparrow and The
Song of Bernadette. Post-war saw her
in MGM’s Without Love, Universal’s Lady on
a Train and the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes starrer Dressed to Kill. She was in Johnny
Weissmuller’s last jungle pic Tarzan and the
Huntress, Song of the Thin Man
and in Kiss of Death
she played a rape and suicide victim but her part was cut.
Following her success in Kiss Me, Kate,
which she also played in twice on television, she worked mainly on the
small
screen for most of her subsequent career. She returned briefly to films
to play
Georges Sand in Song Without End
(1960). Her final performance came in the most unlikely of films,
Terence
Davies’ The Long Day Closes in
1992.
She never married.
ROBBY MŰLLER
(
The Dutch cinematographer, who has
died aged 78 from
vascular dementia, 
had a preference for black-and-white
photography as he
believed that “the absence of colour can be a stronger factor than the
presence
of colour.” Known as the Master of Light, he worked often with such
directors
as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier. Starting his film
career in 1965
he shot some shorts and TV movies until Jonathan
(1970), Hans W. Geissendörfer’s adaptation of a Bram Stoker novel. For
Wenders
he shot Summer in the City, The
Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, The Scarlet Letter,
KIP NIVEN (27 May 1945-6 May 2019)
The
name of the American actor Kip Niven, who has died from a heart attack
aged 73, may not mean too much to UK audiences, but he had a long
career in theatre, cinema, television and radio. A native of Kansas, he
joined the university theatre programme and gained much experience as
an actor on stage. His TV career began in 1968 and he worked solidly on
the small screen until he found favour in Magnum Force (1973), one of Clint Eastwood’s ‘Dirty’ Harry Calahan movies in which he played rogue cop Astrachan. 
More television work led to films such as Newman’s Law, with George Peppard, and Airport 1975, Jack Smight’s group jeopardy drama with a starry cast headed by Charlton Heston.
He was in Earthquake,
another battle for survival with Heston again, and Ava Gardner and the
earth-movingly tremulous Sensurround sound process. Niven’s third
disaster movie was The Hindenburg,
Robert Wise’s flaming Zeppelin drama with George C. Scott and a few
archive shots of the original disaster. Completing his run of real-life
historical dramas, Niven played a pilot in Battle of Midway with director Smight and Heston again. Scarlet Buccaneer (aka Swashbuckler) was pirate hokum with Robert Shaw.
Niven appeared on TV more than he did in films during the 1970s. In 1977 he did Smight’s Damnation Alley with Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard and three years later played a serial killer in New Year’s Evil (1980), a so-so schlock-horror fest. Although always busy on TV, Kip Niven had to wait twenty years to get back in the cinema. The Painting (aka Soldiers of Change, 2001), was a race related film that didn’t make the UK. More Than Puppy Love suffered the same fate, while little happened to Raising Jeffrey Dahmer, The Only Good Indian, Jayhawkers or Goodland. Kip Niven’s last film role was as Farmer Jim in The Land
which still awaits a release. In a long career of over fifty years on
film and TV, Kip Niven never appeared to be out of work. His first
wife, actress Susan Tisdall, with whom he had a son and daughter,
died in 1981. He then married the actress Linda Lavin, but they
divorced in 1992, and finally he married Mary Beth Reiff, who gave him
a daughter, but Mary died in 2012.
DENIS NORDEN
(
The writer, presenter and broadcaster
Denis Norden, who has
died aged 96, was probably best-known as the frontman for It’ll Be All Right On the Night, ITV’s
long-running series of
outtakes and bloopers from films and television shows which ran from
1977 for
some thirty years. 
He also presented Looks
Familiar, a TV nostalgia programme for many years. Long
before TV
discovered him, Norden and his writing partner Frank Muir, contributed
a great
deal to radio and TV comedy from 1948 onwards. His career began as a
theatre
stagehand and then cinema manager. After the war he left the RAF, where
he
wrote for troop shows, and then began writing for comedian Dick
Bentley, while
Frank Muir wrote for Jimmy Edwards. They combined forces for the radio
comedy Take It From Here
for Bentley and Edwards together. It ran from 1948 to 1959 and
is still being repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra. They wrote many TV series
including Whack-O!, And So to Bentley,
The Seven Faces of Jim and its sequels, Brothers
in Law, How To Be an Alien, The
Frost Report, The Glums
etc. They
appeared together on radio in My Word!
and My Music and on TV in Call My
Bluff. Early on in their careers, Muir and Norden had written
additional
dialogue for the film Song of Paris,
with Dennis Price. When they stopped writing together, Norden
contributed to
several film screenplays including The
Bliss of Mrs Blossom, Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell, The Best House in
London,
Twelve Plus One, Every Home Should
Have One, The Statue, Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman, The Water
Babies,
plus a number of television movies. Frank Muir died in 1998 and Denis
Norden
retired in 2006 at the age of 84 because he was developing macular
degeneration.
He was married to Avril Rosen (who died just two months before him).
They have
two children, architect Nick and radio presenter Maggie. Denis Norden
published
his autobiography, Clips from a Life,
in 2008.
ERMANNO OLMI
(
The screenwriter and director Ermanno
Olmi, who has died at
the age of 86, was one of
IDRISSA OUÉDRAOGO (21 January 1954–18
February 2018)
Idrissa
Ouédraogo, who has died aged 64, was one of the 
few
great filmmakers to emerge
from the African continent. Born in 1954 in Banfora, Burkina Faso –
then Upper
Volta – Ouédraogo was the son of farmers, but was born in his country’s
capital
city, Ouagadougou, where he also died. It was there that, after primary
school,
he began his serious education, later studying at the city's African
Institute for
Cinema Studies (where he graduated with a masters’ degree), in Kiev and
in
Paris. Before leaving for the USSR, he set up his own film company, The
Future
of Films, for whom he directed a number of shorts, starting with Poko (1981). His feature films largely
focused on rural African life and he employed nonprofessional
performers and
members of his own family, most of whom could not even read. Thus, he
encouraged
his actors to improvise, to draw on their emotions rather than to
repeat
dialogue he had written. His third film, Tilaï
(The Law) (1990), which he also co-produced and co-wrote, won
the Grand
Prix at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. And Samba
Traoré (1993), about a petty thief plagued by guilt, was
nominated for the
Silver Bear at the 43rd Berlin Film Festival. He also contributed a
segment to
the omnibus film 11'09"01 September
11 (2002), alongside Alejandro González Iñárritu, Claude
Lelouch, Ken Loach
and Sean Penn.
NICHOLAS PARSONS (10 October 1923-28 January 2020)
What most people don’t realise about Nicholas Parsons, who has died aged 96
after a short illness, is that before he was a radio and television presenter
he was an actor on stage, in films and on television. Although he always wanted
to be an actor, his parents apprenticed him to an engineering firm in Glasgow,
followed by study at Glasgow University. He qualified as a mechanical engineer
but never graduated. Illness prevented him from joining the Merchant Navy in
World War II so, after the war he became an actor in London in The Hasty Heart and Arsenic and Old Lace, followed by rep at Bromley, Windsor and
Maidstone. He had been discovered by impresario Carroll Levis and appeared on
his radio show. Parsons also did a stint as a stand-up comedian at the Windmill
Theatre and later appeared in Boeing-Boeing,
was the Narrator in the first London production of Sondheim’s Into the Woods and took part in the 21st
anniversary production of The Rocky
Horror Show. On television early on he was the voice of Tex Tucker in Gerry
Anderson’s puppet series Four Feather
Falls. Later he played stooge on
comedian Arthur Haynes’ TV show for ten years, with Haynes always referring to Parsons
as ‘Nicholarse’. He also worked with Benny Hill and other TV included The Very Merry Widow, The Ugliest Girl In
Town, Kappatoo, The Comic Strip, Doctor Who, Cluedo and the children’s shows
Bodger and Badger and The Wotnots.
From 1971 he was the presenter on Anglia TV’s quiz show Sale of the Century for the next twelve years. However, before that
he became (unwillingly, at first) the chairman of the BBC radio programme Just a Minute in 1967, a job he kept for
some fifty-two years, with nary a break, missing just a couple of recordings
due to ill-health. The show was transferred to television for a while but it was
not a long-runner on the box.
That leaves the films that Parsons made. Although he was on TV from 1953, he had made his cinema debut in Master of Bankdam
in 1947, playing Edgar Hoylehouse in a saga about a Yorkshire mill
family. He then had small parts in many 1950s films, including To Dorothy a Son with Shelley Winters, Simon and Laura with Peter Finch and Kay Kendall, An Alligator Named Daisy and Eyewitness, both with Donald Sinden, The Long Arm with Jack Hawkins, Brothers in Law with Richard Attenborough, Happy Is the Bride with Ian Carmichael, Too Many Crooks and Carlton-Browne of the F.O. both with Terry-Thomas, Upstairs and Downstairs with Michael Craig, Let’s Get Married with Anthony Newley, and then Doctor in Love, Carry on Regardless, Murder Ahoy!, Every Day’s a Holiday and The Wrong Box. He made a few more films until 1976 and his last cinema appearance was as himself in Lady Godiva
in 2008. Nicholas Parsons was first married to the actress Denise Bryer
and they have two children. Following their divorce in 1989 he married
Ann Reynolds in 1995. He was appointed OBE in 2004 and CBE in 2014, for
his children’s charity work.
IVAN PASSER (10 July 1933-9 January 2020)
The
Czech writer-director Ivan Passer, who has died aged 86 from pulmonary
complications, was part of the Czech New Wave of filmmaking in the
1960s. Until then a political stranglehold prevented filmmakers from
expressing their own perhaps controversial views. Passer was part of a
group that included Jirί Menzel, Jan Nĕmec, Vera Chytilová and Miloš
Forman, for whom he wrote Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman’s Ball.
It was, however, a short-lived hiatus because, when the Soviet Union
invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, the government shutters went back up
against personal artistic freedom. 
Some of the Czech directors moved to the US where they found it easier to work. After a short subject, A Boring Afternoon, and the feature Intimate Lighting, Ivan Passer left Czechoslovakia and made his next film in the US. Born to Win (1971) starred George Segal as a former hairdresser and petty criminal. This was followed by Law and Disorder with Carroll O’Connor and Ernest Borgnine as two disenchanted New York cops, and Ace Up My Sleeve, based on a James Hadley Chase novel, with Omar Sharif as an embezzler. Silver Bears featured Michael Caine and Cybill Shepherd in a comic crime story about money laundering. More criminal activity in Cutter’s Way, with Jeff Bridges uncovering a possible murderer. Passer had a change of subject for Creator, with Peter O’Toole as a scientist trying to clone his dead wife. Haunted Summer featured the threesome that were Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley. Pretty Hattie’s Baby about a white girl adopted by a black family was made but never released. It starred Alfre Woodard who was also in The Wishing Tree, playing a woman returning to her black roots in Savannah. Passer also directed a number of TV movies including a biopic on Stalin with Robert Duvall, a version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped with Armand Assante, and a remake of Picnic from the play by William Inge with Bonnie Bedelia and Josh Brolin. Passer’s last film was Nomad: The Warrior,
made in France and Kazakhstan in 2005. Ivan Passer’s US films were not
exactly personal statements of the sort he might have made in
Czechoslovakia, but he was a good journeyman director of genre movies.
He later became a professor of film at the University of Southern
California. Passer was married to Eva Lίmanová and they have one son,
Ivan Passer Jr.
MURIEL PAVLOW (27
June 1921-19 January 2019)
The
British actress Muriel Pavlow, who has died aged 97, had a long career
on stage, in the cinema and on television. She was born in London to
parents of Russian and Swiss-French origin. 
Muriel
grew up in Hertfordshire and began acting as a teenager. Her first film
was with Gracie Fields in Sing
As We Go (1934) and she made her theatre debut in The Old Maid
in 1936. Being rather petite, she played juvenile roles long beyond her
own age until John Gielgud cast her in John Van Druten’s Old Acquaintance.
Her early films include A
Romance in Flanders, John Halifax (as a young boy), Night Boat to Dublin, The Shop
at Sly Corner and Quiet
Wedding where she met her future husband, the actor Derek
Farr. Her stage work included Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus, J.M.
Barrie’s Dear Brutus,
Terence Rattigan’s While
the Sun Shines and Odd
Man In
with Derek Farr and Donald Sinden. She was at the Stratford Memorial
Theatre during the 1950s and also became popular as one of the Rank
Organisation’s contract players in films such as Malta Story with
Alec Guinness, Doctor
in the House and Doctor
at Large with Dirk Bogarde, Conflict of Wings
with John Gregson, Simon
and Laura with Peter Finch, and Reach for the Sky
(as the wife of Kenneth More, who played Douglas Bader), among many
others. She generally played sympathetic roles, morally supporting the
men in her life. Muriel Pavlow more or less retired from films with Murder She Said,
with Margaret Rutherford, in 1961. However, she continued to work on
stage and in television. Derek Farr died in 1986 but Muriel worked
regularly until 2004 when she made a TV movie called Belonging. Her
career farewell came in 2009 with a small part in Stephen Poliakoff’s
film Glorious 39.
Muriel Pavlow spent her last years in Denville Hall, the home for
retired actors.
D.A. PENNEBAKER (15 July 1925-1 August 2019)
The
documentary film director and cinematographer Donn Alan Pennebaker, who
has died aged 94 from natural causes, became something of a one-man
industry as far as cinéma-vérité
was concerned. Before taking up filmmaking, he studied engineering at
Yale, ran an electronics firm and worked in advertising. He started
making short films in 1953, often with Shirley Clarke (famous for her
film The Connection, about drug addicts). 
His first film of any length was Opening in Moscow, on the 1959 American Exhibition in Russia. After some TV work, he made Jane, about the 25-year-old actress Jane Fonda rehearsing a play. In 1967 he made the film he is most famous for – Don’t Look Back, a feature-length portrait of the singer Bob Dylan on his 1965 tour of the UK. Monterey Pop
covered the pre-Woodstock music festival with The Mamas and The Papas,
Canned Heat, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin,
The Animals, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Ravi Shankar, etc. He filmed the
recording of Stephen Sondheim’s Company
for Original Cast Album in which Elaine Stritch had trouble getting
it together (she compared it to “like Judy Garland playing the Margaret
Rutherford story”). Pennebaker made more films with musicians including
John Lennon, David Bowie, Little Richard, Otis Redding and a feature on
Stax Records. Other subjects included John DeLorean, Bill Clinton, Town Bloody Hall with Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, the actress’s one-woman show, Woodstock Diary, Kings of Pastry, about the French pastry chef award, and the five-hour National Anthem: Inside the Vote for Change Concert Tour
in 2004, plus many other counter-culture films, often with a musical
subject. He was regularly his own cinematographer, sometimes his editor
too and also producer. He had a single acting credit in Wild 90,
the 1968 film he wrote for Norman Mailer. D. A. Pennebaker was married
three times and is the father of eight children. He was awarded a
lifetime achievement Oscar in 2013.
LUKE PERRY (11 October 1966-4 March 2019)
The
American actor Luke Perry, who has died aged 52 from a stroke, became a
teenage heartthrob from his 200 appearances during the 1990s on the
television show Beverly Hills, 90210
which depicted the lives and mainly the loves of a group of students in
southern California. He played Dylan McKay, a young man constantly on
the edge of society with bouts of alcoholism and an advanced sexual
appetite for which the actor was compared to the late James Dean. 
The
show began quietly but soon took off when it dealt with problems such
as drugs, Aids, rape and bankruptcy. Perry was just one of a cast of
bright young things including Jason Priestley, Shannen Doherty, Tori
Spelling and Hilary Swank. Together they made the show a must-see
programme for the youth audience. Perry began his TV career in 1982 in Voyagers! Followed by Loving, Another World, At Home With the Webbers and several animated series including The Incredible Hulk. In between TV shows, he scored some films such as Terminal Bliss (his first) and then Scorchers with Faye Dunaway and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He starred in John G. Avildsen’s 8 Seconds, was with Ashley Judd in Normal Life and played Billy in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element with Bruce Willis. Throughout the 1990s he was appearing in Beverly Hills, 90210, while his other work just saw him marking time. In 1995 he took a three-year break from Beverly Hills, 90210
but then returned to it until 2000. More television followed, as
well some feature films, but none that had any particular interest and
few, if any, reached the UK. While Perry was more popular in the US
than here, he played the Billy Crystal role in When Harry Met Sally
on stage in London, although it was not well received. In the last few
years of his life Perry was in over fifty episodes of the TV series Riverdale, about a gang of youthful amateur sleuths solving local crimes. At the time of his death, Luke Perry had finished Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,
Quentin Tarantino’s sideways glance at Tinseltown, which is due for
release in August 2019. It could well be Luke Perry’s best film. Perry
married and divorced the actress Rachel Sharp and they have two
children, Jack and Sophie.
MICHAEL J. POLLARD (30 May 1939-20 November 2019)
The
American actor Michael J. Pollard, who has died from a heart attack at
the age of 80, will be remembered for one role in particular, although
he had a long career in film and television lasting for over fifty
years. That one role was as one of the accomplices of Bonnie Parker and
Clyde Barrow (played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) in Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn’s 1967 film about the 1930s gun-toting bank robbers. 
Pollard
played C.W. Moss, the couple’s driver and mechanic, for which he
received an Oscar nomination. His Actors’ Studio training (with Marilyn
Monroe, no less) was put to good use in his amusing, mumbling,
naturalistic performance, coupled with his angelic, curly-mopped face.
Pollard had done a lot of acting before and Warren Beatty discovered
him when they worked together in the theatre. After quite a bit of
stage work, Pollard broke into television in 1958 but his first film
was It Happened to Jane
(1958), in an uncredited role with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon. Much more
TV saw him into the 1960s when other films came along – Martin Ritt’s Adventures of a Young Man with Richard Beymer, Franklin J. Schaffner’s Woman of Summer with Joanne Woodward and Beymer again, and Summer Magic with Hayley Mills. More TV kept him busy until Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! Then Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels saw him working with Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra and Bruce Dern. Enter Laughing was Carl Reiner’s comedy about a young tyro actor, and Caprice was with Doris Day again plus Richard Harris. After Bonnie and Clyde there was James Goldstone’s Jigsaw, Michael Winner’s Hannibal Brooks, Little Fauss and Big Halsy (as Little Fauss) with Robert Redford, and a starring role in Dirty Little Billy (as Billy the Kid). Pollard co-starred with Ernest Borgnine in Sunday in the Country and played ‘The Hawker’ in Between the Lines, about an underground Boston newspaper, and he was Little Red in Melvin and Howard about the millionaire Howard Hughes. Other of Pollard’s films included The Patriot, America, The American Way and Roxanne. He was in Scrooged, an update of A Christmas Carol, Next of Kin with Patrick Swayze and Liam Neeson, Tango & Cash with Sylvester Stallone, and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy.
In the 1990s and from 2000 onwards, he made many films but nothing
particularly interesting, did more TV and played himself in Remembering Nigel. His last film, The Next Cassavetes,
is still in post-production. Michael J. Pollard married and divorced
actress Beth Howland (she died in 2015) and they have a daughter,
Holly. He also married and divorced Annie Tolstoy and they have a son,
Axel.
NIK POWELL (4 November 1950-7 November 2019)
Film
producer and one-time record executive Nik Powell, who has died of
cancer at the age of 69, surfaced at a time when the British film
industry really needed him. He created Palace Pictures which produced
many high-profile films and furthered the careers of directors Mike
Leigh, Peter Greenaway and Neil Jordan, etc. Early on he knew Richard
Branson and they went into business together, trying to market, of all
things, 
the breeding of budgies and growing fir trees for Christmas. After these failures, Branson and Powell launched Student
magazine, but following a falling out, Powell then joined Branson in a
mail order record company called Slipped Disc, with shops around
London. He then co-founded Virgin Records with Branson and from their
first release, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells,
the company was a huge success. In 1983, Powell parted from Virgin to
create Palace Pictures with Stephen Woolley who ran the Scala
independent cinema in Bloomsbury and later in King’s Cross. Together
they produced some of the most interesting British films of the 1980s
and ’90s including The Company of Wolves, Absolute Beginners, Mona Lisa, High Spirits, Scandal, Red, Hot and Blue, The Pope Must Die and The Crying Game among many others. When Palace went out of business, Powell continued as a producer with Scala Productions, releasing Backbeat, The Neon Bible, Fever Pitch, Little Voice, Last Orders, Ladies in Lavender, Brimstone, and many others. Willow, made in Macedonia, is due to be released soon, while A Gentleman’s War,
Scott Hicks’ film about Douglas Jardine and the 1930s cricket bodyline
scandal, is in pre-production. From 2003 to 2017, Nik Powell was the
director of the National Film and Television School. His first wife was
Merrill Tomassi, Richard Branson’s sister-in-law and, following their
divorce, he married the singer Sandie Shaw in 1982. They have two
children, Amie and Jack, and divorced in 1995. Nik Powell received the
OBE for his services to the music, film and television industries in
2018.
ANDRÉ PREVIN (6 April 1929-28 February 2019)
How
do you sum up the life and career of the German-American musician,
composer and conductor André Previn, who has died at the age of 89? He
was involved in so many aspects of music, be it jazz, classical,
musical theatre and, yes, films, that it is hard to know where to
begin. He even proved his mettle as an actor by working with Morecambe
& Wise on a television sketch that has forever imprinted his
persona on the great viewing public. For just that TV performance
alone, Previn will always be remembered. 
However,
to begin at the beginning, in 1938 his Jewish family moved from Berlin
to the USA and settled in Los Angeles. Still in high school, André
began arranging and composing for MGM, who had discovered the teenager
on a local radio station. At the age of 18 he was a
composer-conductor at the studio, writing his first film score at the
age of 20 for The Sun Comes Up,
the first film to feature Lassie the dog. He subsequently worked as
arranger, conductor, composer or musical director on titles including Three
Little Words, The Violent Hour, Give a Girl a Break, Kiss Me, Kate,
Young at Heart, It’s Always Fair Weather, Kismet, Bad Day at Black
Rock, Wedding Breakfast (aka The Catered Affair), Bells
Are Ringing, Designing Woman, Gigi, Elmer Gantry, One, Two, Three, The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Silk Stockings, Porgy and Bess, Sweet
Bird of Youth, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Dead Image, Two for the
Seesaw, Irma La Douce, My Fair Lady, Inside Daisy Clover, Thoroughly
Modern Millie, Paint Your Wagon, The Music Lovers and Rollerball, among many many others.
Previn
had started his musical career as a jazz pianist, making his first
album at the age of 16. He continued with this and worked on and off
with many other celebrated jazz artists into the 1990s. From the early
1960s he had concentrated on conducting, first with the Houston
Symphony, then the St Louis Symphony and from 1968 he was the principal
conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Later he took over at the
Pittsburgh Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Royal
Philharmonic and the Oslo Philharmonic. He recorded hundreds of albums
of jazz, classical, contemporary and film music. He composed two
operas, A Streetcar Named Desire and Brief Encounter and theatre musicals including A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Coco, The Good Companions and the incidental music to Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.
His orchestral compositions include overtures, works for cello, guitar,
piano, violin, harp and some double and triple concertos plus very many
pieces of chamber music. He also collaborated on several jazz and pop
songs.
Previn won many awards, including Oscars for Gigi, Porgy and Bess, Irma La Douce and My Fair Lady,
plus several Grammy Awards, including a lifetime achievemant award. He
was appointed an honorary KBE, Knight Commander of the Order of the
British Empire in 1996. André Previn was married five times,
including to the singer-songwriter Dory (Langan) Previn, the actress
Mia Farrow and the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. He was father to ten
children.
ANNA QUAYLE (6 October 1932-16 August 2019)
On
stage from the age of three in one of her father Douglas Quayle’s
productions, the British actress Anna Quayle, who has died aged 86 from
Lewy body dementia, specialised mainly in comedy roles but was also a
talented dramatic performer. Following her training at Rada, 
she
was immediately cast in several revues in Edinburgh and London. Her big
break came in 1960 as the four heroines of Anthony Newley and Leslie
Bricusse’s musical Stop the World – I Want to Get Off.
It played Manchester, London and Broadway, where Quayle secured a Tony
Award. Other stage work included plays by Anthony Shaffer, Rodney
Ackland, Terence Rattigan, Noël Coward and Sandy Wilson’s The Boyfriend. She appeared on television from 1961 in series including Not Only... But Also, The Avengers, Girls About Town, Grubstreet, Jackanory Playhouse, The Georgian House and The Basil Brush Show. Later on she was in Henry V, Brideshead Revisited, Father Charlie, Mapp & Lucia, Lytton’s Diary and The Sooty Show. For five years from 1990 she played Mrs Monroe in the children’s serial Grange Hill. Anna Quayle’s first film appearance was in A Hard Day’s Night (1964) with The Beatles and she went on to make The Sandwich Man with Michael Bentine, Drop Dead, Darling with Tony Curtis, Casino Royale (1967) with David Niven, Smashing Time with Rita Tushingham, and she had a prominent part as Baroness Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She was in Up the Chastity Belt with Frankie Howerd, Mistress Pamela, a version of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, Martin Campbell’s Eskimo Nell and also his Three for All, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution with Alan Arkin, Nicol Williamson and Laurence Olivier, Adventures of a Private Eye and ...of a Plumber’s Mate. Her last work was for television, Adam’s Family Tree in 1999. Anna Quayle married and divorced the actor Donald Baker. They have a daughter, Katy.
MARTIN
RANSOHOFF
(
The American producer
and writer
Martin Ransohoff, who has died aged 90, had a thirty-five year career,
mainly in films.
After starting out in advertising, he made his first film as a
producer, Boys’ Night Out, in 1962,
a comedy with
Kim Novak and James Garner, followed by The
Wheeler Dealers, with Garner and Lee Remick. 
He produced The
Americanisation of Emily with Julie Andrews
and wrote the story of The Sandpiper,
but the combined efforts of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie
Saint,
Charles Bronson, Robert Webber and Tom Drake (under the direction of
Vincente
Minnelli) couldn’t make this odd romance rise above the level of tosh.
However,
it did win an Oscar for best song, ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’.
Ransohoff’s
choice of films was eclectic: Tony Richardson’s The
Loved One
and Hamlet, Norman Jewison’s The
Cincinnati Kid (after he fired Sam Peckinpah) with Steve
McQueen, Eye of the Devil with
Deborah Kerr
(after he fired Kim Novak), and the debut of Sharon Tate who later on
was in
Ransohoff and Polanski’s The Fearless
Vampire Killers. Other
films included
Jack Clayton’s Our Mother’s House,
Alexander McKendrick’s Don’t Make Waves,
John Sturges’ Ice Station Zebra, Peter Hall’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Sydney Pollack’s Castle Keep, Mike Nichols’ Catch-22,
Richard Fleischer’s 10
Rillington Place,
John G. Avildsen’s Save
the Tiger and comedies with Gene Wilder and/or Richard Pryor,
namely Silver Streak, See No Evil and Hanky
Panky.
One of Ransohoff’s biggest successes was Jagged
Edge (1985) with Glenn Close and
Jeff
Bridges. His last film was Turbulence
in 1997 with Ray Liotta. Martin Ransohoff was married twice, first to
Nancy
Hope Lundgren and later to Joan Marie Madgey, who survives him.
SANDY RATCLIFF (2 October 1948-7 April 2019)
The British actress Sandy Ratcliff, who has died from cancer at the age of 70, 
made an instant impression in her first film, Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971), playing a teenage girl having a breakdown. Her next film was the science fiction film The Final Programme, from the Michael Moorcock novel. Her television work included Crossroads, Crown Court, Couples, Touch and Go, Danger UXB, Shoestring, Minder, Shelley and over 260 episodes of EastEnders, in which she played café owner Sue Osman. Other films included Yesterday’s Hero, written by Jackie Collins, Chris Petit’s Radio On, Hussy with Helen Mirren, Doll’s Eye
and several TV movies, the last in 1994, after which she retired from
acting. In 1991 she had appeared in court when her then-boyfriend was
accused of murder, her last public appearance. She was married to the
photographer Peter Wright from 1968 to 1973, and bore a son, William,
whose father was ex-boyfriend, theatre director Terence Palmer. In her
time, Sandy Ratcliff played bass guitar in the bands Tropical Appetite
and Escalator. Following drug addiction and nervous breakdowns, she
became a counsellor and ambulance driver.
BURT
REYNOLDS (
The American actor
Burt Reynolds,
who has died from heart problems at the age of 82, was quoted as
saying: “My
films were the kind they only show in prisons and in airplanes, because
nobody
can leave.” He was famous for turning down good roles but nevertheless
enjoyed
a sixty-year career in 
As a teenager,
he was a good athlete and nearly had a football career until a knee
injury put
paid to it. In college in
SHANE RIMMER (28 May 1929-29 March 2019)
The
Canadian actor and writer Shane Rimmer, who has died aged 89, emigrated
to the UK in the 1950s and worked here for the rest of his life.
Although his face would be familiar to many filmgoers and TV watchers,
he may well be remembered for his voice-over work, 
in particular on Thunderbirds and other Gerry Anderson puppet series. He was the voice of Scott Tracy on Thunderbirds (1965) on TV and for the features Thunderbirds Are GO and Thunderbirds 6, was various characters’ voices in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Joe 90 and Space: 1999. He also co-wrote some episodes of Joe 90 and Captain Scarlet.
In Canada he was a cabaret singer and then worked on TV for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He made his film debut in Sidney J.
Furie’s first film, A Dangerous Age (1957), then appeared in Flaming Frontier with Bruce Bennett and Jim Davis. Moving to the UK, he worked on Armchair Theatre for ABC TV and then for Stanley Kubrick in Dr Strangelove... Umpteen television shows followed from then and for the rest of his career and a new Thunderbirds series for its 50th anniversary in 2015. Other films in which Shane Rimmer appeared include You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die (voice only), S*P*Y*S,
Rollerball, The ‘Human’ Factor, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Star Wars IV,
Silver Bears, The People That Time Forgot, The Spy Who Loved Me,
Superman I, II and III, The Dogs of War, Priest of Love, Reds, Gandhi, The Hunger, Out of Africa, Whoops Apocalypse, A Kiss Before Dying (1991), Batman Begins
etc. Never a star or leading man, Shane Rimmer always brought something
extra to a role, be it comedy or drama, and he made a good living out
of being on the perimeter or just on the soundtrack. He was married to
Sheila G. Logan and they have three children. In 2014 Shame Rimmer
published a novel, Long Shot, following his autobiography, From Thunderbirds to Pterodactyls.
NICOLAS
ROEG (15 August 1928-23 November
2018)
The British cinematographer and film director Nicolas Roeg, who has
died aged 90, was never one to work on routine projects. 
Instead,
he was mostly associated with controversial productions that often
became something of a cult. His career began as a tea boy in the small
Marylebone Studios which happened to be across from where he lived. He
worked his way up to become a clapperloader and eventually camera
operator on such films as The
Trials
of Oscar Wilde, The Sundowners, The Man Inside, Bhowani Junction,
Lawrence of Arabia, The Caretaker, The Masque of the Red Death, Nothing
But the Best, Fahrenheit 451, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the
Forum, Far From the Madding Crowd and Petulia. His first
film as a director was Performance,
co-directed with Donald Cammell. Controversy – sex, drugs and Mick
Jagger – kept the film on the distributor’s shelf for two years. Walkabout was set
in the Australian outback, Don’t
Look Now featured Venice and was a popular and critical
success. David Bowie played The
Man Who Fell to Earth and then Art Garfunkel starred in Bad Timing with
Theresa Russell, who became Roeg’s second wife. The film, however, was
disowned by the Rank Organisation. Insignificance
saw famous names of Marilyn Monroe, Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Senator
McCarthy meeting up. Of his later films, only The Witches really
worked to its own advantage, with Castaway,
Track 29, Cold Heaven and Two Deaths
following as also-rans. Sadly, Roeg’s last film, Puffball
(2007), was a huge disappointment. As a cinematographer, Roeg always
displayed great imagination and a distinctive visual style. He was
awarded a British Film Institute Fellowship in 1994, received the OBE
in 1996 and won the Lifetime Achievement Awards at Raindance in 1999
and at the Transilvania International Film Festival in 2007. The London
Film Critics’ Circle gave him the Dilys Powell Award in 2012. Roeg was
married to actress Susan Stephen, with whom he had four children,
Theresa Russell (two children) and latterly Harriet Harper (from 2005).
ALVIN SARGENT (12 April 1927-9 May 2019)
The
American screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who has died of natural causes at
the age of 92, was notorious for taking a long time to write his
scripts. But, that said, he created many high-profile films and could
never be accused of writing second-rate material. 
He
was born Alvin Supowitz in Philadelphia where he was educated but left
school to join the US Navy during World War II. Moving to Los Angeles,
he worked as a restaurant waiter, then for a clothing company and then
as a CBS prop man. After some acting experience, he sold advertisements
for the showbiz paper Variety. He began writing for television from 1956 including for Naked City, Ben Casey, Route 66 and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. His first film script was for Gambit (1966) with Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine and then Robert Mulligan’s The Stalking Moon with Gregory Peck, Alan J. Pakula’s The Sterile Cuckoo (aka Pookie) with Liza Minnelli, and I Walk the Line, again with Peck. In the 1970s he wrote The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for director Paul Newman and star Joanne Woodward, Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, and Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, again for Pakula and starring Maggie Smith. He contributed (uncredited) to Streisand’s version of A Star Is Born, Sydney Pollack’s Bobby Deerfield, and Julia for Fred Zinnemann, with whom he had worked as an uncredited actor on From Here to Eternity in 1953. After Straight Time, The Electric Horseman, Nuts (with Streisand), and Ordinary People,
Robert Redford’s first film as a director, Sargent worked through the
1990s with Susan Sarandon, Bill Murray, Danny DeVito, Dustin Hoffman,
Whoopi Goldberg and Richard Gere, until Spider-Man 2 came along in 2004, followed by Spider-Man 3 and finally The Amazing Spider-Man,
his last screenplay (in 2012). Alvin Sargent was married to the actress
Joan Camden for over twenty years. After their divorce, he lived with
Laura Ziskin, producer of the Spider-Man movies, for 25 years but they married only a year before she died in 2011. Sargent won two Academy Awards, for Julia and Ordinary People.
ELIZABETH SELLARS (6 May 1921-30 December 2019)
The Scottish-born actress Elizabeth Sellars, who has died aged 98, was a prominent
player on stage, in films and on television. She enjoyed a long career
particularly in the cinema, often playing enigmatic women of mystery, no better
than they should have been. 
Born in Glasgow and educated in Hertfordshire, she
attended Rada and then in 1940 worked for Ensa entertaining the troops
overseas. Her London theatre debut was in The
Brothers Karamazov in Hammersmith and she later worked at the Bristol Old
Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company and London’s West End. She made her
television debut in Dr Faustus (1947)
and later on did South Sea Bubble, Ordeal by Fire, Dial M for Murder, The
Philadelphia Story, Pink String and Sealing Wax, The Browning Version, The Second Mrs Tanqueray and John Mortimer’s Too Late for the Mashed Potato. She was also John Mortimer’s mother
in A Voyage Round My Father with Laurence
Olivier. Sellars’ first film was Floodtide
in 1949, followed by David Lean’s Madeleine,
Hunted and The Gentle Gunman (both
with Dirk Bogarde) and many British black & white thrillers such as Guilt Is My Shadow, Night Was Our Friend,
The Long Memory, The Broken Horseshoe, Recoil, Forbidden Cargo, Three Cases of
Murder and The Last Man to Hang,
titles that often appear on the Talking Pictures channel. In Hollywood she did The Barefoot Contessa for Joseph
L.Mankiewicz, Désirée with Marlon
Brando, and Prince of Players with Richard Burton. She was
also in The Shiralee with Peter
Finch, Jet Storm with Richard
Attenborough, The Day They Robbed the
Bank of England with Peter O’Toole, Never Let Go with Peter Sellers, 55 Days at Peking, The Chalk Garden and The
Mummy’s Shroud. After The Hireling
in 1973 she worked solely in television until she retired in 1990. Elizabeth
Sellars was married to Francis Austin Henley from 1960 until his death in 2009.
DAVID SHERWIN
(
The screenwriter, actor and producer
David Sherwin, who has
died from sepsis aged 75, 
did not have a great output, but what he
wrote for
the cinema was sheer class. He made his mark on three Lindsay Anderson
films,
namely if…. (1968), O
Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia
Hospital (1982). His first
screenplay was actually called Crusaders
but had a title change suggested by a secretary at the production
company. If…. dealt with rebellion
at a public
school and introduced Malcolm McDowell in his first film, playing Mick
Travis. O Lucky Man! followed him
in his career
as a coffee salesman, and
JOHN SHRAPNEL (27 April 1942-14 February 2020)
The
British actor John Shrapnel, who has died aged 77 from cancer, was a
familiar face on television although he was also a stage actor
throughout his career and appeared in many high-profile films. Born in
Birmingham to Norman Shrapnel and his wife Mary, he was brought up in a
literary household as his father was a Guardian
reporter, reviewer and theatre critic who also wrote books on politics.
Moving south, John was educated at the City of London School and
Cambridge. Early stage productions included Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing,
the latter his professional debut. Later he worked at the National
Theatre, the Donmar Warehouse, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Young
Vic and the Barbican Theatre. 
On television (from 1967) he was in the Elizabeth R
series (with Glenda Jackson) playing the Earl of Sussex, as well as
various Shakespeare adaptations. He often played men of substance,
military types or out-of-the-ordinary professionals. His first feature
film was Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), then he played Father James in Pope Joan with Liv Ullmann. Other films included Hennessy starring Rod Steiger, Personal Services with Julie Walters, Partition, set in India at the time of independence in 1947, Tony Palmer’s Testimony with Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich, Bruce Robinson’s How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Nicolas Roeg’s Two Deaths and Stephen Herek’s 101 Dalmatians with Glenn Close as Cruella de Vil. He was a PR Chief in Notting Hill with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, Gaius in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, played an Admiral in Kathryn Bigelow’s K-19: The Widowmaker with Harrison Ford, was Nestor in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, played Lord Howard in Elizabeth: The Golden Age with Cate Blanchett, was General Grey in The Duchess with Keira Knightley, played a Reverend Father in The Awakening with Rebecca Hall, appeared with Ant & Dec in Alien Autopsy and was Claudius and the Ghost to Maxine Peake’s Hamlet. John Shrapnel’s last film was the TV version of Mike Bartlett’s play King Charles III
in 2017. He was married to the landscape gardener Francesca
Bartley, daughter of Deborah Kerr, and they have three sons, writer
Joe, director Tom and actor Lex, the latter appearing with his father
at the Young Vic in Caryl Churchill’s A Number.
NEIL SIMON
(
The American writer
Neil Simon,
who has died aged 91 from renal failure following Alzheimer’s disease,
conquered the worlds of theatre, cinema and television, mostly with
comedy,
often based on his own life experiences. His career began as a gag
writer on TV
in the late 1940s with Sid Caesar’s long-running series Your
Show of Shows and Caesar’s
Hour. 
He also did TV adaptations of Best
Foot Forward, Babes in Toyland,
A Connecticut Yankee, The
Chocolate Soldier, The Desert Song
and The Great Waltz. He wrote some
twenty episodes of the Sergeant
Bilko You’ll Never Get Rich series
and
more besides. His first play was Come
Blow Your Horn which was followed by Barefoot
in the Park, The Odd Couple,
Sweet Charity, Plaza
Suite and Last of the
Red Hot Lovers, all of which became films written by him. The Odd Couple also made a perennially
successful TV series. Other of his plays that made movies were The Prisoner of Second Avenue,
The Sunshine Boys, Chapter
Two, The Gingerbread Lady
(filmed
as Only When I Laugh), I Ought To Be In Pictures, Brighton
Beach Memoirs, Broadway
Bound,
Lost in Yonkers and Biloxi
Blues, the last four being very
much based on his early life in New York. He also wrote the original
screenplays of The Out of Towners, The Heartbreak Kid, Murder
by Death, The Goodbye
Girl, The Cheap Detective,
California Suite and Seems
Like Old Times. Simon wrote the
books for the stage musicals Little Me,
Sweet Charity and Promises,
Promises. With further TV movies and
his other adaptations, Neil
Simon must surely have been the most productive comedy writer in the
world. His
plays were staged everywhere and his films were global successes.
Actors no
doubt fought to be in his plays and films and he certainly raised the
profiles
of performers such as Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. He never won an
Oscar
himself, but he did win Tony awards for The
Odd Couple, Biloxi
Blues and Lost in
Yonkers, the last gaining him a Pulitzer Prize. Neil Simon
was born, lived
and died in
ALAN
SIMPSON (
From 1957, the scriptwriting
partnership of Ray Galton and
Alan Simpson 
produced some of the best comedy
programmes on radio and
television for some sixty years. They met in hospital when they were
both
suffering from tuberculosis and started writing for the hospital radio
station.
They began scripting for BBC radio in 1951 for Derek Roy’s show Happy-Go-Lucky, then with Eric Sykes
contributed to Frankie Howerd’s Fine
Goings On and eventually Hancock’s
Half Hour (1954-59) which transferred to BBC Television from
1956 to 1961.
They had also written for Bernard Braden and contributed ten one-off
scripts
for BBC TVs Comedy Playhouse, one
of
which, The Offer, about two rag and
bone men, became Steptoe and Son
(1962-74). The duo wrote Citizen James,
a series for Sid James, and other TV shows for Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd
and
Leslie Phillips, plus television movies and an adaptation of Clochemerle. In the cinema they were not
that successful. Apart from movie spin-offs of Steptoe
and Son and Up the
Chastity Belt for Frankie Howerd,
there was The Rebel (1961) written
when Hancock was at the height of his fame, The
Bargee (1964), with Harry H. Corbett, The
Spy With a Cold Nose
(1966), the
film version of Joe Orton’s Loot
(1970) and a short called Le Petomane
(1979) with Leonard Rossiter as the Frenchman with a music hall farting
act.
However, Alan Simpson and Ray Galton were essentially TV writers and in
their
heyday they were the best there was and their material still stands up
today.
They both received the OBE in 2000 and were awarded a Bafta Fellowship
in 2016. Ray Galton himself died 5 October 2018 following a long
illness associated with dementia.
JOHN SINGLETON (6 January 1968-29 April 2019)
The
American film writer, producer and director John Singleton, who has
died at the age of 51 following a stroke, was the youngest director to
be nominated for an Academy Award. At 24 years old he was also the
first African- American to be nominated in that category. The film was Boyz n the Hood (1991) 
and
Singleton was also nominated for best screenplay written directly for
the screen. The film detailed the lives of three street guys (Ice Cube,
Cuba Gooding Jr and Morris Chestnut) growing up in South Central Los
Angeles surrounded by problems of drug dealing and gangsterhood. In his
time Singleton wrote three other films, Poetic Justice with Janet Jackson, Higher Learning with Laurence Fishburne, and Baby Boy with Tyrese Gibson, all of which he also directed. Among the other films he directed were Rosewood with Jon Voight, 2 Fast, 2 Furious with Gibson and Paul Walker, Four Brothers with Mark Wahlberg, and Abduction with Taylor Lautner. He also produced all these films as well as a remake of Shaft with Samuel L. Jackson, Hustle and Flow with Terrence Howard, Black State Moan with Jackson again and Justin Timberlake, and Illegal Tender with Rick Gonzalez. He also contributed to television series including Empire, American Crime Story, Rebel, Billions and Snowfall, as well as several TV documentaries. He appeared as an actor in Beverly Hills Cop III, Baadasssss! and others, and played himself in The Game
TV series. John Singleton was married briefly to Ghanaian filmmaker
Akosua Busia and they have one daughter, Hadar. With his former wife,
Tosha Lewis, he has two children, Tosha and Maasai, and he also
fathered a daughter, Cleopatra. Arguably the most important black
filmmaker since Spike Lee, Singleton claimed his favourite directors to
be De Sica, Truffaut, Spielberg, Kubrick, Scorsese, Kurosawa,
Cassavetes and Coppola. He was a great admirer of Western films such as
Henry King’s The Gunfighter (1950), a movie that particularly influenced many of Singleton’s own film set-ups.
SHEILA STEAFEL (26 May 1935-23 August 2019)
The
South African-born actress Sheila Steafel, who has died aged 84, was
British and lived all her adult life in the UK. She trained as an
actress in London at the Webber Douglas Academy and subsequently
appeared in repertory
theatre, various shops and a club where she served curry in a sari. On TV from 1957, her big break came with The Frost Report, although she had already appeared in TV comedy programmes such as Hugh and I, Sykes and A..., Not Only... But Also, Frankie Howerd, Comedy Playhouse and Roy Hudd’s Illustrated Weekly. Comedy played a huge part in Sheila Steafel’s career with her appearances with Bernard Cribbins, Tommy Cooper, Jimmy Tarbuck, Eric Sykes again, The Goodies, Spike Milligan, Kenny Everett, Rab C. Nesbit and many more. She was also in TV drama including Z Cars, Diary of a Nobody (as Carrie Pooter), Grange Hill, Holby City and Doctors. Between TV work she managed to fit in many films too, such as Robert Fuest’s Just Like a Woman, her first in 1967 with Wendy Craig and Frances Matthews, Quatermass and the Pit, The Bliss of Mrs Blossom, Otley, Baby Love, The Smashing Bird I Used to Know, Goodbye, Mr Chips, Tropic of Cancer, Some Will, Some Won’t, Percy, Up Pompeii, Melody, Catch Me a Spy, Digby: The Biggest Dog in the World and Bloodbath at the House of Death, among others. In 1976, Steafel was in the West End production of Salad Days and she also worked for the RSC during the 1980s in plays by Shakespeare and Vanburgh, and she did Chekhov’s Ivanov at Richmond, Neil Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady at Watford and was in Paris Match at the Garrick. She had a very funny one-woman cabaret show and often appeared at the Players’ Theatre music hall and on The Good Old Days TV show as Popsie Wopsie, a Gaiety Girl who could never quite keep in step or in tune with the music. Sheila Steafel was married to the actor Harry H. Corbett from 1958 to 1965 and she wrote an autobiography called When Harry Met Sheila.
DAVID
The Oregon-born actor David Ogden
Stiers, who has died aged
75 from bladder cancer, was a man of many talents. Known chiefly for
his role as
Major Winchester in the long-running television series M*A*S*H,
he was very much more than just that. He was at high
school 
with
the celebrated film critic Roger Ebert and at the early age of
twenty he joined the Santa Clara Shakespeare Festival for seven years,
then
studied acting, singing and conducting at Juilliard and appeared on
Broadway in
The Magic Show. More stage work
followed. He became a drama teacher and principal guest conductor of a
local
BARBARA STONE
(
JOHN STRIDE
(
The London-born actor John Stride, 
who
has died aged 82,
worked chiefly on stage and in many television films and series, most
notably The Scarlet and the Black, Heil Caesar! (as Mark Antony), The Main Chance (as David Main), Wilde
The British actor Dudley Sutton, who
has died at the age of
85 from cancer, generally played renegades, outsiders with problems,
out of
which he made a very successful career. After service in the RAF he
joined Rada
but was subsequently expelled for liking rock’n’roll. 
Early
on he joined
Theatre Workshop with Joan Littlewood at Stratford East. Following a
couple of
small roles in the films A Night to
Remember (1958) and Go To Blazes
(1962), he was cast in a couple of important films by director Sidney
J. Furie.
In The Boys he played one of
several bad
lads up in court on a murder charge, and in The
Leather Boys (1964) he was a biker in the gay film. The
latter, a bold
production based on the novel by Gillian Freeman (writing as Eliot
George), threw
light on the subject of homosexuality well before its time and was
certainly
more believable than Victim of a
few
years earlier. Dudley Sutton also played the title role in the first
stage
production of Joe Orton’s similarly ground-breaking Entertaining
Mr Sloane. He worked steadily in both films and television
right up to his death. On TV he was in Coronation
Street, Dixon of Dock Green, The Baron, The Avengers, EastEnders,
Casualty, Emmerdale,
Holby City, Doctors among many other series. He will be
remembered for
playing Tinker Dill, Ian McShane’s sidekick, in the long-running series
of Lovejoy, all seventy episodes.
Among the
other films Dudley Sutton did were Crossplot
with Roger Moore, The Walking Stick
with David Hemmings, One More Time with Sammy Davis Jr, A Town Called Bastard with Telly
Savalas, Ken Russell’s The Devils, Valentino
and The Rainbow, Ken Loach’s Family Life, The
Stud with Joan Collins, Fellini’s Casanova,
Michael Winner’s remake of The Big Sleep,
Brimstone and
Treacle with Sting, Lamb
with
Liam Neeson, Derek Jarman’s Edward II, The
Football Factory with Danny Dyer, Dean
Spanley with Peter O’Toole and Cockneys
vs Zombies, etc. There are still three more films awaiting
release: Steven
Berkoff’s Tell Tale Heart, Sacha
Bennett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and When
the Devil Rides Out, with Oliver Tobias. Dudley Sutton
married
American actress Marjorie Steele in 1961. They have a daughter and
divorced in
1965. He married again three times and fathered two sons.
VITTORIO
TAVIANI
(
Vittorio Taviani, the Italian film
director and
screenwriter, who has died aged 88, worked with his younger brother
Paolo,
making over twenty films from 1954 onwards. Many of their subjects were
historical or docudramas such as Outlaws
of Love and Allonsanfan.
They had
an international hit with Padre Padrone
(1977), a true story about a Sicilian man who educated himself out of
his poor
upbringing. Many of their films won awards, including Padre
Padrone, La notte di
San Lorenzo (The Night of the
Shooting Stars, 1982), Caesar Must Die and Rainbow:
A Private Affair. Their other films included Kaos,
Good Morning Babylon (set in
Vittorio Taviani
RONNIE TAYLOR
(
The British cinematographer Ronnie
Taylor, who has died at
the age of 93, following complications after a stroke, had a long
career
working with many famous directors such as 
Jack
Clayton, Karel Reisz, Ken
Russell, Bryan Forbes, Anthony Harvey, Dario Argento, Richard
Attenborough,
Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas. His film career began in the 1940s as
a clapper
loader and focus puller until his first credit came as camera operator
on It’s Not Cricket (1949) with
Basil
Radford and Naunton Wayne. He spent much of his working life as a
camera
operator on such titles as Boys in Brown, Brandy for the Parson, The Scamp,
Room at the Top, The Rough and the Smooth, The
The
American actor Rip Torn, who has died at the age of 88, was a master at
playing unpleasant characters, heavies for whom no-one could feel
affection. Born Elmore Rual Torn Jr in Texas of German, Austrian,
Bohemian and Moravian descent, he assumed the name Rip which was a
family monicker for the male side of his family. At the University of
Texas he studied animal husbandry with the intent of buying a ranch. 
To
fund this he moved to Hollywood but needed to work on other jobs before
being discovered for the movies. His debut was in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll
in 1956. Then he moved to New York to study at the Actors’ Studio under
Susan Strasberg and also dance with Martha Graham. After some
television work, Kazan cast him in the film A Face in the Crowd, and then he did Time Limit directed by Karl Malden. He had a reasonable part in Lewis Milestone’s war film Pork Chop Hill with Gregory Peck and then it was mostly TV until he played Judas in Nicholas Ray’s biblical epic King of Kings.
Torn worked on and off Broadway many times. Kazan directed him in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth
with Paul Newman and Geraldine Page, and the same cast appeared in
Richard Brooks’ film of the play. Torn played a theatre director in Critics’ Choice with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball and then appeared in The Cincinatti Kid,
Norman Jewison’s 1965 poker-playing drama with Steve McQueen. After a
slew of popular TV series, Torn then had a run of films including
Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now, Cornel Wilde’s Beach Red, Brian G. Hutton’s The Heroin Gang, Milton Moses Ginsberg’s Coming Apart, Joseph Strick’s Tropic of Cancer and Norman Mailer’s Maidstone, the last involving a real and famously controversial fight between director and star.
Torn was memorable as a Country & Western singer in Payday and also in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth with David Bowie. He kept busy in movies and on television right up to 2016. Notable among his films were The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, The Seduction of Joe Tynan, First Family, Airplane II: The Sequel, Cross Creek, Songwriter with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, City Heat with Clint Eastwood, Extreme Prejudice with Nick Nolte, Beautiful Dreamers (as Walt Whitman), RoboCop 3, How To Make an American Quilt, Men In Black I, II and III, Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas, and Marie Antoinette (as Louis XV). In later years Rip Torn was popular in the TV series The Larry Sanders Show, Will & Grace and 30 Rock. His only Academy Award nomination was for Cross Creek, but he won a Primetime Emmy for The Larry Sanders Show.
Rip Torn was married three times, to the actresses Ann Wedgeworth,
Geraldine Page and Amy Wright. He was father to six children.
PIERO TOSI (10 April 1927-10 August 2019)
The
Italian film costume designer Piero Tosi, who has died of natural
causes aged 92, was the first costume designer to win an honorary
Academy Award. 
The
citation in 2014 called him “a visionary whose incomparable costume
designs shaped timeless, living art in motion pictures.” Noted for his
painstaking research into historical costume, his crowning achievement
was Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard
(1963) which called for hundreds of elaborate costumes, in particular
for the grand ball scenes. Tosi was born in Florence where his father
was a metalworker. Piero, however, had other ideas with his love for
theatre, the movies and costumes. He was discovered by fellow art
student Franco Zeffirelli who introduced Tosi to Visconti who then
employed him on his theatre productions.
His first three film commissions from 1951 were all for Visconti – Bellissima, Senso and White Nights. He worked again with Visconti on Rocco and His Brothers, The Leopard, The Stranger, The Damned, Death in Venice, Ludwig and The Innocent.
He also worked with other high-profile directors such as Mauro
Bolognini, Luigi Comencini, Mario Monicelli, Ḗdouard Molinaro, Marco
Ferreri, Louis Malle, Liliana Cavani, Vittorio De Sica, Roger Vadim,
Pasolini, Fellini and Zeffirelli. He received five other Oscar
nominations for his designs and was the winner of two Baftas, for Death in Venice and Zeffirelli’s La Traviata, among many other international awards.
VERNE TROYER
(
The American actor and stuntman Verne
Troyer, who has died
aged 49, possibly from suicide, 
was,
even at just 32 inches tall, an iconic
figure. He appeared in films for some twenty years in parts that called
for his
lack of stature, beginning in 1996 with Pinocchio’s
Revenge and Jingle
All the Way. He was also in Men in
Black, Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas, Mighty Joe,
etc, but really came to fame in Austin
Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, playing Mini-Me, a pint-sized
version of
Mike Myers’ title character. He appeared in video shorts, on television
and in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (as Griphook), and
returned
for Austin Powers in Goldmember.
More
TV followed as well as the films Postal,
College, The Love Guru, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Keith Lemon: The Movie, Convenience
and Gnome Alone. His last film is
the still to be completed Hipsters,
Gangsters, Aliens and Geeks with
Troyer as the Emperor Beezel-Chugg, but it will be Mini-Me for which he
will be
remembered.
AGNÈS VARDA (30 May 1928-29 March 2019)
The
Belgian-born French film director, writer, artist and photographer, who
has died at the age of 90, was often called the ‘Godmother of the New
Wave’ in French cinema, as her work pre-dates the beginnings of the
Nouvelle Vague, after which she was consigned to a back seat while the
rise of Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette and Varda’s
husband, Jacques Demy, superceded her initial influences. Varda began
her career as a stills photographer but always had cinema in mind and
at times combined the two genres. She worked as a theatre photographer
for a while, until she decided to make a film. She knew little about
cinema, having seen few films. She did some filming for a friend in a
French fishing village, La Pointe Courte, and then made a film about
the town which she named after the place itself and in 1955 it became
the forerunner of the New Wave, edited by no less a figure than Alain
Resnais.
She went on to make short documentaries including Along the Coast, 
a stunning travelogue about the French Riviera. Her next feature, Cléo from 5 to 7,
was an international success, heralding a career in which Varda would
make films about women and their problems. Here the worries of a young
girl (Corinne Marchand) are about the chances of her having cancer. It
had music by Michel Legrand and other appearances by French cinema
luminaries such as Dorothée Blanck, Jean-Claude Brialy, Eddie
Constantine, Danièle Delorme, Sami Frey, Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina
and Alan Scott.
Le Bonheur was the ironically titled film about a three-way love relationship while Les Crèatures had Catherine Deneuve as a mute woman marrried to a novelist. Lions Love was made in Hollywood with several Tinseltown celebrities. One Sings, the Other Doesn’t is the story of two women set against the burgeoning feminist movement. In Vagabond a young woman is found dead, frozen in a ditch. In Le Petit Amour Jane Birkin plays a woman trying to fathom the mind of a teenage boy. Jane B. by Agnès V. is an imaginary biography of Jane Birkin, and in Jacquot de Nantes Varda pays tribute to her late husband, Jacques Demy, a year after he died. This was followed by Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans, a documentary on Demy’s musical films Les demoiselles de Rochefort made 25 years earlier. She also made a third film about her husband, The World of Jacques Demy, in 1995.
After that she mostly made documentaries for the cinema or television, including two autobiographical studies, The Beaches of Agnès (2008) and Agnès Varda: From Here to There, a five-part TV series in 2011. She was Oscar nominated in 2018 for the delightful Faces Places,
recording her journey around the villages of France with photographer
JR, which won awards all over the world including Cannes and the London
Film Critics' Circle for documentary of the year. However, in the same
year she received an honorary Academy Award for her lifetime’s
achievement. Her last work was a final autobiographical TV series in
2019, Varda by Agnès. She was
married to Jacques Demy from 1962 until his death in 1990. They have a
son Mathieu and Varda was the mother of Rosalie Varda, the daughter she
had with the actor and director Antoine Bourseiller.
JAN-MICHAEL VINCENT (15 July 1945-10 February 2019)
The
American actor Jan-Michael Vincent, who has died from cardiac arrest
aged 73, usually played men of action in his movie career. Discovered
as he was leaving the National Guard at 22, he went straight into
television, an episode of The Hardy Boys.
More TV came along as well as feature films in which he generally
showed off his hunky good looks and physique. His first film in 1967
was a Western, The Bandits, made in Mexico. 
Journey to Shiloh saw him working with James Caan, Michael Sarrazin, Don Stroud and Harrison Ford, five years before Ford clicked in American Graffiti. He appeared with John Wayne in The Undefeated, and with Robert Mitchum in Going Home in which Vincent played a disturbed orphan. Michael Winner pitched him against Charles Bronson in The Mechanic, and he played the title role in The World’s Greatest Athlete as a Tarzan figure from Africa. Being well-built for physical roles, Vincent nevertheless could handle romance as he did in Buster and Billie, Daniel Petrie’s sensitive tale of his relationship with an unpopular girl. Bite the Bullet was Richard Brooks’s Western with Gene Hackman, James Coburn and Candice Bergen, and in Baby Blue Marine Vincent played a failed marine who is fêted as a war hero on returning home. In titles like Shadow of the Hawk, Vigilante Force, Damnation Alley and Hard Country you can guess the content, but with Big Wednesday,
John Milius’s film about California’s surfing community, its rarity
value proved popular. More actioners including Hal Needham’s Hooper with Burt Reynolds and Sally Field led eventually to Vincent’s most successful TV work, The Winds of War with Robert Mitchum, and Airwolf,
all fifty-five episodes which defined Vincent’s career for ever, as he
played Stringfellow Hawke, pilot of a battle helicopter. More minor
action pics followed, very little of which we saw in the UK. Vincent’s
last film was White Boy in
2002. His life thereafter took a turn for the worse. He had broken his
neck in a car crash, was already an alcoholic and went into rehab for
being drunk while on probation, was arrested for abusing his wife,
sectioned for drug charges and later jailed for further offences.
Finally, in 2012, he had part of his right leg amputated through an
infection. A person of promise, Jan-Michael Vincent never really lived
up to his early potential. He was married three times, with his first
two marriages ending in divorce, and has one daughter, Amber Vincent,
from his first marriage.
MAX VON SYDOW (10 April 1929-8 March 2020)
International
cinema was first aware of the Swedish actor Max von Sydow, who has died
aged 90, through his films made with director Ingmar Bergman. Although
they had worked together in Swedish theatre, their first film together
was The Seventh Seal in 1957. Bergman had made films from the mid-1940s, but The Seventh Seal
really put him on the world map. Von Sydow played a 14th-century
knight returning from the Crusades, having lost his faith in God. The
film had a commanding performance by the actor who was very tall with a
deeply sonorous voice. There were further films with Bergman: Wild Strawberries, So Close to Life, The Face, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light (1962). Later he was back with Bergman for The Hour of the Wolf, Shame, The Passion of Anna and The Touch. 
For Max Von Sydow the wider world of cinema also called. He turned down the title role in Dr No, but later played Blofeld in Never Say Never Again. He appeared to be the embodiment of Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told, was creepily outstanding in the title role of The Exorcist and its first sequel, managed to replicate Charles Middleton’s original 1930s persona as Ming the Merciless for Flash Gordon in 1980, and lent gravitas as the King opposite Arnie in Conan the Barbarian. Some of his other films included The Reward with Yvette Mimieux, Hawaii with Julie Andrews, Michael Anderson’s The Quiller Memorandum, John Huston’s The Kremlin Letter, Fred Haines’ Steppenwolf, Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, Francesco Rosi’s Illustrious Corpses, Voyage of the Damned with Faye Dunaway, Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, Duet for One with Julie Andrews, Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror (Oscar nomination), Judge Dredd with Sylvester Stallone, Dario Argento’s Sleepless, Spielberg’s Minority Report, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (as Sir Walter Loxley), Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Oscar nomination), Scorsese’s Shutter Island, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Thomas Vinterberg’s Kursk and six films with director Jan Troell. On the way he was in TV series of Quo Vadis?, Christopher Columbus, The Tudors and, latterly, Game of Thrones,
as the Three-Eyed Raven. Max Von Sydow married the actress Christina
Olin in 1951 and they have two sons, Clas and Henrik. After divorcing
in 1979, he married the director Catherine Brelet in 1997 with whom he
also has two sons, Cedric and Yvan.
CLINT WALKER
(
Former Merchant Marine turned actor
Clint Walker, 
who has
died aged 90 of congestive heart failure, had many jobs before becoming
a
security officer at the Sands Hotel in
AUDREY WELLS
(25
January
1960-4 October 2018)
The
American
film director and scenarist Audrey Wells, who has died from cancer at
the age
of 58, 
was the daughter of a psychiatrist from
Austria and a psychologist from
Romania. Born and raised in a French-speaking household in San
Francisco, she
was imbued with a world-view from the get-go. After studying at the
University
of California, Berkeley, she moved to Paris and then returned to
California
and, after dabbling as a jazz DJ and earning a master’s of fine arts,
embarked
on a career as a screenwriter. Her first film as scenarist was the
funny and
charming romcom The Truth About Cats and
Dogs (1996), with Uma Thurman, followed by the
action-adventure George of the Jungle
(1997) with Brendan
Fraser, and the 1999 drama Guinevere
with Stephen Rea and Sarah Polley, which also marked her directorial
debut. She
scripted Disney's The Kid (2000),
with Bruce Willis, before writing and directing Under
the Tuscan Sun (2003), which really made her name. Her other
writing credits include Shall We Dance?
(2004), with Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez, The
Game Plan (2007), with Dwayne Johnson, and the canine
comedy-drama A Dog’s Purpose (2017). Audrey
Wells died the day before her last completed film, the critically
acclaimed The Hate U Give, was released
in US
cinemas.
SHEILA WHITE
(
The British actress
Sheila White,
who has died aged 69 of heart failure, was first seen at age twelve in Cinderella, a pantomime starring Arthur
Askey at the Golders Green Hippodrome. 
This
led to an audition for The Sound of Music
at
PETER WHITEHEAD (8 January 1937-10 June 2019)
The
British-born documentary film director Peter Whitehead, who has died
aged 82, was a pioneer in his own field and a definite influence on
other filmmakers and the music video scene. Born in Liverpool, he
studied music, played the organ and won a scholarship to Cambridge
where he read chemistry, mathematics and physics, although he later
wanted to study English literature and become a writer. He won another
scholarship to the Slade School of Art to train as a painter but, as a
cinephile, he was soon diverted into studying film under the veteran
director Thorold Dickinson. 
Whitehead
began his filmmaking career with short documentaries for the Nuffield
Foundation. Then he appeared to concentrate on the zeitgeist of Britain
in the ‘swinging’ 1960s. Wholly Communion
(1965) was a record of a beat poetry convention at the Royal Albert
Hall, with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Christopher Logue, Adrian
Mitchell, etc. Then he made Charlie Is My Darling
(1966) with The Rolling Stones but the band’s manager Andrew Loog
Oldham, who had commissioned the film, disapproved of the results and
it wasn’t fully released until 2012. However, Whitehead did work with
the Stones again on various promotions and filmed other musicians such
as Pink Floyd, The Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, The Small Faces,
etc. For Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London
(1967) the filmmaker really captured the spirit of the times in
interviews with Mick Jagger, David Hockney, Edna O’Brien, Vanessa
Redgrave, Lee Marvin, Roman Polanski, Terence Stamp and Michael Caine,
among others. He joined Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company to
produce Benefit of the Doubt
(1967), a film of Brook’s production of US, about the war in Vietnam,
with Ian Hogg, Michael Kustow, Michael Williams and Glenda Jackson. In
1969 he made The Fall,
probably Whitehead’s most personal film and his most political, dealing
as it dealt with protest, violence and revolution in 1960s' America. It
had such an effect on him that he turned to fictional subjects
including Daddy (1973) and Fire in the Water (1977). He also wrote some novels, one of which he made into a film, Terrorism Considered As One of the Fine Arts (2007) about state control of culture. Before that he was interviewed for Paul Cronin’s documentary about Whitehead, In the Beginning Was the Image
(2006). Peter Whitehead was married to Dianne Leigh, Dido Goldsmith and
Liza Kareninam. He fathered seven children including a son
and daughter from his relationships with Coral Atkins and Deanna
Woodrow.
HUGH
WHITEMORE (
Although he trained to be an actor at
Rada, Hugh Whitemore,
who has died at the age of 82, became a playwright and a screenwriter
for both television
and film. 
He began writing for television in 1962
with a story for No Hiding Place,
followed by The Full Chatter with
Brian Rix, the BBC
soap Compact and many more series
such as Armchair Theatre, The Wednesday Play, Elizabeth
R, adaptations of Somerset Maugham stories, David
Copperfield, Moll Flanders, Rebecca,
My Cousin Rachel, A Dance to the Music of Time, Cider With Rosie,
etc. For
the theatre he wrote Breaking the Code,
about Alan Turing and Bletchley Park, A
Pack of Lies, on the Kroger spy
ring,
The Best of Friends, about George
Bernard
Shaw, Stevie, on the poet and
novelist Stevie Smith, A Letter of
Resignation with Edward Fox as Harold Macmillan, It’s Ralph, with Timothy West, Sand
in the Sandwiches about
John
Betjeman, and an adaptation of Pirandello’s As
You Desire Me. For the cinema, his first contributions were
additional
scenes for an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline
and Fall… of a Birdwatcher
in
1968. Then came All Neat in Black
Stockings, Man at the Top,
the
sequel to John Braine’s novel, The Blue
Bird, from the Maeterlinck play,
with
(disastrously) Elizabeth Taylor, The
Return of the Soldier with Alan Bates and Julie Christie, 84 Charing Cross Road, and Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, with Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Whitemore’s last work was all for TV: an episode of Midsomer
Murders, the Emmy-winning The
Gathering Storm, with Albert Finney as Churchill, My House in Umbria, from the William
Trevor novel, with Maggie Smith (another Emmy), and Into
the Storm (2009) with Brendan Gleeson as Churchill. Hugh
Whitemore was married three times and has a son, Thomas, from his
second
marriage.
JUNE
WHITFIELD (11 November 1925-28 December 2018)
The
British comedy actress June Whitfield, who has died aged 93, conquered
all the entertainment media: radio, television, theatre and film. After
training at Rada, 
she toured in theatre and eventually
became well-known when she replaced Joy Nicholls in the 1950s radio
show Take It From Here,
for which Frank Muir and Denis Norden wrote her the part of Eth Glum.
After that, her career in comedy was well and truly sealed. She went on
to work with many comics of the day, including Arthur Askey, Benny
Hill, Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, Harry Worth, Jimmy Edwards, Stanley
Baxter and Dick Emery. She was also a regular for many years on Roy
Hudd’s radio series The
News Huddlines. Mainly known for her television work in
sitcoms with Terry Scott, their comic partnership in Happy Ever After
and Terry and June
ran from 1974 to 1987. June Whitfield made her film debut (uncredited)
in Quiet Wedding
(1946) but went on to appear in Carry
On Nurse, Friends and Neighbours, The Spy With the Cold Nose, Bless
This House, Carry on Girls, Not Now, Comrade, Run For Your Wife, Carry
On Columbus, Jude and many television movies. She still
worked in radio and her last film appearance was in Absolutely Fabulous – The Movie
in 2016, in which she reprised her regular role of ‘Mother’. She was
awarded the OBE in 1985 and became a Dame Commander of the Order of the
British Empire (OBE) in 2017. She was married to chartered surveyor Tim
Aitchison in 1955 until his death in 2001. Their daughter Suzy also
became an actress.
STUART WHITMAN (1 February 1928-16 March 2020)
The
American actor Stuart Whitman, who has died aged 92, had a long career
in films and television. He was noted for his athleticism and rugged
good looks which made him popular as a leading man. Born to a Russian
and Polish Jewish emigrant family, he graduated in law and drama,
joined the Army Corps of Engineers and studied acting at the Los
Angeles Academy of Dramatic Art. 
After touring in theatre, he entered films in 1951 in uncredited roles in two sci-fi titles, When Worlds Collide and The Day the Earth Stood Still. He spent a long time uncredited in films while also appearing on television. His first credited role was in Rhapsody (1954) with Elizabeth Taylor and later he was in King of the Carnival, the last of the Republic serials, and in Budd Boetticher’s western 7 Men from Now with Randolph Scott. Often in B-pictures, he had the title role in Johnny Trouble, but on a better level did The Young Invaders with James Garner, Ten North Frederick with Gary Cooper, The Decks Ran Red with James Mason, The Sound and the Fury with Yul Brynner, Don Siegel’s Hound-Dog Man and Guy Green’s The Mark, for which Whitman was Oscar-nominated. Michael Curtiz’s The Comancheros was a fine John Wayne Western with Whitman second-billed. He was in the all-star war film The Longest Day, the Western Rio Conchos with Richard Boone, Signpost to Murder with Joanne Woodward, the epic comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and See You in Hell, Darling (1966) based on Norman Mailer’s novel An American Dream.
Whitman’s career then mainly included genre, action and exploitation
movies as well as television series. He went on working until 2000 but
little of this output could be considered of much value. The TV work
included Fantasy Island, The A Team, Hotel, Knots Landing and Murder, She Wrote.
Still, it was a fifty-year career during which Whitman was rarely out
of work. He was married three times, to Patricia Ann LaLonde, Caroline
Boubis and Julia Vadimovna Paradis, producing five children, Tony,
Michael, Linda, Scott and Justin.
RICHARD WILLIAMS (19 March 1933-16 August 2019)
The
Canadian film animator Richard Williams, who has died of cancer aged
86, was very much an outsider in the world of cartoons. He had his own
style unlike any other animator, that was independent, personal and
totally original. He was recognised at the Academy Awards who gave him
two Oscars 
for his magnum opus in 1988, Who Framed Roger Rabbit
which was the culmination of a lifetime’s work, mixing hand-drawn
animation and live action with superb skill. Brought up in Toronto by
his painter father and commercial artist mother – influences on his
drawing – as a child he was impressed by Disney’s Snow White
and eventually met Walt and his animators with whom he eventually
worked. Feeling hemmed in, however, he carried on drawing and inventing
his own stories. He moved to the UK in 1955 and joined fellow Canadian
animator George Dunning at TV Cartoons Ltd. Apart from making TV
commercials Williams created his first film, The Little Island, which won a Bafta in 1958. Next came Love Me, Love Me, Love Me and then he worked on many title sequences for films such as What’s New Pussycat?, Casino Royale (1967), The Charge of the Light Brigade, 30 Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, and some of the Pink Panther films, etc. His animated features include A Christmas Carol (1974), which won him another Oscar, and The Thief and the Cobbler, the last undergoing many rewrites over the thirty-one years it took to complete. It was later released as Arabian Knight. Williams wrote a cartoonist’s manual, The Animator’s Survival Kit, and towards the end of his life he held workshops on animation. He was married four times and is father to six children.
CHARLES WOOD (6 August 1932-1 February 2020)
The British playwright and screenwriter Charles Wood, who has died aged 87, was first a professional soldier from the age of eighteen with a keen interest in military history, a subject he often drew upon for his plays and film scripts. Even with his interest in matters military, his writing often took an anti-war stance. His parents were touring actors and Wood, although he trained as a graphics artist, began working backstage in the theatre, and also as a journalist and in advertising before writing for the theatre. In the 1960s he worked with Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and also at the National, and later on at the Royal Court. He started writing for television in 1961 and wrote his first film in 1965, an adaptation of Ann Jellicoe’s play The Knack... And How to Get It, the first of many collaborations with director Richard Lester. It starred Rita Tushingham, Ray Brooks and Michael Crawford. Help! followed, again with Lester and The Beatles. Then there was Wood’s adaptation of Patrick Ryan’s novel How I Won the War with Michael Crawford and John Lennon, also for Lester. He wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade for director Tony Richardson, and then A Long Day’s Dying for Peter Collinson, with David Hemmings and Tom Bell. He was back with Lester for The Bed Sitting Room, an adaptation of Spike Milligan and John Antrobus’s play. It starred Rita Tushingham, Dudley Moore, Harry Secombe and a host of British actors, plus Milligan. After that Wood mainly wrote for television before working with Lester again on Cuba, with Sean Connery as a British mercenary fighting Castro’s guerrillas. Wagner was a TV miniseries written for Tony Palmer who also directed Wood’s script for Puccini, with Robert Stephens, and England, My England, a portrait of composer Henry Purcell, with Simon Callow. My Family and Other Animals was a TV series about the naturalist Gerald Durrell. War themes surfaced in Wood’s TV work on Richard Eyre’s Tumbledown with Colin Firth, Sharpe’s Company and its several sequels with Sean Bean, and A Breed of Heroes with Samuel West. He also contributed to Inspector Morse, Kavanagh Q.C. and Monsignor Renard, all three starring John Thaw. The other films Wood wrote were An Awfully Big Adventure, from the Beryl Bainbridge novel, with Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant, and Iris, a biopic of the novelist Iris Murdoch with Judi Dench. His last screenplay was a 2008 collaboration - again with director Richard Eyre - for The Other Man with Liam Neeson and Antonio Banderas. Charles Wood was married to the actress Valerie Newman. They had a son, John, who predeceased Charles, and a daughter, Kate.
FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI (12 February 1923-15 June 2019)
The
opera, television and film director and designer Franco Zeffirelli, who
has died aged 96, made his mark in all four art forms. The illegitimate
son of a fashion designer and a cloth merchant who were both married to
other spouses, Zeffirelli was apparently a descendent from the Leonardo
da Vinci family. Perhaps his lineage produced in young Franco an
artistic streak that set him up for the rest of his life. He studied
art and architecture from 1941 at the University of Florence but during
World War II he joined the British Army as an interpreter.
Returning to his studies, he saw Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V
and decided on a career in the theatre. Italian director Luchino
Visconti, with whom he had an affair, appointed him assistant director
on La Terra Trema which
influenced Zeffirelli’s work with Vittorio De Sica and Roberto
Rossellini. Throughout his career he often designed his own stage
productions and supervised the costumes. With his innate good taste, he
made his productions both look and sound exceptional. From the
mid-1960s he staged many operas for television, including La Bohème, Otello, Carmen, Turandot, Don Carlo, I Pagliacci, Don Giovanni, Aida, La Traviata and Madama Butterfly, plus seasons from the Metropolitan Opera.
Zeffirelli’s first cinema film as a director was Camping in 1958, but his first major production was The Taming of the Shrew
(1967) with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (Sophia Loren and
Marcello Mastroianni were not available), possibly the most successful
Shakespeare film ever made – unless it was his next one, Romeo and Juliet
(1968) with teenagers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey which went
global on account of the leading lady revealing her embonpoint. Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) was a biopic on St Francis of Assisi with a young Graham Faulkner in the lead. Jesus of Nazareth (1977) was a miniseries with Robert Powell, while The Champ (1979) was a remake of an old boxing movie with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder. 
Endless Love (1981) seemed like a modern version of Romeo and Juliet and La Traviata
was the Verdi opera filmed on location with Plácido Domingo and Teresa
Stratas. Domingo was also the lead in the Zeffirelli film of Otello.
Twenty-two-year old C. Thomas Howell played the title role in Young Toscanini
with Elizabeth Taylor as an operatic diva, would you believe? Mel
Gibson as the Prince of Denmark proved to be a good choice for Hamlet. In 1996 Zeffirelli tackled Jane Eyre with Charlotte Gainsbourg (Anna Paquin played the young Jane) with William Hurt as Rochester. Tea with Mussolini
(1999) was based on events from Zeffirelli’s own childhood and starred
Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, Cher and Lily Tomlin. His
last feature film was Callas Forever (2002) with Fanny Ardant, Jeremy Irons and Joan Plowright.
Outside
of the theatre and the cinema, Zeffirelli, an ultra-conservative Roman
Catholic, was a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing party from
1994 to 2001. Although he was gay (a word he hated because it was not
‘elegant’), he supported the Roman Catholic church in its anti-gay
policy. He finally came out in 1996, which was no surprise to anyone,
least of all the young actors who had accused him of sexual misconduct
during filming. He had no children but ‘adopted’ two men in his employ.
He received an honorary knighthood (KBE) by the UK in 2004. So, a great
artist perhaps, but a less than perfect man.