Film Review Daily

 

In Memoriam

 

 

Michael Darvell examines the lives of the recently deceased, including 
Francis Lai, Audrey Wells, Sheila White, Charles Aznavour, Gary Kurtz, Denis Norden, 

Dudley Sutton, Fenella Fielding, Liz Fraser, Burt Reynolds, Gloria Jean, Neil Simon, Barbara 

Harris, Ronnie Taylor, Bernard Hepton, Shinobu Hashimoto, Michael Howells, Hugh 

Whitemore, Tab Hunter, Claude Lanzmann, Robby Műller, Liliane Montevecchi, Leslie 

Grantham, Eunice Gayson, Michael D. Ford, Glynn Edwards, Allyn Ann McLerie and Clint 

Walker.

 

MICHAEL ANDERSON (30 January 1920-25 April 2018)

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, Logan’s Run and Orca. Then he worked for television until his last feature The New Adventures of Pinocchio (1999) and a video version of Around the World with Simon Callow and Philip Jackson. Michael Anderson was married three times and had six children. His son Michael is an actor and David is a producer.

  

RICHARD ANDERSON (8 August 1926-31 August 2017)

American actor Richard Anderson, who has died aged 91, will be mainly remembered for his roles on television in the late 1970s, in particular The Six Million Dollar Man playing Oscar Goldman, a part he also reprised in the series The Bionic Woman. However, he began his career in films in 1947 with The Pearl, an adaptation of the John Steinbeck story. After that he was in several minor movies such as The Man With Thirty Sons, Grounds for Marriage, Cause for Alarm! and No Questions Asked. He was in Storm Warning with Doris Day, Rich, Young and Pretty with Jane Powell, The People Against O’Hara with Spencer Tracy, Across the Wide Missouri with Clark Gable, Scaramouche with Stewart Granger, The Story of Three Loves with Kirk Douglas, I Love Melvin with Debbie Reynolds, and other MGM films of the 1950s including Escape from Fort Bravo, The Student Prince, Betrayed, Hit the Deck and Forbidden Planet. Stanley Kubrick cast him in Paths of Glory and Martin Ritt directed him in The Long, Hot Summer, with Paul Newman. The 1960s brought on a lot of TV work with occasional films such as Compulsion, The Gunfight at Dodge City, Johnny Cool, Seven Days in May and Seconds. The rest of Anderson’s career was mostly in television in Perry Mason, Dynasty, Fantasy Island, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and of course The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Having retired in 1998 he returned in 2015 for The Blood Trail. He was married twice and had three children.

 

SUSAN ANSPACH (23 November 1942-2 April 2018)

The American actress Susan Anspach, who has died aged 75, made her New York theatre debut in A View from the Bridge in 1965 with Robert Duvall, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. She was also in the musical Hair (1967). Her first film was The Landlord (1970) with Beau Bridges, then Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces with Jack Nicholson, Herbert Ross’s Play It Again, Sam with Woody Allen, and Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love with George Segal. She will be best-remembered for these four films. Otherwise it was television and minor movies (The Big Fix, Running, Gas, etc). The best of her later films was Dusan Makaveyev’s Montenegro (1981) and her last film was Inversion in 2010. While married to actor Mark Goddard she had a son, Caleb, by Jack Nicholson, and previously had a daughter, Catherine, by Steve Curry (from Hair). She was also married to singer-guitarist Sherwood Ball.

  

STÉPHANE AUDRAN (8 November 1932-27 March 2018)

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 Denmark during the Franco-Prussian War. In between the Chabrol films, Audran also worked for Eric Rohmer, Anatole Litvak, Frédéric Rossif, Claude Sautet, Georges Lautner etc and, more famously, Luis Buñuel in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Bafta award) and for Édouard Molinaro in La cage aux folles II. Among her films in English were Peter Collinson’s And Then There None (from Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians), The Black Bird, a remake of The Maltese Falcon with George Segal, Silver Bears with Michael Caine, The Devil’s Advocate with John Mills, Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One and the TV series Brideshead Revisited. Stéphane Audran appears to have retired in 2008, having made over a hundred films. Still to surface in the UK is The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles’s last and unfinished film which has appearances by many of the great and good of Hollywood, plus Chabrol and Audran. Married in 1964, Chabrol and Audran divorced in 1980; they had a son, Thomas. Audran was also briefly married to the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant for two years in the 1950s, although they still appeared in films together after divorcing. Chabrol died in 2010.

   

JOHN G. AVILDSEN (21 December 1935-16 June 2017)

The American film director John G. Avildsen, who has died aged 81, was not just a director but also in his time a producer, editor, writer and cinematographer. His most famous film was arguably Rocky (1976), for which he won an Oscar and which won many other awards around the world. It was enormously popular and made a star out of Sylvester Stallone. Avildsen also directed Rocky V and hit gold, too, with The Karate Kid (1984) and its sequels, but he also made other, more interesting films such as Joe (1970) with Peter Boyle, Save the Tiger (1973) with Jack Lemmon (who won an Oscar for it) and other titles including W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, Slow Dancing in the Big City, The Formula and The Power of One. As a producer, Avildsen was involved with Arthur Penn’s Mickey One (1965) with Warren Beatty, and at the time of his death was working on The Margarita Man, American Satan and Nate & Al, the last with Richard Dreyfuss and Martin Landau. Derek Wayne Johnson has written and directed a documentary tribute, John G. Avildsen: King of the Underdogs with contributions from Stallone, Ralph Macchio, Martin Scorsese, Luke Perry etc plus archive footage of Avildsen’s many other actors.

 

CHARLES AZNAVOUR (22 May 1924-October 1 2018)

The singer, songwriter and actor Charles Aznavour, who has died aged 94, was born Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian in Paris to Armenian immigrants Michael and Knar Aznavourian. 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 Old-Fashioned Way’, ‘Yesterday When I Was Young’ etc) were used in films and on TV. In 1997 he was awarded an Honorary César in France and won countless honours all over the world, including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was a political activist and created a charity for Armenia following its 1988 earthquake, becoming the Armenian delegate at the UN in Geneva. Charles Aznavour married three times and produced six children.

  

MICHAEL BALLHAUS (5 August 1935-12 April 2017)

The German-born cinematographer learned how to photograph actors at his parents’ theatre in Berlin. Max Ophűls was a family friend and Ballhaus was inspired by the great German director’s work. Ballhaus began his career working on German television from 1959 until his first feature film in 1969. He carried on in TV with the occasional cinema film until Rainer Werner Fassbinder used him for his Western Whity. In all he made fifteen films with Fassbinder, including The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Martha, Fox and His Friends, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, Chinese Roulette, Germany in Autumn and The Marriage of Maria Braun. He then gravitated to Hollywood where he shot seven films with Martin Scorsese beginning with After Hours(1985), followed by The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, GoodFellas, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York and The Departed. Ballhaus also worked on Baby, It’s You, Reckless, Broadcast News, Quiz Show, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Sleepers and Something’s Gotta Give, among many other high-profile productions. For Mike Nichols he filmed Working Girl, Postcards from the Edge and Primary Colours. He also worked with Prince and Madonna. He shot 3096, his last film, back in Germany in 2013. He was born and died in Berlin.

 

KEITH BARRON (8 August 1934-15 November 2017)

Although he spent most of his working life on television, the Yorkshire-born actor Keith Barron, who has died aged 83 following a short illness, also appeared in several films. He began acting in repertory at Sheffield and later at the Bristol Old Vic. His TV career began in 1961 with A Chance of Thunder. However, it was probably the BBC’s Wednesday Play series in 1965 that brought Barron recognition as he starred in two Dennis Potter political plays, namely Stand Up, Nigel Barton and its sequel Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton. Then there was no stopping him as he appeared in many more TV series such as Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Jackanory, A Family at War, The Edwardians (as Baden-Powell), Upstairs, Downstairs and very many more. Having excelled in both drama and comedy he was at home in Crown Court, Telford’s Change, Prince Regent (as Charles James Fox), Doctor Who and Leaving, etc. His most successful series was the sitcom Duty Free (1984-86, for 22 episodes), with Gwen Taylor, and with scripts by Eric (Rising Damp) Chappell and Jean Warr. For the cinema Barron’s debut was in Baby Love (1968), then he was in The Man Who Had Power Over Women with Rod Taylor. The Firechasers, She’ll Follow You Anywhere, Freelance and Nothing But the Night came along between TV work. The Land That Time Forgot and At the Earth’s Core were a couple of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations, while Voyage of the Damned, with Faye Dunaway, was about the flight of German Jews from Nazi Germany. Barron played Henry VIII in God’s Outlaw, appeared with Shirley Bassey in La passione, and made his last feature film, In Love With Alma Cogan, in 2011. Keith Barron was married to the stage designer Mary Pickard and they had a son, Jamie. For three years in the 1980s the family ran Fox’s, a restaurant in Cornwall, with Mary cooking, Jamie waiting, and Keith acting as host.

  

GEOFFREY BAYLDON (7 January 1924-10 May 2017)

Having allegedly turned down the part of Doctor Who for fear of being typecast in an old-man part, the actor Geoffrey Bayldon went on to make his name as Catweazle in the TV series of the same name about an 11th-century wizard reincarnated into the 20th century, an iconic role that put him among the most popular TV roles. Later on he would gain more fans as the Crowman in Worzel Gummidge and the hero of Magic Grandad, all parts of an old man. Before entering TV he had worked on stage at Stratford-upon-Avon, Glasgow, Birmingham and London’s Old Vic etc. In films from 1952, he was uncredited in Trent’s Last Case with Orson Welles, but then concentrated on television while also taking small roles in films such as The Camp on Blood Island, Dracula, A Night to Remember, The Rough and the Smooth and Libel. Still concentrating on television Bayldon also made films including The Longest Day, 55 Days at Peking, Becket, King Rat, Sky West and Crooked, Casino Royale (1967, as Q), To Sir, With Love, Inspector Clouseau, A Dandy in Aspic, Otley and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. Never a leading man in films, he played a waiter in Born to Boogie with Marc Bolan and Ringo Starr, a vicar in Steptoe and Son Ride Again, an Archbishop in The Slipper and the Rose, the governor in the film of Porridge, and a colonel in Bullshot. Apart from appearing in umpteen high-profile TV series, his last films included Madame Sousatzka, Tom and Viv, Ladies in Lavender and Love/Loss (2010). But it is as Catweazle that Geoffrey Bayldon will be best remembered and loved.

   

HYWEL BENNETT (8 April 1944-25 July 2017)

The Welsh actor Hywel Bennett, who has died at the age of 73, joined the National Youth Theatre for five years and also trained at Rada. In his time he played many Shakespearean roles including both Hamlet and Ophelia. His television debut was in Doctor Who in 1965 and he went on to appear regularly on the box until his first film, the Boulting brothers’ The Family Way (1966), from the play by Bill Naughton about newlyweds’ difficulty in consummating their marriage. His co-star was Hayley Mills with whom he appeared in two other films, Twisted Nerve and Endless Night. Some of his other films were The Virgin Soldiers, Loot, The Buttercup Chain, Percy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Love Ban, and Deadly Advice, in which he played Dr Crippen. Bennett was particularly good in Simon Gray’s TV play Death of a Teddy Bear, as the murderous young man involved in a case based on the Rattenbury scandal of the 1930s. However, from the many television series he appeared in, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Boon, The Bill and EastEnders, he will be most remembered for Peter Tilbury’s Shelley, a long-running sitcom about a permanently unemployed waster, which ran for five years from 1979, and then came back as The Return of Shelley from 1988 to 1992. Hywel Bennett was first married to the journalist and broadcaster Cathy McGowan, with whom he had a daughter, Emma, and later married Sandra Fulford. He retired in 2007 due to ill-health.

 

SHELLEY BERMAN (3 February 1925-1 September 2017)

The American stand-up comedian Shelley Berman, who has died aged 92 from complications with Alzeimer’s disease, trained as an actor but became a dance instructor and speech teacher among other jobs, before making his name as a comedian. He was famous for his funny confessional monologues on his view of life and its problems. He toured with the likes of Mike Nichols and Elaine May and later worked solo in night clubs, on television and also recording his routines for albums. He won the first Grammy for a non-musical disc. On television (from 1954) he acted in Peter Gunn, The Twilight Zone, Rawhide, Burke’s Law, Bewitched, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart and Curb Your Enthusiasm etc and appeared as himself in his own shows and with Dinah Shore, Jack Paar, Perry Como, Merv Griffin, Judy Garland, Andy Williams Dean Martin and Ed Sullivan, among many others. For the cinema Berman was in The Best Man, Divorce American Style, Every Home Should Have One, Son of Blob (directed by Larry Hagman), Rented Lips, and also Teen Witch, The Last Producer, Elliot Fauman, Ph.D., Motorama, Meet the Fockers, The Holiday and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. He played himself in the documentary feature The Aristocrats, alongside many other gagsters telling the dirtiest joke ever. Shelley Berman was married to Sarah Herman for seventy years and they had two children.

  

JOSEPH BOLOGNA (30 December 1934-13 August 2017)

The American actor, writer and director Joseph Bologna, who has died aged 82 of pancreatic cancer, was originally a comedy writer and playwright, whose play Lovers and Other Strangers, written with his wife Renée Taylor, was the first piece he adapted for the cinema (in 1970). It was Oscar-nominated and also became a TV series in 1982. Bologna was to write another four screenplays, plus nine TV series, some of which he also directed. As a film and TV actor he has over 70 titles to his credit. Although he wrote with his wife, he mainly acted in films, beginning with Made for Each Other, written with Taylor in 1971, a comedy about an eccentric couple and their relationship. They continued to write and appear together in films and on TV. Bologna’s film credits as actor include Cops and Robbers, Honour Thy Father, The Big Bus, Chapter Two, My Favourite Year, Blame It On Rio, The Woman in Red, It Had to Be You, Coupe de Ville, Love Is All There Is, Big Daddy, etc, and he was the voice of Mr Start in Ice Age: The Meltdown. On TV he was in Sins with Joan Collins, Rags to Riches and Top of the Heap among others. His last film, Tango Shalom (in post-production), is co-written by Bologna, features Bologna and Taylor and is directed by their son Gabriel.

 

ANTHONY BOOTH (9 October 1931-25 September 2017)

Liverpool-born actor Tony Booth, who has died aged 85 from heart failure (following Alzheimer’s and a stroke), will be remembered on two counts, first as Mike, the layabout son-in-law of Alf Garnett in TV’s Till Death Us Do Part, and for fathering his daughter Cherie who became the wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Booth’s acting began while he was in the army, after which he did repertory theatre work before entering television in 1959. His TV appearances included Z Cars, The Avengers, Dixon of Dock Green, The Saint, Coronation Street, EastEnders, The Bill, Emmerdale and Holby City. Till Death Us Do Part grew out of a Comedy Playhouse pilot in 1965 and went on to comprise over fifty episodes (and two feature films). For the cinema Booth appeared in Mix Me a Person (1962), with Anne Baxter and Adam Faith, The Valiant with John Mills, The L-Shaped Room, Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall, several of the Confessions of… series, Brannigan with John Wayne, Priest, written by Jimmy McGovern, and Treasure Island with Jack Palance. His last appearance was in Moving On (2010), the Jimmy McGovern TV series. Anthony Booth was married four times, including to Patricia Phoenix shortly before she died. He fathered eight children by his wives and other partners.

   

POWERS BOOTHE (1 June 1948-14 May 2017)

Texas-born actor Powers Boothe gave up football in high school and turned to theatre. He gained a Masters Degree in Fine Arts and for the early part of his career appeared only in Shakespeare in Oregon, Philadelphia and New Haven. His Broadway debut was in James McLure’s comedy Lone Star in 1979. After that he never played comedy again and became typecast as either villainous characters or authority figures in films and on television. His film debut was in Neil Simon’s screenplay of The Goodbye Girl (1977), in which he played a member of the Richard III cast. He had a small part in William Friedkin’s Cruising and then a TV series called Skag. More TV followed including The Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones for which Boothe won an Emmy playing the title role. He then appeared in several genre movies such as Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort and Extreme Prejudice, John Milius’s Red Dawn, John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest and Yuriy Ozerov’s Stalingrad. He had the title role in the TV series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. Boothe made his mark opposite Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer in Tombstone, about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. He was Alexander Haig in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, and then played a Sheriff in the same director’s U Turn, a Captain in Men of Honour, an FBI Agent in Frailty, a Senator in Sin City and its sequel Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, and a colonel in MacGruber. His last work included Avengers Assemble and the TV series Agents of SHIELD. Also on TV he was in the Deadwood, 24 and Nashville series. Powers Boothe claimed that his favourite movie was Mutant Species (1994), about a man infected with bio-hazardous material. His wife Pam Cole and their children Parisse and Preston survive him.

 

CONRAD BROOKS (3 January 1931-6 December 2017)

The American actor, writer, producer and director Conrad Brooks, who has died aged 86, was born Conrad Biedrzycki to Polish immigrant parents. His first Hollywood film was a Bowery Boys comedy, Jalopy, in 1953. While there he met the cheapest director on the lot, Ed Wood, who became legendary for making bad bad films. Brooks had three roles in Wood’s Glen or Glenda?, about a transsexual and a pseudo hermaphrodite, starring Bela Lugosi. From then on it was downhill all the way with Ed Wood in films such as Plan 9 from Outer Space (also with Lugosi) and many other Z-grade movies that never reached the UK. Brooks wrote, acted, directed and produced some of these films, which had enticing titles such as Blood Slaves of the Vampire Wolf, Bikini Drive-In, Baby Ghost, Toad Warrior, Shotgun Boulevard, Rollergator and I Woke Up Early the Day I Died. Most of his films went straight to video. However, Brooks occasionally appeared in the odd decent film such as Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood and an episode of the BBC TV series Dalziel and Pascoe. He worked continuously (except for a break in the 1960s and 1970s) right up until his death, clocking up nearly a hundred films. Yet to be released are Revenge of the Devil Bat, Darkness Waits and Abaddon.

  

GLEN CAMPBELL (22 April 1936-8 August 2017)

The American singer and musician Glen Campbell, who has died aged 81 following complications with Alzheimer’s, was mainly involved in the music business but appeared occasionally in films and on many television shows. He began his career as a studio guitarist accompanying the likes of The Beach Boys, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Frankie Laine, Ricky Nelson, Judy Garland, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. As a solo singer he had hits with ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘Galveston,’ etc, while many of his recordings from the mid-1960s onwards were used on television programmes and on the soundtracks of films. As an actor Campbell appeared in Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) with Steve McQueen and Lee Remick, The Cool Ones with Roddy McDowall, True Grit, with John Wayne and Kim Darby, Norwood, with Kim Darby again, Any Which Way You Can, with Clint Eastwood, and Uphill All the Way, plus some TV movies. In his time he sold 40 million records, received twelve gold discs and was nominated for an Academy Award for the documentary Glen Campbell: ‘I’ll Be Me (2014) amongst many other awards and nominations. Glen Campbell had four wives and eight children.

 

JOSEPH CAMPANELLA (21 November 1924-16 May 2018)

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 Columbia University. He moved to Hollywood in 1952 and worked on many TV shows including Naked City, The Untouchables, Route 66, The Big Valley, The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, The Virginian, Mannix, Gunsmoke, Ironside, Quincy M.E., The Colbys and too many more to mention. There were occasional feature films with him usually playing crooks, policemen, doctors, soldiers or priests, the first being Murder, Inc in 1960. His film career mainly rested on minor titles such as The Young Lovers, Roger Corman’s St Valentine’s Day Massacre, Ben, Love Child, Defiance, Hangar 18, Veliki Transport, Café Romeo, and many others that have long disappeared from view. His last film was Lost Dream in 2009. Campanella was married to the singer and dancer Kathryn Jill Bartholomew and they have seven sons.

 

ANNE V. COATES (12 December 1925-8 May 2018)

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.

    

KATHLEEN CROWLEY (26 December 1929-23 April 2017)

The American actress Kathleen Crowley came sixth in the Miss America pageant of 1949, representing New Jersey. Her prize money went towards her studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York. In 1951 she made her TV debut in a version of A Star Is Born with Robert Montgomery. More television followed until her first film role in The Silver Whip, a western with Dale Robertson. Then came The Farmer Takes a Wife with Robertson again and Betty Grable, and Sabre Jet with Robert Stack. She appeared with Fess Parker in Westward Ho, the Wagons! but for the most part it was back to TV apart from Target Earth, a sci-fi horror flick which set the tone for her career in exploitation movies such as Female Jungle, The Flame Barrier, Curse of the Undead, The Rebel Set, The Quiet Gun, Showdown and other minor Westerns. Guest shots in TV also kept her busy. After the films of Downhill Racer and The Lawyer in 1970, she retired to look after her family and to become a bridge tender for the Green Bank Road Bridge in her hometown in New Jersey.

 

PEGGY CUMMINS (18 December 1925-29 December 2017)

The Irish actress Peggy Cummins has died aged 92, following a stroke. She had a successful film career for twenty-five years up until 1965, gracing television only twice before her retirement. Born in Wales to the actress Margaret Cummins and the journalist and music teacher Franklin Fuller, Peggy appeared in the theatre and on radio as a teenager. Her first film in 1940 was Dr O’Dowd and she made several more British films, including Old Mother Riley Detective, before what might have been her big break in Hollywood in 1947, namely Forever Amber. However, filming was suspended after a month for script rewrites and re-casting and Cummins lost the title role to Linda Darnell. Then Joseph L. Mankiewicz cast her in The Late George Apley and in Escape and she stayed in Hollywood for Moss Rose with Victor Mature and The Green Grass of Wyoming with Charles Coburn. After Alexander Korda’s That Dangerous Age came arguably her best film, Gun Crazy, Joseph H. Lewis’s brilliant film noir co-written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo and in which Cummins and John Dall played a latterday Bonnie and Clyde. Other films included My Daughter Joy with Edward G. Robinson, while her return to Britain saw her in Who Goes There! Street Corner, Always a Bride, Meet Mr Lucifer, The Love Lottery, To Dorothy a Son, Carry on Admiral, Hell Drivers, The Captain’s Table and several others. Another notable film was Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957), which became something of a cult, based on Casting the Runes, M. R. James’s story about devil worship. Of the two TV series Cummins made, one was an episode of The Human Jungle (1964) which has lately been revived on the Talking Pictures channel. Peggy Cummins was married to the businessman Derek Dunnett until his death in 2000. They had two children, David and Diana. After retirement, Cummins devoted her time to charity work.

 

VIC DAMONE (12 June 1928-11 February 2018)

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 Las Vegas! with Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse. In 1960 he was in Phil Karlson’s war film Hell to Eternity but the cinema was not his main career, as he was essentially a crooner singing live and on record. He did guest shots on TV shows with Red Skelton, June Allyson, Dick Van Dyke, Danny Thomas etc and appeared in many TV documentaries, but his last acting role was in The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mysteries in 1978. Vic Damone had five wives, including actresses Pier Angeli and Diahann Carroll, and fathered four children.

    

MIREILLE DARC (15 May 1938-28 August 2017)

The French actress Mireille Darc (birth name Mireille Algroz) has died of a heart condition aged 79. She studied in Toulon and then worked in the theatre in Paris. Her first film was Trapped by Fear (1960) with Jean-Paul Belmondo, followed by Please, Not Now directed by Roger Vadim, of Bardot fame and to whom Darc was compared. She was an attractive woman and her looks as well as her acting abilities were mainly used in genre movies such as sex comedies and crime thrillers, many of which never came to the UK. The director Georges Lautner cast her in over a dozen films. In 1967 she was in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, a departure for her to work with a New Wave director rather than the more traditionalist filmmakers. It was arguably her best film. She was in (briefly) the 1967 Casino Royale and also Ken Annakin’s Monte Carlo or Bust, mainly as eye candy, Jacques Deray’s Borsalino with Belmondo again, while Yves Robert’s The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe was a global hit. She continued to make films with André Cayatte, Michel Boisrond, Edouard Molinaro and Alain Delon, with whom she had a long relationship before marrying her husband Pascal Desprez. Her last feature was in 1986 after which she directed television documentaries. Mireille Darc was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 2006.

 

DANIELLE DARRIEUX (1 May 1917-17 October 2017)

The French actress and singer Danielle Darrieux, who has died aged 100, was a mere 14 years old when she won her first film role in Le Bal in 1931, after which she worked continuously. Of the forty or so films she made before World War II, the outstanding ones were Mayerling (she played Maria Vetsera opposite Charles Boyer), Club des femmes, which caused a storm in New York with its risqué setting of a women-only hotel, Ruy Blas with Jean Marais, and Occupe-toi d’Amélie..!, Claude Autant-Lara’s Feydeau comedy adaptation. Later on she also did Rouge et noir for Autant-Lara, based on Stendhal’s novel. In the 1950s she worked with Max Ophuls on La Ronde, from the Arthur Schnitzler play, as well as Le plaisir and Madame de… Darrieux had a taste of Hollywood in 1938 in The Rage of Paris with Douglas Fairbanks Jr but then went back to France during the Occupation. She returned to Hollywood in the fifties for the MGM musical Rich, Young and Pretty, starred with James Mason in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 5 Fingers, and figured in Robert Rossen’s dull epic of Alexander the Great with Richard Burton. However, for the most part, Darrieux continued working extensively in French cinema and TV until Pièce montée in 2010, with an occasional outing for The Greengage Summer (1961), shot in France and the UK with Kenneth More. She contributed a delightful performance for Jacques Demy in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967), and was also in his musical melodrama Une chambre en ville. Darrieux did some theatre work in Paris, and also on Broadway in the musical of Coco (taking over from Katharine Hepburn). In London and New York she was in Ambassador, a musical with Howard Keel. Among her last films was François Ozon’s 8 Women (2002) which earned her a Silver Bear at Berlin, and she voiced the Grandmother in the animated film Persepolis (2007). She was married three times: to director Henri Decoin, diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa and then scriptwriter Georges Mitsinkidès, who died in 1991. Darrieux received an honorary César award in 1985.

    

JONATHAN DEMME (22 February 1944-26 April 2017)

The American filmmaker Jonathan Demme was prolific as a writer-director-producer and sometime actor, covering both cinema and television in equal measure. He began as a producer in the early 1970s, writing several films such as Angel Warriors, The Hot Box and Black Mama White Mama. His first film as a director was Caged Heat in 1974, then Crazy Mama with Cloris Leachman, Last Embrace with Roy Scheider, Swing Shift with Goldie Hawn, and Melvin and Howard with Jason Robards as Howard Hughes. He also worked concurrently on TV documentaries, series and video shorts. Then there was Something Wild (1986), which starred Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels, followed by Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, and Married to the Mob, with Michelle Pfeiffer. Next came his greatest success, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which won five Oscars, including statuettes for best picture, Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins and for Demme himself as best director. He then followed this with Philadelphia, which won Tom Hanks his first Oscar and was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to tackle homosexuality and Aids. This was followed by Beloved, with Oprah Winfrey and Thandie Newton, and the critically ridiculed The Truth About Charlie, a remake of Charade with Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton. His remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004) with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep was no improvement on the original, just different. Among the documentary work, Demme still found time to direct Rachel Getting Married with Anne Hathaway, A Master Builder, based on the play by Ibsen, and Ricki and the Flash (2015), with Meryl Streep, his last theatrical feature.

 

BRADFORD DILLMAN (14 April 1930-16 January 2018)

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 Cannes. Dillman filmed Circle of Deception in London, where he met his second wife, actress and model Suzy Parker. He joined Welles again for Crack in the Mirror, then did Tony Richardson’s Sanctuary and Michael Curtiz’s Francis of Assisi. Dillman usually gave the impression of there being something deep behind the eyes, but most films failed to live up to his talent. He moved back into television before filming A Rage to Live, The Plainsman, Jigsaw and The Bridge at Remagen, but it was always television that kept him busy. Later films included The Mephisto Waltz, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, The Way We Were and John Frankenheimer’s film of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, in which he played Willie Oban. Other features interrupted Dillman’s TV career (Gold, Bug, The Enforcer and Sudden Impact among them), but the work was mainly routine and unworthy of his gifts. He retired in 1995 after several appearances on Murder, She Wrote. His first wife was Frieda Harding with whom he had two children, while Suzy Parker bore him three more plus a stepdaughter. His daughter Pamela Dillman is an actress and appears mostly on television.

 

KARIN DOR (22 February 1938-6 November 2017)

The German actress Karin Dor, who has died at the age of 79, will always be remembered as a Bond girl, playing Helga Brandt opposite Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice (1967). Born Kätherose Derr, she began her career as a film extra. Spotted by her future husband the film director Harald Reinl, one of her first films was his Der schweigsame Engel (1954) and she went on to make more films in Germany, including Edgar Wallace thrillers, Karl May westerns and White Horse Inn (1960). She did The Invisible Dr Mabuse, The Treasure of the Silver Lake and Winnetou: The Red Gentleman with Lex Barker, and in the UK The Face of Fu Manchu with Christopher Lee. Then came 007 and You Only Live Twice, after which she became known globally. However, she still made films in Germany, apart from Dracula Versus Frankenstein (with Michael Rennie) in Spain. Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz was her only other major American film and is remembered for the scene of Karin Dor’s death, as Juanita, in which an overhead shot sees her fall while her dress flows out around her. Television in the US and Germany plus other German features filled out the rest of her career, although she also appeared on stage in Germany almost up until her death, the result of an earlier brain concussion. Apart from Harald Reinl, with whom she had a son (the actor Andreas Renell), Dor’s other husbands were Gűnther Schmucker and the actor-director George Robotham (1921-2007).

  

ROY DOTRICE (26 May 1926-16 October 2017)

Essentially a character actor but a great one, Roy Dotrice, who has died at the age of 94, was mainly a man of the theatre, although he appeared in a lot of television and radio and also in films. Born in Guernsey, he joined the RAF at the age of 16 and was shot down during World War II and taken prisoner in Germany, where he started to perform. Back home he joined Rada and then played in rep around the UK, eventually becoming a member of the Stratford Memorial Company, specialising in older character parts. He will be remembered for his one-man show as the 17th-century diarist John Evelyn, a decrepit gossip and, as Dotrice played him, a hilariously memorable figure. He played this all over the world for a record-breaking 1700 plus performances. He also had one-man shows on Churchill, Dickens, Lincoln and Will Rogers. He began in TV in 1957, while his film career started in 1960 with Joseph Losey’s The Criminal, and then came The Heroes of Telemark, A Twist of Sand, Lock Up Your Daughters, The Buttercup Chain, Nicholas and Alexandra, Tales from the Crypt, Saturn 3 (dubbing for Harvey Keitel), Amadeus (as Leopold Mozart), Swimming With Sharks, The Scarlet Letter, These Foolish Things and others, but he appeared more on television, in The Wars of the Roses, Jackanory, Misleading Cases (Bafta award, 1967), Clochemerle, Dickens of London, Shaka Zulu, Murder, She Wrote, Life Begins and latterly Game of Thrones (as Hallyne). He married Kay Newman in 1947 and they had three daughters, Michele, Karen and Yvette, all actresses. Roy Dotrice received the OBE in 2008.

 

PETER DUFFELL (10 July 1922-12 December 2017)

The British film director and writer Peter Duffell, who has died aged 95, worked mainly in television. Nonetheless, he did direct the occasional film. From 1967 he was noted for his helming of such TV series as The Avengers, Man in a Suitcase, The Far Pavilions, Inspector Morse, etc, and several one-off TV movies. For the cinema he began working on Merton Park Studio’s second features, including the Edgar Wallace mysteries, and The Scales of Justice and Scotland Yard series. The House That Dripped Blood (1971) was his first main feature, an Amicus anthology of four horror stories with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Duffell then both co-wrote and directed England Made Me, based on the Graham Greene novel, with Peter Finch and Michael York. Inside Out was a comedy thriller with Telly Savalas. Experience Preferred… But Not Essential was co-written by Jack Rosenthal and produced by David Puttnam. King of the Wind (1990), a period adventure about a horse, starred Richard Harris and Glenda Jackson and was Duffell’s last feature. He wrote and directed his own thriller, Some Other Spring, for television in 1991 and retired after directing episodes of The Bill in 1996. He won a Bafta award for Stephen Poliakoff’s Caught on a Train (1980) with Peggy Ashcroft. Peter Duffell married three times: his third wife was Rosslyn Audrey Cliffe and he fathered a child with his second wife. His autobiography Playing Piano in a Brothel: Memoirs of a Film Director, had an introduction by Christopher Lee who called Duffell “Britain’s most underrated director."

 

GLYNN EDWARDS (2 February 1931-23 May 2018)

The British character actor Glynn Edwards, who has died aged 87, was born in Malaya but grew up in Salisbury. Most famous for playing Dave the barman in the TV series Minder, with George Cole and Dennis Waterman, he also appeared as Dave in Marillion’s video of Heart of Lothian. Glynn Edwards, who also had a career on stage and in films, trained at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in Stratford East where he met and married the actress Yootha Joyce. He appeared in Brendan Behan’s play The Hostage and Lionel Bart’s musical Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, among other productions. He was a police constable in his first film, The Heart Within (1957), and went on to play many officers of the law or villains. His films included A Prize of Arms, Sparrows Can’t Sing, Zulu, The Ipcress File, Robbery, The Blood Beast Terror, The Bofors Gun, Get Carter, Under Milk Wood, Burke & Hare (as Hare), All Coppers Are…, Shaft in Africa, 11 Harrowhouse, Rising Damp, etc. His TV work also included Sir Francis Drake, No Hiding Place, Madame Bovary, The Newcomers, Public Eye, Bless This House, The Main Chance, Dixon of Dock Green, Crown Court, Jack of Diamonds and Letty. After 95 episodes of Minder, he retired to Spain in 1994. He was also married to Christine Pilgrim and Valerie Edwards. He has one son, Tom.

     

PAMELA ENGEL (12 November 1934-15 July 2017)

The global film industry has much to be grateful for in Pamela Engel, the film distributor who has died aged 82. Based in London, Pam and her first husband Andi Engel were responsible for distributing major foreign films that may not otherwise have been seen in the UK and elsewhere, were it not for their vastly enterprising company Artificial Eye. Pam only ever distributed titles that she liked, whether or not they had commercial possibilities. Leaving school she obtained a job at the British Film Institute, later becoming assistant to Richard Roud, the National Film Theatre’s programmer. She met her future husband Andi at a film festival and, after she worked for Derek Hill’s New Cinema Club, they set up PolitKino, a company specialising in the avant-garde. By 1976 they had founded Artificial Eye, and had also acquired cinemas including London’s Lumière, the Camden Plaza and the Chelsea Cinema. Their record of films they distributed included works by Bertolucci, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Chabrol, Rohmer, Wajda, Herzog, Resnais, Kieslowski, Sorrentino, Marguerite Duras, Michael Haneke, Wim Wenders, Ousmane Sembene and Ken Loach, among many others. Their greatest success was Paul Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac, with Gérard Depardieu, which made over two million pounds. Although Pam and Andi divorced, they continued to work together. Eventually they sold the company to Curzon and, following Andi’s death in 2006, Pam and Robert Beeson started New Wave Films together and subsequently married.

 

R. LEE ERMEY (24 March 1944-15 April 2018)

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 Vietnam and Japan, he retired from the Corps and studied criminology and drama. His first US film was The Boys in Company C (1978) before Coppola used him as helicopter pilot in Apocalypse Now. He was outstanding as the Sergeant in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and continued playing military roles and heavies in Mississippi Burning, Fletch Lives, Deathstone, Toy Soldiers, Hexed, Sommersby, Body Snatchers and other films and TV series. He was in On Deadly Ground, Naked Gun 33 1/3, Murder in the First, Leaving Las Vegas, Dead Man Walking, Taking Sides, Willard, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) and The Watch. He also did voice work on Toy Story (as Sarge) and its sequels, Starship Troopers, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Reef, and the Family Guy and The Simpsons TV series.

   

SUZAN FARMER (16 June 1942-17 September 2017)

British actress Suzan Farmer, who has died aged 75, left school at 15 to become an actress and made her first film, The Supreme Secret – a B-picture shot at Southall Studios – a year later. Her next film, The Dawn Killer, was made for the Children’s Film Foundation. She was uncredited in The Wild and the Willing, which starred her future husband, Ian McShane, in his film debut. A mixture of film and TV work followed, including the films 80,000 Suspects, 633 Squadron and Monster of Terror, with Boris Karloff. Farmer then made memorable appearances in several Hammer films - The Scarlet Blade, The Devil-Ship Pirates, Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Rasputin: The Mad Monk. She was also in Doctor in Clover, Where the Bullets Fly and Persecution (with Lana Turner and Trevor Howard), Farmer’s last film in 1974. Her career continued on TV in The Saint, Coronation Street, Dixon of Dock Green, Blake’s 7 etc and Leap in the Dark, her last appearance in 1980.

 

FENELLA FIELDING (17 November 1927-11 September 2018)

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 West End revue Pieces of Eight with Kenneth Williams. She was also a huge success in Sandy Wilson’s musical Valmouth. She appeared on television from 1957 and a year later made her debut (uncredited) in the film Sapphire, with Nigel Patrick. More TV included The Four Just Men, Danger Man, The Avengers, Comedy Playhouse and The Prisoner, in which she was the voice of the loudspeaker announcer, and she camped it up in stories by Saki and the farces of Feydeau. Fenella’s early films included Follow a Star with Norman Wisdom, Foxhole in Cairo with James Robertson Justice, No Love for Johnnie with Peter Finch, In the Doghouse with Leslie Phillips, three of the Doctor films and a pair of Carry Ons – Regardless and Screaming. Other films included Drop Dead Darling, Lock Up Your Daughters, Guest House Paradiso and the gay film Over the Edge (2011). She was also the voice of the Blue Queen in Dougal and the Blue Cat. More TV followed, including four series of the Uncle Jack children’s stories in which she played The Vixen. Another series, Conditions, is due to air in 2019. Over the years Fenella Fielding acted in plays by Ibsen, Shakespeare, Fielding, Vanbrugh, Chekhov, Wilde, Sheridan, Coward, Henry James etc. She did a one-woman show on Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh and was very good in her own play about the Duchess of Windsor. She did voice-work for a computer game and audiobooks, released an album of cover songs, old and recent, called The Savoy Sessions, and did readings from her autobiography Do You Mind If I Smoke?, one of her lines from Carry On Screaming. Fenella Fielding received the OBE in 2018 for services to drama and charity. She never married. Her brother Basil, Lord Feldman, survives her.

   

MICHAEL D. FORD (1928-31 May 2018)

The British-born art director and set decorator, who has died aged 90, trained at Goldsmiths College as an illustrator, then worked as a scenic artist before entering films via television. His first film credit was for Man in the Moon (1960) with Kenneth More, then The Anniversary (1968) with Bette Davis, Kelly’s Heroes with Clint Eastwood, The Alf Garnett Saga with Warren Mitchell, Up the Front with Frankie Howerd, Take Me High with Cliff Richard and Girl Stroke Boy with Peter Straker. Ford also worked on television during the 1970s, his credits including The New Avengers and Space 1999. Then came the big ones: two Star Wars pictures, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, plus his Oscar-winning contributions to Raiders of the Lost Ark. He worked through the 1980s and ’90s on many films, including The Chain, Return to Oz, Young Sherlock Holmes, The Living Daylights, Empire of the Sun, Consuming Passions, Licence to Kill, The Muppet Christmas Carol and GoldenEye. He scored another Academy Award for Titanic in 1997. His last film work was on Wing Commander in 1999.

 

MILOŠ FORMAN (18 February 1932-13 April 2018)

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 US and was embraced by Hollywood and eventually became a naturalised American citizen. His Cannes festival winner, Taking Off (1971), was a satire on American parents trying to understand their kids by getting stoned. Between 1975 and 2006 he made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (five Oscars and a Bafta), Hair, Ragtime (eight Oscar nominations), Amadeus (eight Oscar wins), Valmont, The People vs Larry Flint (two Oscar nominations), Man on the Moon and Goya’s Ghosts. Forman’s last film was the Czech musical A Walk Worthwhile in 2009. He was married three times and had four children.

  

BRUCE FORSYTH (22 February 1928-18 August 2017)

Sir Bruce Forsyth, who has died at age 89 following a prolonged illness, was an all-round entertainer who could sing, dance, play various musical instruments and be a funny gameshow host. Over seventy years he entertained with utter professionalism and an abiding rapport with his audience. He toured in variety from the age of eleven, until his big break came in hosting Sunday Night at the London Palladium (1958-64). He was on many other TV shows but will be remembered mainly for The Generation Game (1971-94), Play Your Cards Right (1980-2003), Bruce’s Price Is Right (1995-2001) and Strictly Come Dancing (2004-15). On stage he appeared just once in the West End as an actor in Little Me, the Neil Simon-Cy Coleman-Carolyn Leigh musical in which Forsyth played seven roles. He made a few films but, like Morecambe & Wise, he was mainly a performer for live audiences. He played Gertrude Lawrence’s father in Star! with Julie Andrews, appeared in Anthony Newley’s egotrip Can Heironyms Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, did Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and the British comedy portmanteau The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins. Otherwise it was TV for other acting parts until his final film, House! (2000), about the fate of a bingo hall, in which he played himself. Bruce Forsyth was married three times, to Penny Calvert, Anthea Redfern and Wilnelia Merced. He fathered six children and was knighted in 2011.

 

LIZ FRASER (14 August 1930-6 September 2018)

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, Dunkirk with Richard Attenborough, Wonderful Things! with Frankie Vaughan, and Alive and Kicking with Sybil Thorndike, but her real break came in the Boulting Brothers’ I’m All Right Jack, playing Peter Sellers’ daughter Cynthia Kite, a role that brought her a Bafta nomination for most promising newcomer. Her career continued with a mix of film and television and her comedic highlights include The Night We Dropped a Clanger, Desert Mice, Two Way Stretch, Doctor in Love, The Bulldog Breed, The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s and The Rebel with Tony Hancock, with whom she had worked on his TV series. She was in four Carry Ons – Regardless, Cruising, Cabby and Behind – and also Raising the Wind from the same team. Her fifty-year plus career also included much television: Rumpole of the Bailey, Robin’s Nest, The Professionals, The Avengers, Birds of a Feather, Minder, The Bill, Miss Marple, Last of the Summer Wine, Foyle’s War and Holby City. On film she appeared in The Painted Smile, The Americanisation of Emily, The Family Way, Up the Junction, Dad’s Army (as Mrs Pike), The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle and Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, her final cinema film in 1990. Liz Fraser continued to work on TV until 2007 but returned in 2018 for an episode of Midsomer Murders. She was married briefly to travelling salesman Peter Yonwin and then to TV producer and director Bill Hitchcock, who died in 1974. Her autobiography, Liz Fraser… and Other Characters, was published in 2012 by Signum Books.

   

STEPHEN FURST (8 May 1954-16 June 2017)

The American actor-director (and sometime writer and producer) Stephen Furst has died aged 63. Once a pizza delivery boy in Hollywood, Furst put his photo and cv inside the pizza boxes and was thus discovered for a role in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978). Television took up most of his time after that, alongside crazy and comic features or horror flicks. He was also in National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, an early screenplay by John Hughes who wrote the TV Delta House series in which Furst played Flounder, his character from Animal House. From 1983 onwards he appeared mainly on TV. Feature films, however, included The Dream Team, Little Bigfoot 2: The Journey Home, Deadly Delusions, Going Greek, Echoes of Enlightenment, Sorority Boys, Wild Roomies, Everything’s Jake and, his last film, Seven Days of Grace in 2006. As a director he was responsible for Magic Kid II, Stageghost, Game Day, Title to Murder, and episodes of Babylon 5, the TV series in which he played Vir Cotto over 100 times. Among his films as a producer were My Sister’s Keeper with Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin, Cold Moon, written and directed by his actor-director son Griff Furst, and Jack Snyder’s River Runs Red, a thriller due out in 2017. Stephen Furst and his wife Lorraine had another son, Nathan, a film composer.

 

RAY GALTON (17 July 1930-5 October 2018)

See the obituary below for Alan Simpson, the writing partner of Ray Galton, who died 8 February 2017.

   

JOHN GAVIN (8 April 1931-9 February 2018)

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 (17 March 1928-8 June 2018)

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 (6 March 1920-23 February 2018)

The British film director Lewis Gilbert, who has died at the age of 97, was at the forefront of the UK film industry for over forty years, creating some of Britain’s most popular movies. He worked with many major British actors including Laurence Harvey, Michael Redgrave, Dirk Bogarde, Margaret Lockwood, Kenneth More, Michael Caine, Alec Guinness, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Julie Walters and Pauline Collins, to name but a few. He also wrote and produced many of the films he directed, becoming the doyen of British cinema. Beginning with documentary shorts in the 1940s, his first feature was The Little Ballerina (1947) about a budding dancer; the film included a performance by Margot Fonteyn. Then he made a series of thrillers including Once a Sinner, Scarlet Thread, There Is Another Sun, Cosh Boy and The Good Die Young. Then came the war films: Albert R.N., The Sea Shall Not Have Them, Reach for the Sky, Carve Her Name With Pride, Sink the Bismarck!, Light Up the Sky! and the period sea drama H.M.S. Defiant. He made Alfie with Michael Caine and then the first of his three Bond films, You Only Live Twice, followed by The Spy Who Loved Me (Gilbert’s favourite film), and Moonraker. Later successes in the 1980s included Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine and Stepping Out with Liza Minnelli. His last work was on Haunted (1995), a ghost story by James Herbert, and Before You Go (2002), a family comedy with Julie Walters. Lewis Gilbert was Oscar-nominated for Alfie and won a Bafta for Educating Rita, received the British Academy’s Michael Balcon Award in 1990, and was created a BFI Fellow in 2001. He won at Cannes for Alfie and also received the Dilys Powell Award from the London Film Critics’ Circle, among many other awards. He was married to Hylda Tafler (sister of the actor Sidney Tafler) who died in 2005. He had a son, Stephen, and a stepson John.

  

DON GORDON (13 November 1926-24 April 2017)

The American character actor Don Gordon, who has died aged 90, appears never to have been out of work between 1951 and 1993. Appearing in countless long-running television series as well as guest shots on other TV shows plus a number of major films, he was never, however, a particular star, just a face that was always there. His career began with uncredited appearances in Twelve O’Clock High, Halls of Montezuma, Let’s Go Navy!, Force of Arms and It’s a Big Country. He then graduated to TV in Space Patrol, and was in the original television production of Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty with Rod Steiger. Other TV series included 77 Sunset Strip, Wanted: Dead or Alive (with his pal Steve McQueen), The Untouchables, The Twilight Zone, Peyton Place and Remington Steele. Often appearing as a man frantically agonising over some kind of trouble, Don Gordon graced the likes of Cry Tough, The Lollipop Cover (top billed in a film he also co-wrote), Bullitt, The Gamblers (based on Gogol), WUSA, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie and Out of the Blue, Fuzz, Papillon, The Towering Inferno, Lethal Weapon, Blake Edwards’ Skin Deep and The Exorcist III (aka Legion). He retired in 1993 after an episode of Diagnosis Murder. Don Gordon was married to the actresses Helen Westcott, Nita Talbot and Bek Nelson. His fourth wife, Denise Farr, daughter of the actress Felicia Farr, Jack Lemmon’s widow, survives him, as does his daughter from his marriage to Bek Nelson.

 

LESLIE GRANTHAM (30 April 1947-15 June 2018)

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 Webber Douglas Academy. Following some early theatre work, he made his television debut in 1982 in Jake’s End, then Goodnight and God Bless and then he played Davros’s henchman Kiston in a Doctor Who Daleks story. Further TV included The Jewel in the Crown, The Nightwatch, a thriller directed by Danny Boyle, The Paradise Club, Cluedo, 99-1, Woof!, The Bill and The Uninvited (on which he was also executive producer). Grantham’s film career was not outstanding. His first feature film was Morons from Outer Space in 1985, but by then he was entrenched in EastEnders. ‘Dirty’ Den was allegedly killed off in 1989 but he returned in 2003 and stayed for 18 months before his final demise, having notched up over 300 episodes. His other films included Shadow Run (with Michael Caine), Crow’s Nest, The Wedding Tackle, Charlie, Mob Handed, and a little-known version of Waiting for Godot with Brian Blessed. His last two films, Jack Southeast and The Krays: Dead Man Walking, are awaiting release. Leslie Grantham married Jane Laurie and they have three children.

  

BRAD GREY (29 December 1957-14 May 2017)

Born in the Bronx, producer Brad Grey first worked for concert promoter Harvey Weinstein while at university. His first promotion was for Frank Sinatra in 1978. Staying in the talent business, he booked New York stand-up comics and in 1984 joined forces with talent manager Bernie Brillstein, forming Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. From 1986 he produced It’s Garry Shandling’s Show for television and remained in TV production for many series and movies until his first features from 1996, Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer, both with Adam Sandler, and The Replacement Killers, with Yun-Fat Chow. He continued in television while also producing films. His greatest TV success was The Sopranos (1999-2007), a massive global hit. Grey went into partnership with Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, the company being Plan B, which gave rise to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Departed and 12 Years a Slave. In 2005 Grey became CEO at Paramount Pictures for twelve years, hitting the heights with There Will Be Blood and sequels to Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and Transformers. Other films made under Grey’s aegis include Mike Nichols’s What Planet Are You From?, Scary Movie, City By the Sea, Running With Scissors and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. His last work was on Real Time With Bill Maher, a TV series from 2006 until 2017. Brad Grey married twice and had four children.

     

ROBERT GUILLAUME (30 November 1927-24 October 2017)

The actor Robert Guillaume has died aged 89 from prostate cancer. He was the first African-American actor to win a Primetime Emmy Award for lead actor in a comedy series (Benson, 1985) and for best supporting actor in a comedy series (Soap, 1979). In both series he made the part of the feisty butler Benson entirely his own. His career began in the theatre, where a production of Carousel in Cleveland led him to New York (in 1961). Among the musicals he was in were Porgy and Bess, Golden Boy, Purlie, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris and an all-black version of Guys and Dolls. Guillaume entered television in 1966 and then worked mostly for the box, appearing in Marcus Welby M.D., Sanford and Son, All in the Family and Good Times, before Soap came along for fifty episodes. He also worked on The Love Boat and North and South, before Benson occupied him from 1979 to 1986. In 1989 he had The Robert Guillaume Show for twelve weeks playing an African-American man in a romantic relationship with a Caucasian woman. His TV movies include Driving Miss Daisy with Joan Plowright. Guillaume’s first film was Super Fly T.N.T in 1973, then Neil Simon’s Seems Like Old Times in 1980, and Prince Jack in 1984, playing Martin Luther King. Then came Wanted: Dead or Alive, They Still Call Me Bruce, John G. Avildsen’s Lean on Me with Morgan Freeman, Death Warrant with Jean-Claude Van Damme, The Meteor Man written and directed by and starring Robert Townsend, and Spy Hard with Leslie Nielsen. One of his last films was Tim Burton’s Big Fish in 2003. He was the voice of Rafiki in Disney’s The Lion King and won a Grammy for the audiobook version. Robert Guillaume was married twice, first to Marlene Scott and then Donna Brown. He fathered five children.

 

KENNETH HAIGH (25 March 1931-4 February 2018)

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 London’s Royal Court. He was primarily a stage actor and in his time worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Open Air Regent’s Park, the Haymarket Leicester, the Mermaid Theatre, Chichester Festival, Edinburgh, the Young Vic and in the USA. He appeared in plays by Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Strindberg, Pinter, Osborne’s The Hotel in Amsterdam and the Lionel Bart musical Maggie May. The part of Jimmy Porter went to Richard Burton for the film version of Look Back in Anger and Haigh’s film career was perhaps incidental although early on he was in Saint Joan (1957), Cleopatra (1963, as Brutus), A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair (1966). Later films included Eagle in a Cage (as Napoleon), Robin and Marian, The Bitch, Wild Geese II, Shuttlecock with Alan Bates and Man at the Top, a sequel to Room at the Top. Haigh had played Joe Lampton in the TV series and was also seen on television in The Search for the Nile (as the explorer Richard Burton), Moll Flanders, Hazlitt in Love and Maybury. Kenneth Haigh married West Indian model Myrna Stephens in 1974 and they had a son. They divorced in 1985 but stayed friends and Myrna looked after him when he contracted brain damage after swallowing a chicken bone that caused him oxygen starvation.

   

BARBARA HALE (18 April 1922-26 January 26 2017)

“Tell me, Perry, how did you know that…?” These words were often spoken by Della Street, confidential secretary to criminal defence lawyer Perry Mason, and played by American actress Barbara Hale in countless episodes and TV features of the long-running courtroom drama starring Raymond Burr. After studying art and modelling, Hale began a long career in movies and TV from 1943. Her first film of note, among over a hundred appearances, was Higher and Higher, also one of Sinatra’s earliest films. This was followed by a mixture of minor pictures including the Falcon series, The Boy With Green Hair, The Window with Bobby Driscoll, and playing the second wife in Jolson Sings Again (1949). After further film work – including A Lion Is In the Streets with Cagney and Unchained (remember the Melody?) – television offered the usual suspects until Perry Mason came along in 1957. This lasted until 1966 with Hale appearing in nearly all 271 episodes. Other TV shows intervened and more films (Airport, The Giant Spider Invasion, Big Wednesday, with her son William Katt) and then from 1985 more of Perry Mason in thirty TV feature-length episodes, the last in 1995 when Hale retired. She married actor Bill Williams (real name Hermann Katt) and, apart from their son William, they also had two daughters.

 

PETER HALL (22 November 1930-11 September 2017)

Sir Peter Hall, who has died from dementia aged 86, was chiefly known as a man of the theatre. He introduced Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to the UK and went on to found the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and at London’s Aldwych Theatre. He eventually ran the National Theatre, taking over from Laurence Olivier, and also became an opera director, running Glyndebourne Festival Opera for seven years. He also found time to work in film and on television where he directed many Shakespeare productions. His first film was Work Is a Four-Letter Word (1968) starring David Warner and Cilla Black, then A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Warner, Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren, and Three Into Two Won’t Go, with Rod Steiger. In the 1970s Hall directed Perfect Friday, a bank heist movie with Ursula Andress, Stanley Baker and Warner again. Pinter’s The Homecoming was made for American television but released theatrically in the UK, after which Hall mostly worked on TV productions. His last cinema film was Never Talk to Strangers (1995) with Rebecca De Mornay and Antonio Banderas. His greatest achievement on film was Akenfield (1974), an adaptation of Ronald Blythe’s book about life in rural Suffolk, where Hall was born. His best TV work was in She’s Been Away (1989) with Peggy Ashcroft, which won several awards at Venice. Peter Hall was awarded the CBE in 1963 and was knighted in 1977. He was married four times, to Leslie Caron, Jacqueline Taylor, Maria Ewing and Nicki Frei. He fathered six children: Rebecca Hall is an actress and Christopher and Edward Hall are both directors, while Jennifer, Lucy and Emma have all acted for their father. 

  

TY HARDIN (1 January 1930-3 August 2017)

The American actor Ty Hardin, who has died aged 87, was a US Army man who made good in Hollywood, beginning in B-pictures from 1958 and then graduating to television. Early films for Paramount included I Married a Monster From Outer Space and Last Train From Gun Hill, before he appeared on TV in Maverick, Cheyenne, 77 Sunset Strip and Tenderfoot, the last introducing the character of Bronco Layne, which then as Bronco ran for 68 episodes. While at Warner Bros he clocked up films including Samuel Fuller’s Merrill’s Marauders, George Cukor’s The Chapman Report, Leslie H. Martinson’s PT 109, Richard Wilson’s Wall of Noise and Norman Taurog’s Palm Springs Weekend. After Battle of the Bulge, Custer of the West and Berserk! (with Joan Crawford), he mostly filmed in Europe and did more TV work, so much so that he had to turn down Batman. He was uncredited as a pilot in Billy Wilder’s Avanti! (1972) and made his last film in 1992, while his final TV appearance came in 1997. He returned, however, briefly as ‘Colonel Sanders’ in The Back-up Bride in 2011. In 1969 he had appeared on stage in the UK in A Streetcar Named Desire with Veronica Lake, but after giving up acting he pursued a career as an extreme right-wing freedom fighter. Born Orison Whipple Hungerford Jr, Ty Hardin had eight wives and ten children.

 

ROBERT HARDY (29 October 1925-3 August 2017)

The actor Robert Hardy, who has died aged 91, may well be remembered for two roles, although he played a wide variety of parts on stage, in films and on television. He seemed to have cornered the market on TV as Winston Churchill and latterly as Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter films. Early on in his career he worked in Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon and later gave a fine performance as Henry V in the BBC’s An Age of Kings series. He graced many a period drama series, including the title role in David Copperfield, Henry Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda, Dudley in Elizabeth R, Prince Albert in Edward the Seventh, Caesar in The Cleopatras, Arthur Broke in Middlemarch and Tite Barnacle in Little Dorrit. He was popular as Siegfried Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small on TV but it was as Churchill that he made his greatest mark in The Wilderness Years, War and Remembrance and Churchill: 100 Days That Saved Britain. He also played the great man in the stage musical Winnie, created by his brother Robin Hardy. Some of the films he made include The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, How I Won the War, 10 Rillington Place, Young Winston (as a headmaster), Gawain and the Green Knight, David Hare’s Paris by Night, Sense and Sensibility, An Ideal Husband and four Harry Potters. He was married first to Elizabeth Fox and then Sally Pearson. He has three children.

 

BARBARA HARRIS (25 July 1935-21 August 2018)

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 Second City theatre company, moving from Chicago to New York. She won a Tony award for the musical The Apple Tree in 1967. Her first TV appearance was in Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1961, followed by Naked City, Channing, The Defenders, etc. Her first film was Fred Coe’s A Thousand Clowns in 1965, then Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You In the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad and Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, possibly two of the longest film titles ever. Shorter ones included Arthur Hiller’s Plaza Suite, Robert Altman’s Nashville, Hitchcock’s Family Plot and Disney’s Freaky Friday, with Jodie Foster. The films got fewer in the 1970s with just Movie Movie, Hill’s Angels and The Seduction of Joe Tynan. In the 1980s Barbara Harris was in Second-Hand Hearts, Peggy Sue Got Married, Nice Girls Don’t Explode and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Her last film was Grosse Pointe Blank in 1997. The rest of her time was taken up in teaching acting classes in Scottsdale, Arizona.

 

ANTHONY HARVEY (3 June 1930-23 November 2017)

Following a single film acting appearance as a child – playing Ptolemy in Gabriel Pascal’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) – the British film director Anthony Harvey, who has died at the age of 87, began his career as an editor. From the 1950s he was with the Boulting brothers on such films as Private’s Progress, Brothers In Law, Happy Is the Bride, Carlton-Browne of the F.O. and I’m All Right Jack. He edited Anthony Asquith’s The Millionairess, then Guy Green’s The Angry Silence, co-written and co-produced by Bryan Forbes for whom he also edited The L-Shaped Room and The Whisperers. For Stanley Kubrick, Harvey edited Lolita and Dr Strangelove and he worked with Martin Ritt on The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Dutchman was Harvey’s first film as a director in 1966, an adaptation of a play by Amiri Baraka, with Shirley Knight. He directed Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter, which won three Oscars (Harvey was nominated too) and he also worked with O’Toole on the TV movie of Svengali and with Hepburn again on a TV adaptation of The Glass Menagerie, on the film Grace Quigley and for television This Can’t Be Love, Harvey’s final work in 1994. Other films directed by Harvey include They Might Be Giants with George C. Scott, The Abdication and Richard’s Things, both with Liv Ullmann, Players and the Western Eagle’s Wing. His other TV work included The Disappearance of Aimee with Faye Dunaway and Bette Davis, and the US sequences of The Patricia Neal Story, with Glenda Jackson.

 

SHINOBU HASHIMOTO (18 April 1918-19 July 2018)

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 US, first as a play by Fay and Michael Kanin and then a film by Martin Ritt in 1964, The Outrage, with Paul Newman. Although Kurosawa was credited, Hashimoto was not. He also worked with Kurosawa again on Ikiru (1952), the title of which in English is Living, although the film is about an old man who is dying, a script inspired by a Tolstoy story. Hashimoto went on to write some seventy screenplays, sometimes in conjunction with Hideo Oguni, for film and latterly for television, many of which have never been seen in the UK. Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) became recognised as a global classic, putting actor Toshiro Mifune on the international film scene. He also starred in Kurosawa-Hashimoto’s Throne of Blood (a version of Macbeth) and The Hidden Fortress (1958), which became an influence for Star Wars. The Magnificent Seven (1960) failed to credit any of the original writers of Seven Samurai, just the American author William Roberts. It became a huge hit and spawned several sequels, while the Elmer Bernstein score remains the epitome of film soundtrack composition. The 2016 remake did, however, acknowledge its antecedents.

    

RICHARD HATCH (21 May 1945-7 February 2017)

After studying piano as a child, the American actor Richard Hatch opted for the theatre, eventually moving from LA to New York. Following theatre work he arrived on television to create the role of Philip Brent in the daytime soap All My Children which he played for two years. His first feature film was Best Friends in 1975, after which it was back to TV and Hawaii Five-O, The Waltons, Cannon, and The Streets of Sa Francisco (as Inspector Dan Robbins). Eventually along came Battlestar Galactica in 1978, and the part of Captain Apollo, which then led to a TV series for a couple of years. Hatch’s other cinema films were rarely from the top rank – Living Legend: The King of Rock and Roll, Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, Prisoners of the Lost Universe, Ghetto Blaster, Leathernecks and The Hitch-Hikers. These were made in between guest shots on TV in Fantasy Island, Dynasty, Murder, She Wrote, Baywatch, etc, and another series of Battlestar Galactica in 2004 but playing a different role. Hatch continued to work on films and in TV and at the time of his death there were still many projects in the pipeline, either announced or in post-production.

 

GLENNE HEADLY (13 March 1955-8 June 2017)

Always wanting to be an actress from her earliest days, Connecticut-born Glenne Headly, who has died aged 62, graduated with acting honours from her high school. Although she studied art history and literature she nevertheless went into theatre and was associated with the famous Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago for some 25 years. She did other theatre work on and off Broadway before getting her first film, Arthur Penn’s Four Friends (1981). She also played a hooker in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, was in Peter Yates’ Eleni and appeared in Seize the Day with Robin Williams and Making Mr Right with her then husband John Malkovich. Later came Nadine, Stars and Bars and Paperhouse, before Dirty Rotten Scoundrels really put her on the map. She was Warren Beatty’s girlfriend in Dick Tracy and was eventually top-billed in Ordinary Magic, with Ryan Reynolds, but then continued in routine fare, except for Mortal Thoughts, Mr Holland’s Opus and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Television work included ER, Encore! Encore!, On Golden Pond, Anjelica Huston’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Monk. Among her last films were Don Jon, Strange Weather, The Circle and Villa Capri (due for release in December 2017). Five years after divorcing John Malkovich, Headly married cameraman Byron McCulloch, by whom she had a son, Stirling.

 

JOHN HEARD (7 March 1946-21 July 2017)

The American actor John Heard, who has died following surgery at the age of 71, had a good start at the beginning of his career. However, although he was in a huge number of films, he never became true leading man material. After appearing on the New York stage from 1974 he graduated to film and television. His first film role was in Between the Lines (1977), Joan Micklin Silver’s movie about life on an alternative newspaper in Boston. It heralded a sitcom on television but not for long. Heard then appeared in a number of Heard then appeared in a number of films, the best of which was probably Joan Micklin Silver’s Head Over Heels (aka Chilly Scenes of Winter, 1979). He played Jack Kerouac in Heart Beat, was Alex Cutter in Cutter’s Way and co-starred in Cat People. After several so-so pictures, he was cast by Martin Scorsese in After Hours as Tom the barman and he was in The Trip to Bountiful with Geraldine Page. He worked with Robert Redford on The Milagro Beanfield War, co-starred in Big and appeared in Beaches. Home Alone and its sequel were huge hits because of Macaulay Culkin, whereas the more thoughtful Awakenings was very moving and a better film. In the Line of Fire saw Heard working with Clint Eastwood; with Julia Roberts on The Pelican Brief; in Costa-Gavras’s Betrayed and with Goldie Hawn in Deceived. After more films and TV work, Heard appeared in Ed Harris’s film about [Jackson] Pollock (2000), but the good parts by then were all behind him, even though he never stopped working. He has six more films yet to be released. He was married to Lana Pritchard, Sharon Heard (two children) and very briefly to the actress Margot Kidder. He also has a son, Jack, by a former girlfriend.

 

HUGH HEFNER (9 April 1926-27 September 2017)

The American entrepreneur Hugh Marston Hefner, who has died aged 91 of natural causes, was mostly known as the publisher of Playboy magazine and the owner of a number of Playboy ‘bunny’ clubs where the female staff dressed as rabbits. He was also involved in producing TV and video documentaries of the models or ‘playmates’ featured in his publications. He released several of these every year from 1977 until 2008. However, he was also executive producer on many feature films for the cinema. In fact, he made cinema and TV films before his Playboy epics, the first being Roman Polanski’s Macbeth in 1971, in an adaptation by the director and Kenneth Tynan. He then produced a dramatised version of Desmond Morris’s book The Naked Ape, followed by Arthur Hiller’s The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder, Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack with Ben Gazzara, and The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu (1980) with Peter Sellers, the actor’s last film. Cut now through all the Playboy material until the 1990s when Hefner became involved in a series of TV documentaries about great silent film stars – Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, Theda Bara and Lon Chaney. In 2003 he produced Rita, a documentary on Rita Hayworth and then concentrated on more documentaries for the final decade of his life. As well as several ‘playmates’, Hugh Hefner had three wives, five partners and four children. He contributed to many charities in politics, publishing, animal welfare and conservation and was a perhaps surprising but fervent supporter of gay rights and same-sex marriage.

 

BERNARD HEPTON (19 October 1925-27 July 2018)

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.

    

JOHN HILLERMAN (20 December 1932-9 November 2017)

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 New York but couldn’t make a living from it, so he moved to Los Angeles. His first film was They Call Me Mr Tibbs (1970), playing the uncredited role of a reporter. Michael Winner then cast him in Lawman with Burt Lancaster, and Peter Bogdanovich put him in The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon and At Long Last Love. Other films in the 1970s included Honky, The Carey Treatment, Skyjacked, The Outside Man, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, The Naked Ape and Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and, later on, History of the World, Part I. He was also in Chinatown, The Day of the Locust, Lucky Lady and Audrey Rose, after which it was mainly television, with guest shots plus regular appearances on The Betty White Show, One Day at a Time, The Love Boat and Valerie (with Valerie Harper). But it was Magnum P.I that dominated his career, in which he appeared in over 150 episodes from 1980. Much nominated for the role, Hillerman won a Golden Globe in 1982 and a Primetime Emmy Award in 1987. His last film was A Very Brady Sequel in 1996. He retired in 1999.

 

SKIP HOMEIER (5 October 1930-25 June 2017)

Born George Vincent Homeier, US actor Skip Homeier, who has died aged 86 of spinal myelopathy, started out as a child actor on radio from the age of six. His early films saw him playing wild teenagers but he managed the change from child to adult actor quite seamlessly and, if never a big star, worked steadily for some forty years. His first film was Tomorrow, the World! (1944) in which he played a Nazi youth. Wedded to genre films, Homeier was seen in many a Western, war and crime picture. A lot were minor films or B-movies but there were some goodies, too, such as Henry King’s The Gunfighter with Gregory Peck, Lewis Milestone’s Halls of Montezuma with Richard Widmark, Sealed Cargo with Dana Andrews, Sam Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets, Douglas Sirk’s Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, Black Widow with Ginger Rogers and The Tall T, Ten Wanted Men and Comanche Station, all with Randolph Scott. Television always figured in his career, too, especially in the 1970s. Skip’s last film was Quell and Co (1982). After that Homeier retired (aged 52), refusing all interviews and festival or convention invitations. He was married twice and had two children.

 

TOBE HOOPER (29 January 1943-26 August 2017)

The American writer, producer, director and sometime actor and composer Tobe Hooper, who has died of natural causes at the age of 74, will be mainly remembered for one influential film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, his second feature from 1974. Born to parents who ran a cinema in Austin, Texas, Hooper began his career as a college professor and documentary film cameraman but graduated to features from 1969. Chain Saw was based on the real-life serial killer Ed Gein, was cheaply made, looked hideous but made a fortune and subsequently led to work for Hooper in Hollywood. However, he never ever reached the giddy heights (or depths) of Chain Saw in his other films. Often writing his own screenplays, he stayed on the same track with Death Trap, The Funhouse, Lifeforce and Invaders from Mars. Although he directed the Spielberg production Poltergeist, it was less personal than his other work. On TV he made Salem’s Lot, from the Stephen King novel, but after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, he mainly worked in television. Later films included Night Terrors, The Mangler, Toolbox Murders, Mortuary and Djinn, his last film in 2013. Tobe Hooper married twice and had two sons.

 

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 Victoria, which was outstanding as far as the production designs were concerned. Before that he designed Charles Sturridge’s TV movie Churchill’s Secret with Michael Gambon as Winston. Period designs seemed to be a speciality with Howells and among the films he designed were Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow, Princess Caraboo with Phoebe Cates, Bright Young Things, based on Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, Nanny McPhee with Emma Thompson and Colin Firth, An Ideal Husband with Cate Blanchett, Fairy Tale: A True Story, Ever After: A Cinderella Story, Miss Julie, Talk of Angels and Blackwood. Michael Howells also designed the TV series of Shackleton and The Game. Early on in his career he also worked with Peter Greenaway on The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, with Claude Miller on The Accompanist, and with John Duigan on Wide Sargasso Sea. The Michael Howells Studios also covered theatre designs, fashion and exhibitions for many of the top fashion houses.

  

TAB HUNTER (11 July 1931-8 July 2018)

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 California hoping for a career with horses, his great passion. Being a prime athlete with blond hair he was soon approached by a Hollywood agent who changed his name to Tab Hunter. By 1950 he was in The Dividing Line then Saturday Island, with Linda Darnell. Set in World War II on a desert island, it required Tab to be shirtless which built up both his female and male fan base, as he became known as ‘The Sigh Guy’. As with Rock Hudson, the studios covered up the fact that Hunter was gay, so he had to escort Hollywood starlets to social occasions. His film career blossomed but mainly in genre pictures such as Gun Belt, Treasure of Kalifa, Return to Treasure Island, Track of the Cat, Battle Cry, The Sea Chase, The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind, the last two with Natalie Wood. Television then took over for a while until What Lola Wants, the film of the musical Damn Yankees, in which he got top-billing. He played the boy-next-door in a TV version of Meet Me in St Louis (1959), opposite Jane Powell, and then appeared in That Kind of Woman with Sophia Loren, They Came to Cordura with Gary Cooper and The Pleasure of His Company with Fred Astaire. The Tab Hunter Show was a TV sitcom about a cartoonist and his romantic exploits around Malibu. It lasted for a season in 1960-61. More films and television came along, with only the occasional worthy piece such as Tony Richardson’s The Loved One, until John Waters discovered Tab for Polyester, with Divine. By then he was something of a Hollywood icon and he did Grease 2, the starry Pandemonium, and appeared in and produced Lust in the Dust with Divine again. His last feature was David Hemmings’ Dark Horse in 1992, for which Hunter provided the story and produced the film. He was also something of a singer and was signed by Warner Bros. Records. Jeffrey Schwarz made a documentary about the actor called Tab Hunter Confidential in 2015. Tab Hunter’s longtime partner was film producer Allan Glaser.

 

JOHN HURT (22 January 1940-27 January 2017)

The Derbyshire-born actor John Hurt attended art school and then went to RADA to study acting. On stage from 1962 he was a weedy-looking soul, the eternal student, which may explain his first appearances on TV in Z-Cars and on film in The Wild and the Willing (both 1962), the latter about love and life on a university campus. More stage work included John Osborne’s Inadmissable Evidence and David Halliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, a play Hurt later filmed and which led to a part in Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons. He made his biggest name as Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, Jack Gold’s 1975 TV film and a part one couldn’t see anybody else attempting. Also on TV he made a mark as Caligula in I, Claudius with Derek Jacobi. High-profile films followed – Alien, Midnight Express and The Elephant Man – again, who else would have done it? He earned Oscar nominations for the last two. Later movies included The Sailor from Gibraltar, Sinful Davey, Before Winter Comes, 10 Rillington Place (as Timothy Evans), The Pied Piper, Heaven’s Gate, 1984 (as Winston Smith), Scandal (as Stephen Ward), The Field, Love and Death on Long Island, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, plus Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, the remakes of Brighton Rock, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Jackie, and so much more up to and including TV’s Doctor Who. Hurt made some 200 film and TV appearances, and a further four films are still to be released. He also had four wives and two children. John Hurt, who died of pancreatic cancer, was knighted in 2015 for his services to drama.

  

CLIFTON JAMES (29 May 1921-15 April 2017)

Although he had one hundred credits to his name, the US actor may well be remembered best for his appearances as Sheriff Pepper in two 007 pictures, Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun in which he played a genial and bluff good old Southern boy. However, he began his acting career as a graduate of the Actors Studio and from 1954 was a regular on television. He also notched up a considerable collection of character parts in many notable films, beginning with Jack Garfein’s The Strange One in 1957 and Something Wild in 1961. He graced Blake Edwards’ Experiment in Terror (Grip of Fear in the UK) and was in David and Lisa, Invitation to a Gunfighter, The Chase, with Paul Newman in both Cool Hand Luke and WUSA, and in Will Penny, The Reivers, Kid Blue, The Iceman Cometh, The Last Detail and Juggernaut. With Gene Wilder in Silver Streak he played another sheriff, as he also did in Superman II. He was in Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and John Sayles’s Lone Star and Sunshine State. Old Soldiers was in pre-production when he died.

 

GLORIA JEAN (14 April 1926-31 August 2018)

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 Hawaii from 2007 until her death. Gloria Jean published her autobiography, Gloria Jean: A Little Bit of Heaven, in 2005.

  

ANNE JEFFREYS (26 January 1923-27 September 2017)

The American actress and singer Anne Jeffreys, who has died aged 94, began her career as a model while also training to be an opera singer, making her debut in La Bohème (1940). A live Hollywood revue led to her being cast in I Married an Angel, a musical film with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. A contract at the Republic Studios saw her in several B-westerns and she was in a couple of Dick Tracy thrillers. She co-starred with Sinatra in Step Lively, with Mitchum in Nevada, with Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger, and with Pat O’Brien in Riff-Raff. Many minor films, musical and otherwise, followed, while Jeffreys also kept her hand and voice in by appearing in theatre shows such as Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, Puccini’s Tosca, Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate and Sigmund Romberg’s My Romance. Divorced from her first husband Joseph Serena, she married Robert Sterling and they toured their cabaret act but then along came television and the series Topper, in which she played Marion the ghost. She still occasionally played in stage musicals – such as Camelot and The King and I. Anne Jeffreys made a few more films, including Panic in the City, The Southern Double Cross, Clifford and Richard III with David Carradine. With husband Sterling (who died in 2006) she had three sons, Jeffrey, Robert and Tyler.

  

JÓHANN JÓHANNSSON (19 September 1969-9 February 2018)

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 Iceland but then began to be recognised for his work on three Dennis Villeneuve films, Prisoners, Sicario and Arrival. However, his score for Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 was rejected. As well as working in the US, Jóhannsson still scored films in Iceland, Denmark and Hungary and he worked with James Marsh on both The Theory of Everything and The Mercy. He was a music and sound consultant on Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! Of his last work, Mandy, with Nicolas Cage and Andrea Riseborough, awaits a UK release, while Garth Davis’s Mary Magdalene is due to be released in the UK on 16 March. Jóhann Jóhannsson was Oscar-nominated for The Theory of Everything and Sicario.

   

SHASHI KAPOOR (18 March 1938-4 December 2017)

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 India with a touring theatre company while also appearing in films. In 1956, at the age of 18, he joined the British actor Geoffrey Kendal’s Shakespeare company and fell in love with one of Kendal’s daughters, Jennifer, whom he subsequently married and with whom he fathered three children. The other daughter, Felicity, was also part of her father’s touring troupe. James Ivory directed Kapoor in The Householder (1963), based on Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novel. The film was released internationally and then in 1965 Ivory and Jhabvala wrote Shakespeare Wallah, based on the Kendals’ touring company in which Geoffrey, Jennifer, Felicity and Kapoor played fictitious versions of themselves. Among Kapoor’s other English-speaking films were Pretty Polly (1967), from a story by Noël Coward, while Ivory directed Kapoor in Bombay Talkie (1970) with Jennifer Kendal, Heat and Dust (1983) and The Deceivers (1988). Ivory’s partner, Ismail Merchant, made In Custody with Kapoor, from the novel by Anita Desai. Other films featuring the actor include Conrad Rooks’ Siddhartha, Stephen Frears’ Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (written by Hanif Kureishi), Jinnah with Christopher Lee, and Tony Gerber’s Side Streets. Dirty British Boys was Kapoor’s last film before he retired in 1999.

 

JOHN KARLSEN (20 October 1919-5 July 2017)

The New Zealand-born actor, who has died aged 97, started his film career in The Naked Maja (1958), with Ava Gardner. He continued with other juicy titles such as Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory, Pontius Pilate, The Witch’s Curse and Toto and Peppino Divided in Berlin, but also appeared in some more high-profile Italian productions such as Fellini’s 8½ and Casanova and he voiced Amarcord in English. He was also in Cleopatra, Modesty Blaise, The Black Stallion, I Love N.Y., Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound. Karlsen was never a star player but notched up over eighty appearances on TV and in films, most of which were shot in Italy. His last films were The Sin Eater (2003) with Heath Ledger, and Pupi Avati’s The Hideout (2007), with Rita Tushingham. He died in Auckland, New Zealand.

  

MARGOT KIDDER (17 October 1948-13 May 2018)

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 Los Angeles in 1969, made her debut in Norman Jewison’s Chicago, Chicago (aka Gaily, Gaily). This was followed, in between TV series, by Waris Hussein’s Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx, a dual role in Brian De Palma’s Sisters, The Gravy Train, Black Christmas, The Great Waldo Pepper and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. In 1978, Superman really put her on the map, in which she played Lois Lane and appeared in its three sequels. Other films included The Amityville Horror, Willie & Phil, Some Kind of Hero, The Pornographer and many long-forgotten titles, as well as a lot more television. Although she worked extensively, Margot Kidder never repeated her early promise or the success of her signature appearances in the Superman franchise. She was married briefly three times, first to Thomas McGuane, who directed her in 92 in the Shade and who gave her a daughter, Maggie, to the actor John Heard (for six days) and to the French director Philippe de Broca.

   

FRED J. KOENEKAMP (11 November 1922-31 May 2017)

The American cinematographer Fred J. Koenekamp, who has died aged 94, began his film career under contract to MGM as a camera assistant on Dangerous When Wet (1953), one of Esther Williams’s musical water features, followed by Underwater! with Jane Russell, Kismet, Raintree County, then Watusi, two Vincente Minnelli films, Bells Are Ringing and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and The Hook with Kirk Douglas. Koenekamp became a Director of Photography through television shows including Mission: Impossible and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and he also worked on several of the last series’ spin-off movies. He photographed the films of many important directors, including Franklin J, Schaffner (Patton, Papillon, Yes, Giorgio, Islands in the Stream), Mark Robson (Happy Birthday, Wanda June), Carol Reed (The Last Warrior), Kirk Douglas (Posse), Sidney Poitier (Uptown Saturday Night), Ted Kotcheff (Fun With Dick and Jane), Irwin Allen (The Swarm), Franco Zeffirelli (The Champ), and Buzz Kulik (The Hunter, Steve McQueen’s last film). Most of his work in the 1990s was taken up with television movies. Fred Koenekamp was Oscar-nominated for Patton and Islands in the Stream and he won the Academy Award for The Towering Inferno. He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of Cinematographers in 2005.

 

GARY KURTZ (27 July 1940-23 September 2018)

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 Crystal, Return to Oz, Slipstream, The Thief and the Cobbler with animation by Richard Williams, and The Steal with Alfred Molina. Kurtz then became involved with television with The Tale of Jack Frost, Friends and Heroes and Resistance. His last feature film was the teen thriller Gangsta Kittens in 2016. He never won an Oscar but was nominated for Star Wars and American Graffiti. Gary Kurtz was married three times and has three children, Dylan, Melissa and Tiffany. Born in California, he died in London.

 

FRANCIS LAI (26 April 1932-7 November 2018)

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 Montmartre and wrote a hundred songs with Bernard Dimey before becoming a pianist for Édith Piaf. Meeting film director Claude Lelouch in 1985 he wrote the score for Un homme et une femme – remember shaba-daba-da, shaba daba da…?, winning Lai a Golden Globe. For Lelouch he wrote Vivre pour vivre, Un homme qui me plait, Le voyou and La bonne année. His biggest success in films was Love Story and the film’s theme song ‘Where Do I Begin?’ was a chart hit for Andy Williams. Other films Lai worked on include Mayerling, Three Into Two Won’t Go, International Velvet, three films for Michael Winner: I’ll Never Forget What’s’is Name, Hannibal Brooks and The Games, Bilitis, Passion Flower Hotel, Édith et Marcel, A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, Dark Eyes and many French films that never reached the UK. Composer of some 130 film scores, Lai completed his last film work on Lelouch’s Les plus belles années which is due for release in 2019. Francis Lai married Dagmar Puetz in 1968. They have two sons and a daughter.

    

MARTIN LANDAU (20 June 1928-15 July 2017)
The first job that the American actor Martin Landau, who has died at the age of 89, had was as a cartoonist on the New York Daily News. By 1951, however, he was determined to take up acting. His stage debut was in Detective Story in Maine, followed by the Broadway production of First Love. Out of two thousand applicants he, along with Steve McQueen, managed to get into Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio. From 1953 Landau appeared in many TV western shows as well as playing John the Baptist in Salome. In 1959 he was in three films, Pork Chop Hill, The Gazebo and North by Northwest, the last from Hitchcock and the film in which Landau made the most impression as Leonard, the ‘friend’ of the villainous James Mason character, who Landau decided should be gay. A lot more television followed until Joseph L. Mankiewicz cast him as Rufio in Cleopatra. Other films included Decision at Midnight, The Hallelujah Trail, The Greatest Story Ever Told  (as Caiaphas), Nevada Smith (with Steve McQueen) and They Call Me Mister Tibbs, among many others. By then Landau had gained popularity as Rollin Hand in the TV series Mission: Impossible (1966-69) and later another series, Space: 1999, kept him busy with his then wife Barbara Bain. Landau rarely stopped working but his better films were Francis Ford Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (Oscar-nominated), Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (Oscar-nominated) and Tim Burton’s Ed Wood for which Landau, brilliant as Bela Lugosi, won his only Academy Award. Landau was working right to the end of his life, and there are still two more features of his to come. He and Barbara Bain have two daughters, Susan and Julie.

 

CLAUDE LANZMANN (27 November 1925-5 July 2018)

The French filmmaker and journalist Claude Lanzmann, who has died aged 92, was the son of a Jewish family who had emigrated to France from Eastern Europe and who then went into hiding during World War II. Claude joined the French Resistance movement and fought with his father and brother in Auvergne. He became chief editor of Les Temps Modernes, a journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and later became a university lecturer in Switzerland. He began writing and directing epic documentary films from 1972.  Shoah (1985) was his magnum opus running over nine hours, a huge survey of the Holocaust in which he interviewed witnesses of the atrocities undergone by the survivors and also their perpetrators. Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4pm was an account of the prisoners uprising at the Nazi extermination camp of Sobibór. The Last of the Unjust was about Theresienstadt, Hitler’s so-called model ghetto, just one stop before the gas chambers. Lanzmann’s latest work, The Four Sisters, with interviews with four Holocaust survivors he had not included in Shoah, was shown on French television on the day before he died. Claude Lanzmann was married three times and has two children. He won many awards for his work including a Bafta for Shoah.

  

WALTER LASSALLY (18 December 1926-23 October 2017)

The German-born, British-Greek cinematographer Walter Lassally, who has died aged 90, came to notice during the 1960s Free Cinema movement. It was for that documentary initiative that he worked with Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, and subsequently for Woodfall Films (which grew out of their time at the Royal Court Theatre in London). From 1946 Lassally worked on a number of shorts, including Lindsay Anderson’s industrial film Three Installations, The Children Upstairs, Green and Pleasant Land, A Hundred Thousand Children and Henry, all for the NSPCC. He also photographed Anderson’s Oscar-winning short Thursday’s Children about the Royal School for the Deaf. Passing Stranger was Lassally’s first feature in 1954, followed by Gavin Lambert’s Another Sky, A Girl in Black and A Matter of Dignity. Momma Don’t Allow and We Are the Lambeth Boys were among the first of the Free Cinema films from Reisz and Richardson along with Anderson’s Every Day Except Christmas, a portrait of the old Covent Garden market. Lassally brought a new and welcome freshness to cinematography with titles including Beat Girl, A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Tom Jones. He worked with director Michael Cacoyannis many times including on Electra, The Day the Fish Came Out and Zorba the Greek, for which Lassally won an Academy Award. In a career in which he photographed over a hundred films, Lassally was involved in all sorts of productions, from Peter Hall’s Three Into Two Won’t Go, Truffaut’s Black Flowers for the Bride, James Ivory’s Savages, Autobiograhy of a Princess, Heat and Dust and The Bostonians, to The Perfect Murder, Diary of a Madman and Simon Callow’s The Ballad of the Sad Café. His last film was the Turkish production Crescent Heart in 2001. Walter Lassally was married to Nadia Lassall. He died on the island of Crete.

    

DALIAH LAVI (12 October 1940-3 May 2017)

Trained first as a dancer, the Palestine-born actress Daliah Lavi was popular as a sex symbol in European films before hitting the global market, notably in the US and UK. Her first film in 1955 was Swedish, followed by productions in Germany, France and Italy. Her first American film, Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), was the director’s sequel to his 1952 film The Bad and the Beautiful. Lavi was in Abel Gance’s Cyrano et d’Artagnon (1964) with José Ferrer and Jean-Pierre Cassel and then came Lord Jim (1965), which put her on the world map. After that she was in Ten Little Indians with Hugh O’Brian, The Silencers with Dean Martin, The Spy With a Cold Nose with Laurence Harvey, the first (spoof) version of Casino Royale, Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon, Nobody Runs Forever, Some Girls Do, and Catlow (1971), but not very much after that, just occasional TV series (including an episode of Sez Les, with Les Dawson in 1972).

Daliah Lavi

   

ROSEMARY LEACH (18 December 1935-21 October 2017)

Actress Rosemary Leach, who has died aged 81 after a short illness, worked extensively on stage and radio, both of which she preferred to television and films, although she appeared in over a hundred television programmes and a number of films as well. She studied at Rada and worked in repertory from 1955 in Amersham, Coventry, Liverpool, Birmingham and The Old Vic. Among her stage successes were plays by Hugh Leonard, Terence Rattigan, Emlyn Williams, William Douglas-Home and Shakespeare. She won a best actress Olivier award for Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road, a favourite part (along with Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls). However, television took up most of Leach’s career and she was a familiar face in many a popular TV sitcom. She was in the TV drama series The Power Game with Patrick Wymark, Zola’s Germinal, Sartre’s The Roads to Freedom, as the Mother in Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie, in Disraeli (as Queen Victoria), The Charmer, with Nigel Havers, etc. She will be especially remembered for The Jewel in the Crown, playing Aunt Fenny. Rosemary Leach’s first film was That’ll Be the Day (1973), playing David Essex’s mother, and in the same year she appeared in Ghost in the Noonday Sun with Peter Sellers. A Question of Faith was about the death of Tolstoy, while Turtle Diary had Glenda Jackson freeing the sea creatures. Rosemary Leach was delightful as Mrs Honeychurch in James Ivory’s A Room With a View and she also appeared in The Children, with Ben Kingsley, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Hawk, Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?, Breathtaking, The Baroness and the Pig, Mission London and The Great Ghost Rescue. Her last film was May I Kill U? with Kevin Bishop in 2012. Over the years she had a recurring part in The Archers on BBC Radio 4. Rosemary Leach was married to the actor Colin Starkey, who survives her.

 

SUZANNA LEIGH (26 July 1945-11 December 2017)

The British-born actress Suzanna Leigh, who has died in Florida aged 72 from liver cancer, 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 Hollywood) came between appearances in TV’s It Happened Like This, The Sentimental Agent and The Saint. Her one big break was Paradise, Hawaiian Style with Elvis Presley, whom she much admired, especially in their kissing scenes together. She was due to appear with Elvis in Easy Come, Easy Go, but Colonel Tom Parker vetoed her. She also missed being in the film of Barefoot in the Park. After that it was such shockers as The Deadly Bees, Deadlier Than the Male, The Lost Continent, Subterfuge, Docteur Caraïbes (both the film and TV series), Lust for a Vampire, The Fiend, Son of Dracula and further television series. After retiring in 1978, Leigh came back with Grace of the Father (2015), her last appearance. She had a partner, Tim Hue-Williams, until 1982, and a daughter, Natalia Leigh Denny. She published her autobiography in 2000. 

  

JERRY LEWIS (16 March 1926-20 August 2017)

The American actor Jerry Lewis, who has died aged 91 following a urinary tract infection, was born to Russian-Jewish parents, Daniel and Rachel Levitch. His father was in vaudeville, while his mother was a radio pianist, and Jerry started performing as a child with them. It was in 1945 that the comedian Lewis met the singer Dean Martin (1917-1995) in a New York club. They teamed up as an act and eventually moved to radio and then became television hosts on The Colgate Comedy Hour. This led to a contract with Paramount Pictures as supporting players in the film version of the radio show My Friend Irma (1949) which was quickly followed by My Friend Irma Goes West. Their first starring movie was At War With the Army and they went on to make many more films for Paramount including That’s My Boy, Jumping Jacks, The Caddy, Living It Up, Artists and Models and Hollywood or Bust. They then split up to make solo careers out of entertaining in Las Vegas, but at separate hotels. Lewis graduated to theatre and TV work and then returned to Paramount to make his own films, sometimes acting and directing. These included The Sad Sack, Rock-a-Bye Baby, The Geisha Boy, Visit to a Small Planet, Cinderfella and The Bellboy. All his films had elements of slapstick humour which now seems far too over the top. However, it didn’t stop the films coming, including The Ladies Man, The Errand Boy, It’s Only Money and The Nutty Professor, the last a take on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He also appeared in films by other hands, including Three Ring Circus, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Boeing Boeing and he directed One More Time, but eventually his own films (including Three on a Couch, Way… Way Out, The Big Mouth and Don’t Raise the Drawbridge, Lower the River) were not good and fared badly at the box office, while The Day the Clown Died (1972) was never even released. Martin Scorsese managed to tame Lewis for The King of Comedy (1983, a Bafta nomination) with Robert De Niro and he made several appearances in television series and movies. His Broadway debut was a production of Damn Yankees (1995) which also came to London, but only for two months or so. One of Lewis’s last films was Peter Chelsom’s Funny Bones (1995) with Lee Evans. If his films were not always worth the candle, Jerry Lewis’s tireless work for charity was exceptional. He particularly supported the Muscular Dystrophy Association, raising over two billion dollars through his annual telethons. He was married first to Patti Palmer and then SanDee Pitnick. He had seven children including an adopted son and an adopted daughter.

  

ALAN MACDONALD (23 June 1956-30 August 2017)

The British production designer Alan MacDonald, who has died aged 61, was responsible for the look of many high-profile and varied films in recent years. Early on in his career he designed record album sleeves and was part of a design collective. He worked on stage productions and, following some short films for John Maybury, his first TV job was on Maybury’s Man to Man (1992), with Tilda Swinton, for the BBC. He worked with Maybury again on Love Is the Devil, with Derek Jacobi as the painter Francis Bacon. Other films included Rogue Trader, Nora, The 51st State, Kinky Boots and then, for Maybury again, The Jacket and The Edge of Love. MacDonald also designed The Queen, Chéri, Tamara Drewe, Philomena, The Program, Florence Foster Jenkins and Victoria and Abdul, all for director Stephen Frears. He also worked on John Madden’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Sing Street for John Carney, and designed Henry V for the BBC’s The Hollow Crown. He worked for Kylie Minogue on her 2002 tour and also collaborated with Boy George, Sinead O’Connor and Neneh Cherry on their music promos. In his time Alan MacDonald was nominated for several awards from the Art Directors’ Guild and the British Independent Film Awards. At the time of his death he was working on the Mamma Mia! film sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.

 

KÁROLY MAKK (22 December 1925-30 August 2017)

Although the Hungarian screenwriter and director Károly Makk, who has died at the age of 91, was part of the new wave of Hungarian directors in the 1960s and 1970s, he had in fact been making films since 1951 but was often hampered by the thought police of the Communist government. Only a few of his nearly 50 films reached the UK, but he will be particularly remembered for Love (1971), in which a political prisoner’s wife tells her mother-in-law that her son is directing a movie in New York. The film won three awards at Cannes. Makk’s Oscar-nominated Cat’s Play (1975) was about two sisters who recall their younger days through letters. A Very Moral Night (1977) dealt with sexual politics, while Another Way (1982) was about the murder of a female journalist by her husband because of her lesbian relationship. Its Oscar nomination was withdrawn by the Hungarian authorities, although it won awards at Cannes and elsewhere. Lily in Love (1984), an adaptation of Molnár’s play The Guardsman, had Maggie Smith as a playwright and Christopher Plummer as her egotistical actor husband. Makk also made The Last Manuscript, Hungarian Requiem, and The Gambler, about Dostoyevsky, with Michael Gambon, Jodhi May and Luise Rainer, along with many other features and television productions. His last film was As You Are in 2010. Károly Makk was married three times and had a daughter, Lily.

 

JOHN MAHONEY (20 June 1940-4 February 2018)

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 US, gaining citizenship there by joining the US Army. He didn’t begin acting until he was in his forties, firstly on stage and notably for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. His film debut was in Hudson Taylor in 1981, after which he mainly appeared on television and in the occasional film. From 1987 he was in some major movies, such as Peter Yates’s Suspect and Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck (both with Cher), Polanski’s Frantic with Harrison Ford, Costa-Gavras’ Betrayed and John Sayles’s Eight Men Out. In the 1990s he was in Love Hurts, The Russia House, Barton Fink, In the Line of Fire, The Hudsucker Proxy, The American President, Primal Fear, She’s the One and The Broken Hearts Club, among many others. Frasier came along in 1993 and he played Martin until 2004. John Mahoney’s last appearance was in an episode of Foyle’s War on British television in 2015. Although he had several relationships, John Mahoney never wed because his parents’ marriage had been an unhappy one.

 

DOROTHY MALONE (30 January 1925-19 January 2018)

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 (14 November 1931-9 January 2018)

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 Aqaba and led to his working with David Lean again on Doctor Zhivago. Other high-profile films for which Marsh was art director include A Man for All Seasons, Oliver!, A Bridge Too Far, Magic, Absence of Malice, and Mel Brooks’s To Be or Not To Be and Spaceballs. He worked on other period films such as Scrooge, Mary, Queen of Scots and a TV version of Great Expectations (1974) with Michael York. Contemporary subjects included A Touch of Class with Glenda Jackson, The Mackintosh Man with Paul Newman and Juggernaut with Richard Harris. Among many other major movies Marsh designed Havana, Basic Instinct, Clear and Present Danger, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. His last film was Rush Hour 2 (2002) with Jackie Chan. He worked on seven Oscar-nominated films and won Academy Awards for Doctor Zhivago and Oliver! Terence Marsh was married to his wife Sandra from 1975 and they have three children.

   

ELSA MARTINELLI (30  January 1935-8 July 2017)

The Italian actress Elsa Martinelli, who has died aged 82, did not enjoy a particularly successful career, except as decorative eye candy on a number of international film productions. After becoming a model at the age of sixteen, her cover shot on Life magazine prompted Kirk Douglas to put her in his film The Indian Fighter (1955). She then returned to Italy, married a count and raised her daughter Cristiana. She appeared in a number of Italian films, including Donatella, which won her a best actress award at Berlin, and was cast in the title role of Guy Hamilton’s Manuela, with Trevor Howard. Apart from several other (mostly forgettable) Italian titles, she was in Mauro Bolognini’s The Big Night, Howard Hawks’ Hatari! with John Wayne, The Pigeon That Took Rome with Charlton Heston, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Anthony Asquith’s The V.I.P.s, Rampage with Robert Mitchum, Maroc 7 with Gene Barry, Vittorio De Sica’s Woman Times Seven, Madigan’s Millions with Dustin Hoffman, and Christian Marquand’s Candy. In between Italian film and TV work Martinelli became a furniture and interior designer. After her first marriage was annulled, she married the photographer and designer Willy Rizzo in 1968. He died in 2013.

 

ALEC McCOWEN (26 May 1925-6 February 2017)

British actor Alec McCowen seemed equally at home on stage, in films and on television. He claimed he wanted to be an entertainer rather than an actor, but in fact he succeeded as both. I was first aware of him as the Dauphin in Shaw’s St Joan, with Barbara Jefford at The Old Vic, circa 1960. He trained at RADA and then appeared in repertory both in the UK and overseas. On returning to London he was directed in Shakespeare by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli and Peter Brook and appeared in many stage productions, including the first production of Equus at the National. His great theatrical feat came in his own adaptation of St Mark’s Gospel, a real tour-de-force of a solo narrative. McCowen’s first film was The Cruel Sea (1953) and he worked steadily in the 1950s and ’60s on such high-profile British pictures as The Divided Heart, The Deep Blue Sea, Private’s Progress, The Long Arm, Town on Trial, Time Without Pity, The Good Companions, The One That Got Away, The Silent Enemy, A Night to Remember and The Doctor’s Dilemma. He was in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner with Tom Courtenay, in The Witches with Joan Fontaine, and The Hawaiians with Charlton Heston. He made Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) and was particularly memorable as a police inspector whose wife presented him with new but increasingly disgusting dishes for dinner. He appeared opposite Maggie Smith in Travels With My Aunt, with Glenda Jackson in Stevie, and played Q in the 007 film Never Say Never Again. More films included Personal Services, Cry Freedom and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. Later in his career McCowen worked with Martin Scorsese on The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York, his last film in 2002. Alec McCowen’s partner, the actor Geoffrey Burridge, died in 1987.

 

ALLYN ANN McLERIE (1 December 1926-21 May 2018)

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, West Side Story and On the Town which was co-written by her first husband Adolph Green whom she divorced in 1953. Her second husband was George Gaynes (of Police Academy fame) to whom she was married for 63 years until his death in 2016. They had two children, Iya and Matthew. Her first film credit was an uncredited appearance in Words and Music (1948). In 1952 she played Amy again in the film of Where’s Charley? with Ray Bolger, then was in The Desert Song and, in Calamity Jane, played Katie Brown, who pretends to be a famous actress appearing in Deadwood City. Other films included Phantom of the Rue Morgue, Battle Cry and 40 Pounds of Trouble. In 1962 she was Shirl in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They and went on to co-star in The Reivers, Monte Walsh, The Cowboys, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Cinderella Liberty and All the President’s Men. Then television mostly occupied her time, including Punky Brewster, working with her husband George Gaynes. She retired in 1994 after an uncredited cameo in Police Academy: Mission to Moscow.

  

MADGE MEREDITH (15 July 1921-16 September 2017)

Never a star, the American actress Madge Meredith, who has died aged 96, had a twenty-year career in the movies and on television. Her first films were second features, namely Take It or Leave It (1944) with Phil Silvers, then Otto Preminger’s In the Meantime, Darling, Mitchell Leisen’s Kitty, Richard Fleischer’s Child of Divorce, The Falcon’s Adventure with Tom Conway, and Trail Street (1947) with Randolph Scott. Then there was a hiatus in her career due to an event more interesting than any of her films. She was accused of complicity in the assault of her former manager and his bodyguard when they were on their way to Meredith’s home. She was tried and convicted and spent five years in jail. In 1951 a California Crime Committee found that she had been framed, the case had been badly handled in court, and inconsistent allegations by those involved had been ignored by the police. She was released from prison and resumed her career mainly in television, apart from uncredited film appearances in To Hell and Back, Tea and Sympathy, The Ten Commandments and The Guns of Fort Petticoat. Her last appearance was in the TV series of The Littlest Hobo in 1964.

   

DINA MERRILL (29 December 1923-22 May 2017)

American actress Dina Merrill was born into wealth, her father being a Wall Street financier, her mother heiress to a cereal fortune. As in life, so in movies, for Dina Merrill always played elegant women from the top shelf of society. Stunning to look at with her high cheek bones, she lifted any part off the floor and placed it on another level. Merrill originally had no desire to act but changed her mind and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, did some summer stock and eventually reached Broadway, staying in theatre for some ten years. Married to Stanley Rumbough, the Colgate-Palmolive heir, she stopped acting to bring up her family. Back to work from 1955 she entered television, including two memorable appearances on The Phil Silvers Show (Sgt Bilko). Her first film was Desk Set (1957) with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and she was in other comedies including Operation Petticoat, with Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, while also appearing on TV. More dramatic roles came her way in Butterfield 8, The Sundowners and The Young Savages. She graced The Courtship of Eddie’s Father with young Ron(ny) Howard but for the most part it was TV virtually all the way, including spoof western episodes of Batman playing Calamity Jan with her then husband Cliff Robertson as Shame. Apart from the TV shows, Dina Merrill was in The Greatest, Tom Gries’s biopic on Ali, while Robert Altman cast her in A Wedding and The Player. She was in Sidney Lumet’s Just Tell Me What You Want, Herbert Ross’s True Colors, Disney’s remake of Mighty Joe Young and Peter Hyam’s remake of the 1956 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009), her last appearance. With her third husband, actor and investment banker Ted Hartley, she bought the RKO studio, becoming allegedly the richest actress in the world but a great benefactor of charities as well. She had four children.

  

TOMAS MILIAN (3 March 1933-22 March 2017)

The Cuban-born American-Italian actor and singer trained at the Actors Studio in New York. After a short spell on Broadway he was discovered for a film career in Italy that covered all manner of action films, from spaghetti Westerns and police thrillers to violent comedies. Director Mauro Bolognini put him in The Big Night, written by Pasolini, and more Italian films followed, including Boccaccio ’70 (the Visconti segment with Romy Schneider), then Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy. Milian rarely escaped from action parts until The Last Movie in 1971 when director Dennis Hopper cast him as a priest. He was in Winter Kills with Jeff Bridges, Havana with Robert Redford, Oliver Stone’s JFK, Spielberg’s Amistad and Soderbergh’s Traffic. In 2014 he played Gramps in Fugly! with John Leguizamo, his final appearance in a career covering some 120 films.

 

JOHN MOLLO (18 March 1931-25 October 2017)

The British costume designer John Mollo has died at the age of 86. He began his career in films as an adviser on historical costumes, and worked on such pictures as Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, Douglas Hickox’s Zulu Dawn, Franklin J. Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. He came from a family of artists, his father inspiring John’s interest in military uniforms. His brother Andrew worked with Kevin Brownlow on the controversial 1964 film It Happened Here, about what Britain might have been like under Nazi rule. This involved creating authentic uniforms of the time and John’s interest developed from there. He became a prolific author of books on military uniforms and costumes, as well as designing for feature films. Among his first assignments were the first two Star Wars pictures for which he interpreted George Lucas’s vision of how the costumes should look. He also designed Ridley Scott’s Alien and Peter Hyams’s Outland, as well as Gandhi, Cry Freedom and Chaplin for Richard Attenborough. Other credits include The Lords of Discipline,Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan…, Revolution, King David, White Hunter, Black Heart, Hanna’s War and Air America. For television Mollo did designs for the Sharpe series and the Hornblower TV movies. Among his last cinema films were Stephen Herek's The Three Musketeers, Stephen Sommers' The Jungle Book and Event Horizon. John Mollo won two Academy Awards, for Star Wars (1977) and Gandhi (1982). He was married first to Ann Mollo and then to Louise Pongracz, with whom he had a son, Thomas.

 

LILIANE MONTEVECCHI (13 October 1932-29 June 2018)

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 Paris. Later she joined the Folies Bergère for nine years and then she took over in Robert Dhéry’s Broadway revue La Plume de Ma Tante in the late 1950s, but she had to wait until 1982 before being really discovered in Maury Yeston’s musical Nine based on Fellini’s film 8½ (Otto e mezzo), for which she won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. Following that success came Grand Hotel, another Maury Yeston musical based on the Vicki Baum novel and the MGM film with Garbo. Other musicals she did included Irma La Douce, Gigi, Hello, Dolly! and Liliane played the Witch in The Wizard of Oz with Mickey Rooney. She toured the world with her one-woman show, having appeared at Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. She was also in the famous 1985 concert performance of Sondheim’s Follies at Lincoln Center. Liliane was always a joy to interview with her irresistible charm and sometimes broken English. I last saw her a decade ago when she was still singing, still dancing and still lifting one leg onto the piano – not bad at 77! She attended classes at The Actors’ Studio with Marilyn Monroe, but her subsequent film career never amounted to very much, although she did get to work with some famous Hollywood names. Her first film was Femmes de Paris (1953) with Michel Simon. She was then under contract to MGM in the 1950s, appearing in secondary roles which required an element of dance, such as The Glass Slipper, with Leslie Caron and Michael Wilding, Daddy Long Legs with Caron again and Fred Astaire. She was a gypsy in Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet with Stewart Granger, danced in Viva Las Vegas! with Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse, played Juanita in The Living Idol, appeared with Jerry Lewis in The Sad Sack, with Brando in The Young Lions, with Elvis in King Creole, and with Danny Kaye in Me and the Colonel. Television then occupied her time until Jean Yanne’s film Chobizenesse in 1975. Then there was Wall Street with Michael Douglas, The Idol, a French romantic drama, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days with Matthew McConaughey. Liliane’s last film was 4 Days in France in 2016.

   

ROGER MOORE (14 October 1927-23 May 2017)

London-born actor Roger Moore first had an interest in being an artist. After art school he was apprenticed to an animation studio but a chance meeting with Brian Desmond Hurst led to the director offering to pay for his studies at Rada. At 17 Moore was an uncredited extra in Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) and many other films but the following year he joined the Royal Army Service Corps. Modelling work then came his way and he was seen on many a Paton & Baldwin’s knitting pattern. His TV debut was in Patrick Hamilton’s The Governess in 1949 and then the early 1950s saw him in US television series until he finally gained a contract with MGM for The Last Time I Saw Paris, Interrupted Melody, The King’s Thief and Diane. Further television work led to the Ivanhoe series, The Alaskans and Maverick, playing James Garner’s brother. Other films included The Sins of Rachel Cade and Gold of the Seven Saints until The Saint series came along. 

Roger Moore as The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970)

 

This gave Roger Moore global fame and another series, The Persuaders, with Tony Curtis. Bond, James Bond, sealed Moore’s celebrity with Live and Let Die and then The Man With the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and A View to a Kill. Other films interspersed during the 007 years were never as popular, although titles such as Gold, Shout at the Devil, The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves and The Cannonball Run were all successful. Moore continued in films but his main work by the 1990s was as a Goodwill Ambassador for Unicef, the work that he was most proud of and for which he won several awards. He was made CBE in 1999 and knighted in 2003. For his acting work he received a Golden Globe among several other gongs. Roger Moore had four wives including the singer Dorothy Squires and he fathered three children by Luisa Mattioli, his third wife. He died in Switzerland after a short battle with cancer.

 

CHRISTOPHER MORAHAN (9 July 1929-7 April 2017)

Noted mainly for his superior work for television, director-producer Christopher Morahan trained as an actor but became a TV director, initially on Emergency – Ward 10, Probation Officer and adaptations of John Gabriel Borkman and Arsenic and Old Lace. In his time Morahan was Head of Plays at the BBC and also directed at the RSC, the National and Chichester Festival Theatres. He will be especially remembered for producing and co-directing The Jewel in the Crown (earning him Bafta and Primetime Emmy Awards), which introduced the then relatively unknown Tim Pigott-Smith. For the cinema Morahan directed Marcello Mastroianni  in Diamonds for Breakfast, as well as All Neat in Black Stockings, Clockwise, Paper Mask and Element of Doubt. He is survived by his second wife, the actress Anna Carteret with whom he had two children, Rebecca, a theatre director, and the actress Hattie Morahan. He also had three children from his first marriage to the late Joan Murray. Morahan died on the same day as his Jewel in the Crown star Tim Pigott-Smith (q.v.). He was awarded the CBE in 2011.

 

ERIN MORAN (18 October 1960-22 April 2007)

Chiefly known for playing Joanie Cunningham on ABC TV’s Happy Days, actress Erin Moran’s first job was a TV commercial for a bank. She made some films but her career was mainly in such TV series as Daktari, My Three Sons, Family Affair, Gunsmoke, The F.B.I., The Waltons, Joanie Loves Chachi, a spin-off of Happy Days, the latter being her most successful part in over 200 episodes (from 1974 to 1984). Other TV series included The Love Boat, Diagnosis: Murder, The Bold and the Beautiful and, inevitably, Murder, She Wrote. For the cinema she was rarely in any major movies but, for the record, she appeared in How Sweet It is! with James Garner and Debbie Reynolds, Watermelon Man, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, Broken Promise and Not Another B Movie (2010), a spoof on the horror film industry, Erin’s last film. She died from cancer, aged 56.

 

JEANNE MOREAU (23 January 1928-31 July 2017)

French actress Jeanne Moreau, who has died of natural causes aged 89, was a very successful stage actress with the Comédie Française before becoming an iconic film star both in France and around the world. Along with her great acting ability, her face was her fortune throughout her long career. In films from 1949 she came to international recognition in Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954), a gangster picture with Jean Gabin. Many films later came Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold and The Lovers, both of which sealed her fate as an actress of some distinction. She was in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and then his Jules and Jim, in which she was famously fought over by Oskar Werner and Henri Serre. Roger Vadim’s Les liaisons dangereuses was an updated version of the Laclos novel with Gérard Philipe. She had a brief appearance in Godard’s Une femme est une femme and made a stunning success as an impossible gambler in Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels. Le Feu Follet and Viva Maria! (Bafta award) were two further Louis Malle films, Luis Buñuel cast her as Céléstine in The Diary of a Chambermaid, and her first husband, Jean-Louis Richard, directed her in Mata Harai, agent H21. At around the same time she began appearing in English language films such as Peter Brook’s Moderato cantabile, Losey’s Eve, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story, Carl Foreman’s The Victors, John Frankenheimer’s The Train and Anthony Asquith’s The Yellow Rolls-Royce. Mademoiselle and The Sailor from Gibraltar were both written by Moreau’s friend Marguerite Duras and directed by Tony Richardson. The Bride Wore Black was Truffaut’s tribute to Hitchcock (complete with music by Bernard Herrmann) with Moreau as a serial-killing widow. She had the title role in Great Catherine, went out West for Monte Walsh (with Lee Marvin), and to Hollywood for Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon. In a very busy career she returned to Europe for film and television work, including Bertrand Blier’s Les valseuses, Losey’s Mr Klein, Fassbinder’s Querelle, Luc Besson’s Nikita and Ever After: A Cinderella Story which was filmed in France. In all she made nearly 150 film and TV appearances, her last film being Le talent de mes amis in 2015. Moreau won film festival awards all over the world and was honoured by the BFI with a Fellowship in 1990 and by Bafta with an Academy Fellowship in 1996. She also received a French Honorary César in 2008 for sixty years of cinema. Apart from Jean-Louis Richard, with whom she had a son, Jérôme, a painter, Jeanne Moreau was also married to the Greek actor Teodoro Rubanis and to the film director William Friedkin.

 

PATRICIA MORISON (19 March 1915-20 May 2018)

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 (4 April 1940-3 July 2018)

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, Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move, Kings of the Road, The American Friend and Paris, Texas. Műller also worked with other directors including Peter Bogdanovich on Saint Jack and They All Laughed, Alex Cox on Repo Man, with Jim Jarmusch on Down By Law, Mystery Train, Ghost Dog, Coffee and Cigarettes and Dead Man, and with Lars von Trier on Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, among many others. In his fifty-year career, Robby Műller won many awards for his cinematography: in all nearly thirty nominations and fifteen wins.

 

DENIS NORDEN (6 February 1922-19 September 2018)

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.

     

BARRY NORMAN (21 August 1933-30 June 2017)

The British journalist and author Barry Norman, who has died from lung cancer at the age of 83, was best known as a television presenter of the BBC’s Film programme, which he hosted from 1972 to 1998. His opinions usually ran straight down the middle of the road, perhaps as a way of appealing to a wide BBC1 audience, while he mastered the art of pinning a film down with more description than criticism. He was engaging and not without charm, although he managed to ruffle the feathers of Robert De Niro, John Wayne and Mel Gibson, among others. His father was Leslie Norman, the film producer and director at Ealing Studios, but initially Barry avoided the cinema as a career by studying shipping management. However, he soon entered journalism at the Kensington News, and then worked on papers in South Africa. On his return he wrote for the Daily Sketch, Daily Mail, The Observer and The Guardian. He wasn’t the first presenter of the BBC Film programme (Irma Kurtz, Joan Bakewell, Frederic Raphael, Jackie Gillott and producer Iain Johnstone came before him) but he settled in well and stayed for 26 years, with time off to present the BBC’s Omnibus arts magazine, and Radio 4’s Today programme, among other radio shows. From 1998, Norman worked for Sky television (for three years) and later contributed to Radio Times. He wrote books on film and cricket and one of his autobiographies was called And Why Not?, a reference to an expression he never actually used except via impersonations by Rory Bremner. Barry Norman was honoured by BAFTA in 1981 with the Richard Dimbleby Award and was made a CBE in 1998. He was voted Best Dressed Man of 1985 and in 1987 became Pipesmoker of the Year. He also had his own brand of pickled onions. He married his wife, writer Diana Narracott, in 1957, and they had two daughters, the writer Samantha Norman and the actress Emma Norman. Diana died in 2011.

  

MICHAEL NYQVIST (8 November 1960-27 June 2017)
Most UK and USA filmgoers will know the Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist, who has died of lung cancer at the age of 56, from his performance as the journalist Mikael Blomkvist in the three adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s thrillers, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. They were also extended and adapted for the television mini-series Millennium. In TV from 1982 and in films from 1987, Nyqvist’s first love, however, was hockey, but he gave it up following an injury. He then tried ballet school but was not supple enough and, on a trip to the US, became interested in acting and studied at the the Malmö Theatre Academy. In Sweden his main break was in the first TV series of Beck (1997) and his film break in Lukas Moodysson’s Together (2000). The villain Kurt Hendricks in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol increased his international standing, followed by the films John Wick, The Girl King, The Colony, Frank & Lola, A Serious Game and I.T. His last major TV role was as H. F. Verwoerd in Madiba, a mini-series on Nelson Mandela. Three more of Michael Nyqvist’s films are awaiting release. Committed to an orphanage as a baby, from where he was adopted, Nyqvist never new his birth parents until later on in his life. He wrote about his situation in an autobiographical novel, Just After Dreaming.

 

ERMANNO OLMI (24 July 1931-5 May 2018)

The screenwriter and director Ermanno Olmi, who has died at the age of 86, was one of Italy’s great masters of the screen, a social commentator of immense power. Influenced by his country’s neo-realism movement of the 1940s, he created some of the most memorable and humane films ever made. He often cast non-professional actors and filmed in authentic locations, using long takes to produce his own kind of realism. He made many documentaries until his first major feature Il Posto (1961). Then, alongside more documentaries and television work, came The Engagement, A Man Named John, One Fine Day, Long Live the Lady!, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, The Profession of Arms and several others not always seen in the UK. His biggest success was The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) which won him the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Olmi, a true artist, received the Honorary Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2008. He made his last film, Vedete, sono uno di voi, in 2017. He was married to Loredano Detto (she was in Il Posto) and they had three children.

  

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. 

  

ANITA PALLENBERG (25 January 1944-13 June 2017)

The actress and model Anita Pallenberg, who has died aged 73, garnered most of her celebrity through her association with The Rolling Stones, as girlfriend to both Brian Jones and Keith Richards, having three children by the latter. She also worked with Mick Jagger on Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s iconic film Performance (1970). Born in Rome to German parents, she was expelled from boarding school and became involved in the art scenes in Rome and New York before becoming a model in Paris. After recovering from drug addiction, she trained as a fashion designer. Her involvement in films began in 1967 in Volker Schlöndorff’s Mord und Totschlag (Degree of Murder), in which she had top-billing. After a brief appearance in Wonderwall, she was in Barbarella, Candy and Dillinger Is Dead. Performance gave everybody concerned a certain notoriety as the film’s release was delayed because of its graphic violence and sexuality. Anita also worked on videos for Madonna, appeared in Absolutely Fabulous on TV, played ‘The Queen’ in Mister Lonely, was ‘Sin’ in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, and La Copine in Stephen Frears’s Chéri. Her last work was in two pictures by Abel Ferrara, Napoli, Napoli, Napoli and 4:44 Last Day on Earth in 2011.

 

MICHAEL PARKS (24 April 1940-May 2017)

The American actor and sometime singer Michael Parks made his professional debut on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series in 1958, which was followed by more TV work, most notably playing Tom in The Real McCoys in 1961. His 1965 film debut was in Bus Riley’s Back in Town with Ann-Margret. He was then hailed as the new James Dean and the film led to his playing Adam in John Huston’s The Bible: In the Beginning. After Wild Seed, The Idol, The Happening and Stranger on the Run, interspersed with more television, he was cast in the title role of a journalist looking for the meaning of life in 26 episodes of Then Came Bronson (1969-70). Later TV series included continuing roles in The Colbys and Twin Peaks. For over fifty years Parks appeared in nigh on 150 roles on film and TV but without really becoming a major leading man. Among the films he made were Between Friends, The Last Hard Men, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (as Robert Kennedy), Breakthrough, North Sea Hijack, The Return of Josey Wales (which Parks also directed), Storyville and Death Wish V, among many other (more forgettable) titles. However, Parks eventually became something of an iconic figure with directors such as Robert Rodriguez in his From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and later Grindhouse (2007), a double-bill of Planet Terror and Death Proof. Similarly, Quentin Tarantino cast him in both Kill Bills (2003/4) and Django Unchained. Kevin Smith, who thought Parks was “the most incredible thespian… the best actor I’ve ever known”, put him in Red State and Tusk. There were also The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Argo. Several films with Parks are still awaiting release or have been announced. Michael Parks had five wives and two children. His son, James Parks, is also an actor and has appeared in many of his father’s films.

 

TIM PIGOTT-SMITH (13 May 1946-7 April 2017)

When Tim Pigott-Smith’s family moved to Stratford-upon-Avon soon after the Royal Shakespeare Company was founded in 1961, young Tim’s future was clearly set in stone by his discovery of Shakespeare. He studied drama at Bristol University, continued his training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and subsequently joined the Bristol Old Vic company from 1969. Essentially a stage actor, he worked in London and New York, but mainly appeared in repertory and regional theatres and with Toby Robertson’s Prospect Theatre Company, eventually forming his own touring theatre company, Compass, for which he was artistic director from 1989 to 1992. His theatre and TV performances covered plays by, among many others, Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee and George Bernard Shaw. His last London stage appearance was in Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, which he took to Broadway and for which he gained Olivier and Tony Award nominations. At the time of his death (from a suspected heart attack) he was about to tour in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, with his actress wife Pamela Miles.

Tim Pigott-Smith was best-known for his television appearance as Ronald Merrick in The Jewel in the Crown, a dramatisation of Paul Scott’s novel on India under the British, for which the actor won a Bafta in 1984. Other notable television appearances include Dr Who, The Glittering Prizes, The Lost Boys, North and South, Bloody Sunday, Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, I Remember Nelson, The Chief, The Vice, Downton Abbey and latterly Decline and Fall. His first film appearance was in Aces High with Malcolm McDowell in 1976 and he subsequently appeared in Joseph Andrews, Sweet William, Richard’s Things, Clash of the Titans, Escape to Victory, The Remains of the Day, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Quantum of Solace, Gangs of New York, RED 2 and the 2017 remake of Whisky Galore!. Four more of his films are due for release in 2017, including a television adaptation of King Charles III.

Tim Pigott-Smith was a patron of Friendship Works, a charity operating in the London boroughs of Camden and Islington, offering mentoring support for children and young people who have problems growing up in their home and social environment. He also wrote books on India and children’s stories. He was awarded an OBE in the New Year’s Honours List in 2017. His son Tom is a concert violinist.

  

MARTIN RANSOHOFF (7 July 1927-13 December 2017)

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.

 

BURT REYNOLDS (11 February 1936-6 September 2018)

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 Hollywood and on television, and also produced and directed for TV and the movies. 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 Florida he dropped out and went to New York to become an actor. After being seen in a production of Mr Roberts, he gained TV work from 1958 until his film debut in Paul Wendkos’ Angel Baby (1961) with George Hamilton and Salome Jens. More TV series, Westerns and war films followed and they gradually improved in quality with the likes of 100 Rifles, Sam Whiskey, Impasse and Shark. In the early 1970s, Reynolds had his own TV series, Dan August, playing the title role of a police lieutenant. After another detective in Fuzz came John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), a film turned down by Brando, Henry Fonda and James Stewart as being too risky. It was the making of Reynolds’ career and was followed by Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Shamus, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, White Lightning, The Mean Machine, At Long Last Love, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, Lucky Lady, Hustle and many more. Playing mainly macho action heroes, his signature casting was for films such as Smokey and the Bandit that gave rise to two sequels. Then there was The Cannonball Run I and II, Sharky’s Machine, The Man Who Loved Women, City Heat and Heat, after which he seemed to have reached his peak, but not before becoming the top money-spinning movie actor for five consecutive years. He both appeared in and directed Gator, The End, Sharky’s Machine, Stick and The Last Producer, plus several television shows. Reynolds worked hard in the 1990s and had some popular TV series (B.L. Stryker, Evening Shade) but the films were not great until Boogie Nights in 1997, which he disliked making but which gave him an Oscar nomination. Never unemployed for sixty years, he continued acting and doing voice-over work and still has a film, Defining Moments, that’s due to be released at Christmas 2018. In his time Reynolds turned down James Bond, the Bruce Willis role in Die Hard, Han Solo in Star Wars, Jack Nicholson’s part in Terms of Endearment, and somehow failed to get Rosemary’s Baby, Tucker, Magnolia, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Soapdish and Zardoz, the last due to illness, and he regretted posing nearly nude for Cosmopolitan magazine after Deliverance. He married the British actresses Judy Carne and Loni Anderson and divorced both. With Anderson he adopted a son, Quinton. Between wives he had a relationship with the singer Dinah Shore and was also the partner and frequent co-star of Sally Field from 1977 to 1982.

 

CLAUDE RICH (8 February 1929-20 July 2017)

The French actor and writer Claude Rich, who has died at the age of 88, was a very successful performer in his native country. Rarely seen in international movies, he acted in over a hundred French films and television productions. His first film was René Clair’s Summer Manoeuvres (1955) with Michèle Morgan and Gérard Philipe. He worked again with Clair on Tout l’or du monde and Love and the Frenchwoman, with Jean Renoir in The Vanishing Corporal, Claude Chabrol on The Seven Deadly Sins, Édouard Molinaro on The Gentle Art of Seduction (and several other titles), with René Clément on Is Paris Burning?, Truffaut on The Bride Wore Black, Resnais on Stavisky, Private Fears in Public Places and Je t’aime, je t’aime, among many other films. He won a César (the French Oscar) for playing Talleyrand in Le souper, and he was Panoramix in Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra. His last film was Ladygrey in 2015. Claude Rich and his wife Catherine Renaudin had two daughters, actress Delphine and painter Nathalie, and an adopted son, Remy.

  

DON RICKLES (8 May 1926-6 April 2017)

The American stand-up comedian Don Rickles joined the US Navy after high school and served in World War II. After discharge he studied acting but took up comedy instead, becoming known as an ‘insult comic’ who would send up his audience, earning the name The Merchant of Venom. He made his film debut in Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster, followed by The Rabbit Trap, The Rat Race, The Man With X-Ray Eyes, Beach Party and its sequels, Enter Laughing, The Money Jungle, Kelly’s Heroes, Innocent Blood, Casino, Dirty Work, Quest for Camelot and Toy Story and its sequels (voicing Mr Potato Head) plus a few others along the way. Most of his career outside of stand-up in Las Vegas was spent on TV in The Thin Man, The Twilight Zone, Wagon Train, The Addams Family, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Burke’s Law, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters and various chat shows. He was married to Barbara Sklar and they had two children.

 

JOE ROBINSON (31 May 1927-3 July 2017)

British actor Joe Robinson, who has died aged 90, was from a wrestling family, both his father and grandfather having been wrestlers. Joe won the European Heavyweight Wrestling Championship in 1952 but, following an injury, he pursued his other main interest, that of acting. He studied at RADA and then secured small parts in films. His first film of any distinction was a gymnastics documentary called Fit As a Fiddle (1952) and in the same year he appeared on stage. Usually cast in films as a heavy or as a boxer or wrestler, Robinson’s first and most famous feature part was in Carol Reed’s A Kid for Two Farthings, in which he wrestled Primo Carnera. He went on to make action films and muscle-men epics, as well as appearing on TV with Tony Hancock and in Emergency – Ward 10, plus the Norman Wisdom film The Bulldog Breed, and Carry On, Regardless, Doctor in Distress and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. After that it was mainly TV until Diamonds Are Forever, his last film in 1971. However, Joe and his brother Doug became stunt arrangers on the Bond movies and elsewhere, while Joe, a judo and karate champion, latterly ran a martial arts centre in Brighton.

 

JEAN ROCHEFORT (29 April 1930-9 October 2017)

The French character actor Jean Rochefort, who has died aged 87, began his career in cabaret and theatre. Although he became very busy in films and on television, he continued also to act and direct on stage until 1970. He became famous for period action films in France but then made his name as a comic actor. Rochefort’s stunningly gaunt appearance made him constantly recognisable throughout his career. His first cinema feature was in 1956 and he continued in films and TV for the next sixty years, often in productions that were not always seen outside of France. Typical titles of some of his early films were Swords of Blood, The Iron Mask, Outpost in Indo-China, The Corrupt and Trouble Among Widows. From 1964 he was in the popular Angélique period film series about a teenage beauty who becomes involved in politics and with royalty. In Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), William Klein’s satire on the 1960s, Rochefort played a character called Grégoire Pecque. Two Weeks in September starred Brigitte Bardot. Other films that did reach the UK include The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe (and its sequel) for Yves Robert (a director Rochefort worked with often), Robert’s Pardon Mon Affaire (and its sequel), Bertrand Tavernier’s The Watchmaker of St Paul and Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty. Rochefort was a delight in Patrice Leconte’s The Hairdresser’s Husband and in Ridicule and also in the Pagnol story directed by Yves Robert, Le chateau de ma mere. He played a contract killer in Wild Target (which was re-made in English, with Bill Nighy), Robert Altman cast him as a cop in Prêt-à-Porter, Guillaume Canet used him in Tell No One, and he was hilarious as the harassed Maitre D in Mr Bean’s Holiday. Terry Gilliam wanted him to play Don Quixote but the 2002 film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, never go off the ground. However, he did appear in Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about the failed project. Jean Rochefort was married twice, firstly to Alexandra Moscwa (three children) and then Françoise Vidal (two children) and he had a son with actress Nicole Garcia.

  

GEORGE A. ROMERO (4 February 1940-16 July 2017)

Film director, writer, producer, editor and actor George A. Romero, who has died from lung cancer at the age of 77, became renowned chiefly for reviving the genre of the zombie movie. His first feature film was Night of the Living Dead in 1968, although there had been zombie films since the 1930s, Victor Halpern’s White Zombie being one of the first (in 1932), while Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1942) is considered to be one of the finest ever. Although he wanted to make other films, Romero became stuck in the zombie rut, mainly because his films were very good and very successful. After making some shorts in the 1960s, Romero and his associates clubbed together and made Night of the Living Dead for a mere $100,000, the result being that it made far more than it cost and allowed him to continue in  the horror genre. After The Crazies, Martin, Season of the Witch and Knightriders (with Ed Harris), he returned to zombies with Dawn of the Dead, Creepshow (from a story by Stephen King), Survival of the Dead and Land of the Dead. His last films were Road of the Dead and Day of the Dead which are in post-production. Romero made many other films and television shows and often acted in his films as well as writing, producing and editing some of them. His work has had an obvious effect on the current run of zombie films, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) being a prime example of Romero’s abiding influence on the filmmakers of today.

       

PETER SALLIS (1 February 1921-2 June 2017)
Although the British actor Peter Sallis’s first job was, like his father, in banking, his call-up into the RAF during World War II actually led to his becoming an actor. Working at RAF Cranfield saw him taking part in amateur dramatics and that was it. He studied at RADA, then appeared in rep and in 1946 made his London stage debut. Much of his early career was spent in theatre, although his TV work began with playing Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in 1947. His first film appearance was in Stranger from Venus (1954) with Patricia Neal, followed by roles in The Doctor’s Dilemma, The Scapegoat, Anastasia, Doctor in Love, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, No Love for Johnnie, The Curse of the Werewolf, The V.I.P.s, The Mouse on the Moon, Charlie Bubbles, The Reckoning, Scream and Scream Again, Taste the Blood of Dracula and many more. For Sallis the films were breaks between TV series such as Danger Man, The Avengers, Maigret, Z Cars, Doctor Who, Budgie, Callan, The Pallisers, and, of course, Last of the Summer Wine, in which Sallis played Cleggy in every one of the 295 episodes of the BBC sitcom, from 1973 to 2010. On stage he worked with Orson Welles and was in Hal Prince’s 1963 production of the musical She Loves Me (later filmed for TV), and also Baker Street, a musical on Sherlock Holmes. He was in John Osborne’s Inadmissable Evidence and the original London production of Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret, with Judi Dench. Apart from Last of the Summer Wine Peter Sallis will also be remembered as the voice of Wallace in Nick Park’s Aardmon Animation film A Grand Day Out and later The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, both of which won Academy Awards and Baftas, and also The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, another Oscar-winner. Sallis was married to Elaine Usher and they had a son, Crispian, a film set-designer. However, after many separations they divorced in 1965. Sallis was awarded the OBE in 2007.

  

SAM SHEPARD (5 November 1943-27 July 2017)

The American playwright, actor, essayist and director Sam Shepard, who has died at the age of 73 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, originally trained to be a vet. However, from 1962, Shepard became involved in theatre and pursued a very successful career acting on stage and in films. He was prolific in all his fields of endeavour, writing over forty plays including The Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, True West, Fool for Love, Licking a Dead Horse and Buried Child, the last winning him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He also wrote short stories, essays and memoirs, directed and acted in plays and films and was nominated for an Oscar for his role as pilot Chuck Yeager in Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983). After acting and writing for the stage, he made his screen debut in Brand X (1970) and in the same year contributed to the screenplay of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point. He continued to act in films, including Days of Heaven, Frances and Crimes of the Heart (both with Jessica Lange, who became his partner), Fool for Love, (from his own script), Steel Magnolias, The Pelican Brief, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mud and August: Osage County, among many other titles. From 1995 until 2017 he also wrote and appeared in television films. Among the cinema films he wrote are Paris, Texas, Fool for Love, Far North and Silent Tongue, the last two of which he also directed. His first wife was actress O-Lan Jones, with whom Shepard had a son, Jesse, and he had two children, Hannah and Samuel, with Jessica Lange. They separated in 2009 after 27 years together.

 

DAVID SHERWIN (24 February 1942-8 January 2018)

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 Britannia Hospital saw him in a satire on the NHS. Sherwin tried writing other films but they came to nothing, including a version of the Camille story for Zeffirelli and Robin Hood for Jon Voight. The film of his own memoir, Going Mad in Hollywood, never got made, although he did rewrite some of Penelope Gilliatt’s screenplay for John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (uncredited, of course). He appeared as himself in Lindsay Anderson’s biographical documentary Is That All There Is? (1992) and in a TV series Cast and Crew (2002) in which filmmakers revisited former locations. His last screenplay was for Wet Gold (1984), a TV movie with Brooke Shields and Burgess Meredith. David Sherwin was married twice and had a son and a daughter.

 

NEIL SIMON (4 July 1927-26 August 2018)

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 New York. He was married five times, to Joan Baim, Marsha Mason, Diane Lander (twice) and Elaine Joyce, and had three children. The Alvin Theatre on Broadway was renamed the Neil Simon Theatre in his honour.

  

ALAN SIMPSON (27 November 1929-8 February 2017)

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.

  

ROGER SMITH (18 December 1932-4 June 2017)

The American actor Roger Smith, most famous for appearing on the 77 Sunset Strip TV series from 1958, got his big break through meeting James Cagney while in the US Naval Reserve in Hawaii. Cagney suggested he try the movies and, following some TV appearances, Smith gained a contract with Columbia Pictures in 1957, appearing in Teenage Delinquents, Operation Mad Ball and Crash Landing. Cagney invited him to appear in Man of a Thousand Faces, a biopic of Lon Chaney, and then Never Steal Anything Small. He also played the older Patrick Dennis in Auntie Mame with Rosalind Russell. But television called again and Smith landed the part of private detective Jeff Spencer in 77 Sunset Strip, a part he had already played in Hawaiian Eye and Surfside 6. He was in the series until 1963 when he became ill with a blood clot on his brain. Forced to give up acting, he formed a production company with his manager Allan Carr, while also returning to television and the theatre. However, after the TV series of Mr Roberts and a couple of movies in 1968, he contracted a muscle and nerve disorder and retired from acting altogether. Having divorced his first wife, actress Victoria Shaw with whom he had three children, Smith married actress-singer Ann-Margret in 1967. Becoming her manager he produced her Las Vegas shows and TV specials and helped  her recover from a near fatal accident. He also wrote the films C.C & Company (for Ann-Margret) and They Don’t Need Pajamas at Rosie’s. Smith’s health subsequently recovered and he and Ann-Margret stayed married for fifty years until his death. 

  

HARRY DEAN STANTON (14 July 1926-15 September 2017)

The American actor, musician and singer (he had a mariachi band) Harry Dean Stanton, who has died of natural causes at the age of 91, was kept busy in films and on television for well over sixty years, making over 300 appearances. He had a weirdly rugged look about him so was probably born to play odd character roles and, in the process upstaged many a star performance. On television from 1954 his first credited role was in the B-western Mark of the Apache (1957), which was followed by more TV work, then Michael Curtiz’s The Proud Rebel, with Alan Ladd, Hero’s Island with James Mason, and an uncredited role in How the West Was Won. In 1967 he was again uncredited for In the Heat of the Night, but then came Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman. More films followed as well as TV work and Stanton then made more of a mark in such films as Kelly’s Heroes, Two-Lane Blacktop, Cisco Pike, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Dillinger, The Godfather Part II, Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Missouri Breaks and Wise Blood among others. He was in Alien, The Rose, Private Benjamin, Escape from New York, One From the Heart, Christine and, more famously, Repo Man and Paris, Texas. After playing Molly Ringwald’s father in Pretty in Pink he did Stars and Bars, Mr North, The Last Temptation of Christ (as St Paul), Twister, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and continued to work on such films as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Straight Story, The Green Mile, The Big Bounce, Avengers Assemble etc. He made four films in 2017 including John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky, in which he plays the central role of a 90-year-old atheist on a journey of self-exploration, and the new TV series of Twin Peaks. His last film, Frank and Ava, about Sinatra and Gardner, is in post production.

 

DAVID OGDEN STIERS (31 October 1942-3 March 2018)

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 Oregon orchestra. His first film role was as the voice of an announcer in George Lucas’s THX 1138 in 1971. Voice-over work was to follow him for much of his career: his voice was used on many Disney cartoons, including Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as well as on video games. TV work included Kojak, Charlie’s Angels, Rhoda, Perry Mason, Matlock, and Murder, She Wrote, as well as M*A*S*H from 1977 to 1983, plus umpteen TV movies. For the cinema he was cast by Woody Allen in Another Woman, Shadows and Fog, Mighty Aphrodite, Everyone Says I Love You and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Other films he graced included Oh, God!, The Cheap Detective, Magic, Harry’s War, The Man With One Red Shoe, The Accidental Tourist, Doc Hollywood etc. His last work (in 2017) was in the film Neil Stryker and the Tyrant of Time and the TV movie The Joneses Unplugged. He fathered a son in the 1960s but came out as gay in 2009.

 

BARBARA STONE (13 December 1934-17 March 2018)

London filmgoers may only know of the American producer-director Barbara Stone, who has died aged 83, from the film distribution company Cinegate that she ran with her husband David until 1986. They distributed and screened independent films at their Gate cinemas in Notting Hill, Brunswick Square and Camden. However, as a director, Barbara made Compañeras and Compañeros (1970) and other films with the Mekas brothers, Adolfas and Jonas, who she knew through their New York Film Culture magazine. She mostly produced documentaries and short films, but also worked on features including The Doctor and the Devils for director Freddie Frances, The Steal for John Hay, Unrelated for Joanna Hogg and That’s For Me for Claudia Solti. With David, who died in 2011, Barbara had four children.

    

DAVID STOREY (13 July 1933-27 March 2017)

Although chiefly a novelist and playwright, David Storey often adapted his own books and plays for both the big and small screen. Yorkshire-born, he trained as an artist at the Slade School in London during the week but returned to Leeds at weekends to play professional rugby. His first novel, This Sporting Life, published in 1960 and based on his own experience, was subsequently filmed by Lindsay Anderson with Richard Harris. Some of his Royal Court plays directed by Anderson, Home, Early Days, In Celebration, The Contractor were all adapted for television, while In Celebration was also filmed by Anderson for the American Film Theatre (screened on TV in the US and released in cinemas in the UK). He was married to Barbara Hamilton (who died in 2015), with whom he had two sons and two daughters. He continued writing mainly novels and plays, and exhibited a collection of his drawings in 2016.

 

HARRY STRADLING JR (7 January 1925-17 October 2017)

New York-born cinematographer Harry Stradling Jr, who has died aged 92, was part of a film cameraman dynasty. Both his father, Harry Stradling Sr (1901-1970), and his great-uncle Walter Stradling, Mary Pickford’s cameraman (1875-1918), were cinematographers, and his two sons, Bob and John Stradling, are also cameramen. Harry Jr started out as an assistant on Gaslight (1944) and subsequently worked on Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, The Kissing Bandit, Intruder in the Dust, Watch the Birdie, Young Bess, The Student Prince and Jeanne Eagels etc. He also worked with his father on Guys and Dolls, The Pajama Game, The Miracle, A Summer Place, Auntie Mame and Gypsy. Stradling Jr first became Director of Photography on Richard Quine’s Synanon in 1965. Then there was Burt Kennedy’s 1967 western with Henry Fonda, Welcome to Hard Times, after which he shot 86 episodes of Gunsmoke and 21 of Cimarron Strip before returning to movies with With Six You Get Egg Roll, Doris Day’s last film. There were more Burt Kennedy westerns: Support Your Local Sheriff, Support Your Local Gunfighter, Dirty Dingus Magee, Young Billy Young and The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, plus Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man, Something Big with Dean Martin, and McQ and Rooster Cogburn, both with John Wayne. Some of his later films included Battle of Midway, The Big Bus, The Greatest, Convoy, Buddy Buddy and, for Blake Edwards, S.O.B., Micki + Maude, A Fine Mess and Blind Date. Caddyshack II (1988) was his last film. Harry Stradling Jr was Oscar-nominated for 1776 and The Way We Were (whereas his father won Academy Awards for The Picture of Dorian Gray and My Fair Lady).

 

JOHN STRIDE (11 July 1936-20 April 2018)

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 Alliance, Love Among the Artists, Diamonds, The Old Devils and Growing Rich. Never a star cinema actor, he entered films in 1960, uncredited in Sink the Bismarck!, then did Bitter Harvest, with Janet Munro. Later he played Ross in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, a sergeant in Something to Hide, Hughes in Juggernaut, an inspector in Brannigan with John Wayne, the psychiatrist in The Omen, and a major in A Bridge Too Far. He was also in Oh Heavenly Dog with Chevy Chase and Hanna’s War with Ellen Burstyn. He was married to Virginia Thomas and April Wilding and fathered three children.

 

DUDLEY SUTTON (6 April 1933-15 September 2018)

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 (20 September 1929-15 April 2018)

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 Hollywood), Night Sun and Fiorile. One of their last films together, Wondrous Boccaccio (2015), dealt with young people trying to save themselves from the plague in the 14th century.

Vittorio Taviani

 

RONNIE TAYLOR (27 October 1924-3 August 2018)

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 Battle of the Sexes, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Innocents, The Wrong Box and The Whisperers. In 1969 he worked for Attenborough on Oh! What a Lovely War and then on Young Winston. He was also director of photography on Attenborough’s Gandhi (for which he won an Oscar), A Chorus Line and Cry Freedom. Taylor also worked with Ken Russell on Tommy, Valentino, Savage Messiah and The Devils. With Kubrick he photographed Barry Lyndon and for Argento he was DP on Opera, The Phantom of the Opera and Sleepless, Taylor’s last picture in 2001. Ronnie Taylor worked on countless other films including the first Star Wars in 1977, did a few movies for television and five episodes of The Avengers in 1965. He was married to Mary Devetta and they have two children. He retired to Spain and died on the island of Ibiza.

 

VERNE TROYER (1 January 1969-21 April 2008)

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.

 

CLINT WALKER (30 May 1927-21 May 2018)

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 Las Vegas. There he met many Hollywood personnel and, being six foot six inches tall, found an effortless entrée into the movies. He was in films from 1954 and then landed the role of Cheyenne Bodie in over a hundred television episodes of Cheyenne from 1955 to 1962. He subsequently appeared in other TV series such as 77 Sunset Strip, The Lucy Show, The Love Boat, etc., while also making films such as Yellowstone Kelly, Send Me No Flowers (with Doris Day), None But the Brave (starring and directed by Frank Sinatra), The Night of the Grizzly, The Dirty Dozen, Sam Whiskey, The Great Bank Robbery, Pancho Villa, etc. His last film work was a voice-over on Small Soldiers in 1998. Clint Walker married three times and has a daughter, Valerie.

     

DEBORAH WATLING (2 January 1948-21 July 2017)

The British actress Deborah Watling, who has died from lung cancer at the age of 69, was the daughter of actors Jack Watling and Patricia Hicks. She made her debut at age 11 in the television series William Tell and was then in The Invisible Man and A Life of Bliss. She played the title role in the BBC’s Alice, adapted from Lewis Carroll by Dennis Potter. Much of her career was spent in television, including the part of Victoria, assistant to Patrick Troughton’s Doctor Who, as well as the BBC’s 1960s’ soap The Newcomers. Deborah Watling made a few films including That’ll Be the Day with David Essex and Take Me High with Cliff Richard. Her last appearance was in 2013 in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, a 50th anniversary special tribute to the longevity of the Time Lord. She was first married to Nick Field and then Steve Turner.

 

MORAY WATSON (25 June 1928-2 May 2017)

Sometimes cast as a military man in films and television, actor Moray Watson was a captain in the army before studying drama at the Webber Douglas Academy. He appeared in rep at Nottingham, eventually reaching London in Small Hotel and The Grass Is Greener by Hugh and Margaret Williams. He also appeared in Stanley Donen’s 1960 film version with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Mainly wedded to the theatre and television, Watson did make the occasional film from Find the Lady in 1956, through The Valiant with John Mills, Operation Crossbow with Sophia Loren and John Mills, Every Home Should Have One with Marty Feldman and The Sea Wolves with Gregory Peck. Never out of work, Watson appeared in dozens of TV films and series including Compact, The Avengers, Z Cars, Paul Temple, Doctor Who, Minder, Rumpole of the Bailey, and perhaps his most memorable role, that of the Brigadier in The Darling Buds of May. He retired in 2014.

 

Moray Watson 

 

MICHAEL WEARING (12 March 1939-5 May 2017)

Michael Wearing was chiefly known as a BBC Television producer responsible for some of the most iconic drama series of the 1980s and ’90s. Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) was the sequel to the original 1980 Play for Today, The Black Stuff. The series won a Bafta award, as did Wearing’s production of Edge of Darkness (1985), with Bob Peck, which he later remade as a feature film. From 1980 he also produced The History Man, Blind Justice, Ashenden, Common as Muck, Martin Chuzzlewit, Seaforth, Pride and Prejudice, Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, Our Friends in the North, Holding On, Our Mutual Friend, Gormenghast and many other TV movies, series and serials. For the cinema he started with Bellman and True (1987, with Bernard Hill from Blackstuff), The Advocate (1993, with Colin Firth), Human Traffic (1999), and from 2000 When the Sky Falls, South West 9, Mystics, Red Mercury and, finally, Edge of Darkness with Mel Gibson. In 1997 he won the Alan Clarke Bafta award for Outstanding Achievement in Television. Michael Wearing had two children, the late Catherine Wearing, a former journalist for What’s On In London, who also became a television producer, and Benjamin Wearing, a film and television cameraman, who survives him.

 

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 (18 October 1948-7 September 2018)

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 London’s Palace Theatre, where she appeared for three years. Following a period at stage school she toured in more shows until her big break in the musical On the Level, in which the song ‘Beep Beep’ was written for her. Later she played Mary Pickford in The Biograph Girl musical and was in Little Me, Dames at Sea and They’re Playing Our Song. Even with leading roles in stage shows, Sheila White never really became a star. However, she worked extensively on television in such series as Z Cars, General Hospital, Poldark (1975), I, Claudius, The Bill, Minder, Casualty and EastEnders. For the cinema her first film (in 1966) was The Ghost Goes Gear with the Spencer Davis Group, followed by Mrs Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter, with Herman’s Hermits, and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush with Barry Evans. Her best film appearances include Bet in Oliver!, Villain with Richard Burton, Nelly Kaplan’s Papa, the Little Boats, Alfie Darling with Alan Price, Silver Dream Racer with David Essex, and Disney’s The Spaceman and King Arthur. She played Rosie Noggett in four Confessions of… films – a Window Cleaner, a Pop Performer, a Driving Instructor, and … from a Holiday Camp. Sheila White was married to theatre producer Richard M. Mills and they have two sons.

 

HUGH WHITEMORE (16 June 1936-17 July 2018)

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.

   

BENJAMIN WHITROW (17 February 1937-28 September 2017)

The Oxford-born actor Benjamin Whitrow, who has died aged 80, was a great man of the theatre who also had a flourishing career on television and in films. Never the big star, he nevertheless graced any production with a passionate affection playing roles that had a certain authority or oddity about them. He had the great ability of turning caricatures into real characters. Beginning in the theatre in the late 1950s, Whitrow eventually joined the companies of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre at The Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Chichester Festival Theatre, appearing not only in many classic plays, but also in late 20th-century plays by the likes of Alan Bennett, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton, Simon Gray, Peter Nichols and David Hare, and he was even in Hecht & MacArthur’s The Front Page and Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. Whitrow made a great impression on television in The Merchant of Venice, Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger, Alan Bennett’s Afternoon Off, Harry’s Game, The New Statesman, and as Thomas Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons, but was particularly memorable as Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1995). Whitrow’s entry into the cinema was an uncredited role in The Small World of Sammy Lee in 1963. Later on he was in Quadrophenia, Brimstone and Treacle and Clockwise, memorably playing John Cleese’s headmaster, then Personal Services, Hawks with Timothy Dalton, On the Black Hill, from the Bruce Chatwin novel, Louis Malle’s Damage, Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin, Michael Hoffman’s Restoration, Charles Sturridge’s Fairy Tale: A True Story, and he was the voice of Fowler in Chicken Run. Among his last work on TV were New Tricks, Wolf Hall and The Musketeers. Benjamin Whitrow was married to Catherine Cook with whom he had two children, Hannah and Thomas. He also fathered a son, Angus, with the actress Celia Imrie.

 

FRED WEINTRAUB (27 April 1928-5 March 2017)

Hollywood writer and producer Fred Weintraub made a lot of feature films for both the cinema and television and many documentaries, too. His first film in 1972, Rage, about a military gas leak, was directed by George C. Scott, who also starred. Weintraub’s first success, the following year, was Enter the Dragon, which starred Bruce Lee. He followed this with more martial arts, action and exploitation movies such as Black Belt Jones and Hot Potato with Jim Kelly, Truck Turner with Isaac Hayes, Golden Needles and The Pack with Joe Don Baker, and The Ultimate Warrior with Yul Brynner. In Britain he made Trial by Combat with John Mills, and also produced Steve McQueen’s penultimate film, Tom Horn. Then it was back to martial arts with Jackie Chan in Battle Creek Brawl and Joe Lewis in Force: Five and then High Road to China with Tom Selleck. Weintraub co-wrote The Women’s Club with his wife Sandra, who also directed the film, which was about a writer turned rent boy. There was Trouble Bound with Michael Madsen, Patricia Arquette and Billy Bob Thornton and many other action films up to 2003. Weintraub’s last production was Dream Warrior, a futuristic sci-fi thriller.

 

ADAM WEST (19 September 1928-9 June 2017)

Although he clocked up nearly 200 credits on film and television, actor Adam West was never a big star or even a leading man, except for Batman, the 1966 TV series and its spin-off movie which made his name for evermore. On leaving the US Army, West toured the States setting up military TV stations. Then he joined a kids’ TV programme, The Kini Popo Show in Hawaii. Following television work from 1954 and after the Boris Karloff film Voodoo Island, West got his Hollywood break in 1959 in The Young Philadelphians, with Paul Newman. Several TV westerns ensued until his next big film, Geronimo (1962), with Chuck Connors. More TV included The Detectives (currently replaying on Talking Pictures TV), Laramie, Bonanza, Maverick, Gunsmoke etc. West was never in many major movies, with perhaps Hooper and The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker being the exceptions. However, he still worked continuously on TV, latterly doing voiceover work on various animated Batman series and as Mayor Adam West in Family Guy, another certainty for being remembered by posterity. He was offered the role of James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever, but declined it as he thought it needed a British actor. Adam West married three times, had four children and two stepchildren.

 

ANNE WIAZEMSKY (14 May 1947-5 October 2017)

The German-born actress, novelist and TV documentarist Anne Wiazemsky, who has died aged 70 from breast cancer, was the granddaughter of the French writer François Mauriac. She came to fame when discovered in 1966 by Robert Bresson for his film Au hazard Balthazar, about an abused donkey. She was subsequently taken up by Jean-Luc Godard for his films La Chinoise, Weekend, Sympathy for the Devil (aka One Plus One) and the portmanteau production Tout va bien, and in 1967 she married Godard. Pasolini cast her in Teorema and Pigsty but she mainly appeared in French films including George Who? about George Sand, Philippe Garrel’s L’enfant secret and She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamp. Wiazemsky appeared in many television movies and series and her last film appearance was in Foreign City in 1988. However, she went on to co-write Claire Denis’s US Go Home, produced a series of short stories, novels and autobiographies, and directed some TV documentaries.

   

HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS (15 November 1941-1 July 2017)

The poet, playwright, political rabble-rouser and magician, no less, Heathcote Williams has died after a long illness at the age of 75. He also wrote songs and took up painting and sculpture but was chiefly known for his poetry, plays and pamphleteering. However, Williams also pursued another career as an actor in films. It all started with Malatesta (1970), a German TV film about the Italian anarchist in which he played Joseph Solokow and in which his life partner, the historian Diana Senior, also appeared. He also co-wrote the screenplay. He was Prospero in Derek Jarman’s The Tempest and also appeared in Wish You Were Here, Little Dorrit, Stormy Monday, Miss Julie, The Browning Version, Slipstream, Orlando, The Tango Lesson, Cousin Bette, The Legend of 1900, The Escort, Basic Instinct 2, and many more, while on television he was in episodes of Friends, Dinotopia and Judge John Deed, plus Nick Willing’s Alice in Wonderland. In all, Williams made over forty appearances on film and TV. He also wrote screenplays and adapted his own play, The Local Stigmatic, for Al Pacino. He had two daughters courtesy of Diana Senior and a son by a previous relationship with the novelist Polly Samson.

  

  

 

MICHAEL DARVELL