Film Review Daily
In Memoriam
Michael Darvell examines the lives of the recently deceased, including Harry Dean
Stanton, Peter Hall, Shelley Berman, Richard Anderson, Károly Makk, Mireille Darc, Tobe Hooper, Jerry Lewis, Bruce Forsyth, Joseph Bologna, Glen Campbell, Robert Hardy, Ty
Hardin, Jeanne Moreau, Sam Shepard, Hywel Bennett, Deborah Watling, John Heard,
Claude Rich, George A. Romero, Martin Landau, Pamela Engel, John Karlsen, Elsa
Martinelli, Joe Robinson, Heathcote Williams, Barry Norman and Michael Nyqvist.
EDWARD
ALBEE (
Essentially a man of the theatre,
American playwright Edward
Albee never wrote for the cinema, However, his most famous play from
1962 also became
celebrated on film. Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, 
directed by Mike Nichols in 1966, details
the destructive
nature of a marriage as George, a university professor, and his wife
Martha
peel off the layers of their relationship to reveal a basic hatred of
one
another. This is played out before two younger guests, Nick and Honey.
The film
was Oscar-nominated in thirteen categories including the four actors,
Elizabeth
Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal and Sandy Dennis, but only Taylor
and Dennis
won the awards, although the film also won for best cinematography, art
direction and costume design. The screenplay by Ernest Lehman was the
only
Albee play ever to be filmed. Albee himself adapted novels for the
theatre
including Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Nabokov’s Lolita,
but both flopped, and he did a
stage version of Carson McCullers’ The
Ballad of the
Sad Café
(1991), subsequently filmed by
Merchant-Ivory using Michael Hirst’s screenplay based on the novella
and Albee’s
play. Albee’s first play was The Zoo
Story in 1959, and of his thirty others he is best remembered
for Tiny Alice, A Delicate Balance (filmed
by Tony Richardson, starring Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield and Lee
Remick,
and released theatrically in Britain),
The Lady From
LOLA ALBRIGHT (20 July 1925-23 March 2017)
The American actress Lola Albright started out as a model 
and
radio station receptionist. She studied piano and singing and recorded
some albums when playing a nightclub singer in the TV series Peter Gunn. Her film debut was in The Unfinished Dance in 1947 with Margaret O’Brien and Cyd Charisse. She had other uncredited roles at MGM before landing a good role in Champion (1949) with Kirk Douglas. She was in Tulsa with Susan Hayward and played in several minor films before entering television in Armstrong Circle Theatre in 1951. More television and some B-films kept her busy until Budd Boetticher’s The Brave and the Beautiful (aka The Magnificent Matador) with Anthony Quinn in 1955. Then there was The Tender Trap with Frank Sinatra, more TV and more B-westerns until 1961 and A Cold Wind in August
in which she showed how good an actress she was, playing a stripper who
seduces an innocent young man. She was a great success in Peter Gunn on TV and appeared with Elvis in Kid Galahad, with Alain Delon in The Love Cage, with Tuesday Weld in Lord Love a Duck, with Kirk Douglas again in The Way West and Doris Day in Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?
Then it was mostly back to television until retirement in 1984. She was
married and divorced three times, her second husband being the actor
Jack Carson.
RICHARD ANDERSON
(
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
ALEXIS
ARQUETTE (
The American actress,
born
Robert Arquette, came out as gay at 13, 
but was really transgender and
became
Alexis. She was the sister of actors Patricia, Rosanna, David and
Richmond
Arquette. After working at various jobs she appeared briefly in Down and
Out in Beverly Hills (1986), with Nick Nolte and Bette
Midler. With a very busy
career on TV and in films Alexis was probably the most successful
transgender
actor in the
JOHN G. AVILDSEN
(
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.
HÉCTOR BABENCO (
The Argentinian-born Brazilian 
film
director, producer,
writer and actor worked in films from 1973 with his documentary on
racing
driver Emerson Fittipaldi. His first feature was King
of the Night (1975), about a man in São
KENNY
BAKER (
Born a dwarf, actor Kenny Baker, who
made his name as R2-D2 in the Star Wars franchise, was formerly a skater
touring
the world in
MICHAEL BALLHAUS
(
The German-born cinematographer learned how to 
photograph
actors at his parents’ theatre in
GEOFFREY BAYLDON
(
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
TERENCE
BAYLER (
The New Zealand-born actor Terence
Bayler’s first film was Broken Barrier, made in
ANN BEACH (
Although she was never a star, 
Ann Beach always brought a great
sense of her own personality to any role she played, be it on stage, in films
or on television. As a chorister in
BRIAN
BEDFORD (
The Yorkshire-born
actor trained at
RADA and subsequently specialised in performing and directing
Shakespeare. He
worked extensively for the New York Public Theatre and, for 27 years,
the
Stratford Shakespeare Festival Theatre in not only Shakespeare but also
Molnar,
Coward, Chekhov, Molière, Shaw, Vanbrugh, Sheridan, Boucicault, Peter
Shaffer
and Tom Stoppard. He played Lady Bracknell and directed Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in
HYWEL BENNETT (
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,
SHELLEY BERMAN (
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.
WILLIAM PETER BLATTY (
The writer, filmmaker and occasional actor William Peter
Blatty will be forever associated with a single film, The Exorcist, which he produced and wrote from his own novel. In
its day (1973), it was one of the most sensational productions to come out of
JOSEPH
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.
POWERS BOOTHE (
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.
GLEN CAMPBELL (
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.
JOAN
CARROLL (
Child actress Joan Carroll had a
short film career from an
uncredited turn in 1936 in The First Baby
until 1945 with Leo McCarey’s The Bells
of St Mary’s. She was
with Claire
Trevor in Walking Down Broadway
(1938) and appeared with many other celebrated stars: Don Ameche in Gateway, Peter Lorre in Mr
Moto’s Last Warning, Rathbone and
Karloff in Tower of London, Alice
Faye in Barricade, Ginger Rogers in
Primrose Path and Fredric March in Tomorrow the World! Apart from The Bells of St Mary’s, Carroll may be
best remembered for the part of Agnes Smith, one of Judy Garland’s
sisters, in Meet Me in St Louis,
She also appeared
(uncredited) with
JOHN
CARSON (
The actor John Carson was born in 
educated in
BILLY
CHAPIN (
The child actor Billy Chapin had a
film and 
TV career that
lasted about eight years up to 1958. He had uncredited appearances as a
baby
and a tot in the mid-1940s before television took hold in 1952. His
first film,
Affair With
a Stranger
(1953) starred Jean Simmons,
his next, The Kid
From Left
Field
had Dan Dailey and Anne Bancroft. He also worked with Dailey on There’s No Business Like Show Business,
playing the Johnnie Ray character aged ten. Tobor
the Great was a space age tale of robots, Naked
Alibi was a film noir with Sterling Hayden, A
Man Called Peter starred Richard Todd,
and Violent Saturday was another film noir.
Chapin will, however, be mainly remembered for playing the boy in The Night of the
Hunter, Charles
Laughton’s only directorial outing for which he personally selected the
boy on
account of his incredible expertise in film acting. Chapin’s last film
was a
B-western, Tension at Table Rock in
1956. For his stage debut in Three Wishes
for Jamie in 1951, Chapin won the New York Drama Critics’
Award for most
promising newcomer.
WILLIAM CHRISTOPHER (
Although the
American actor William Christopher became typecast playing Father Mulcahy in
the TV series M*A*S*H (1972 to 1983), and its sequel After M*A*S*H (1983-85), he also appeared in many
other series (Hogan’s Heroes, The Love Boat, The Smurfs etc). He made
his Broadway debut in Beyond the Fringe
but his first film was Billy Wilder’s The
Fortune Cookie (aka Meet Whiplash
Willie in the
TOM
CLEGG (
The Lancashire-born director Tom Clegg initially worked for Granada Television as a camera operator. Moving to ABC TV he became a director and for most of his career worked in television directing high-profile series such as Special Branch, Regan (1974), the TV pilot that led him to direct The Sweeney with John Thaw and Denis Waterman, the Gerry Anderson sci-fi series Space 1999 and episodes of Minder, The Chinese Detective, The Professionals, Boon, Van der Valk, Bergerac, Between the Lines, Poirot and Rosemary and Thyme etc. Probably his biggest contribution to British television was directing 16 feature-length TV action films based on the character of Sharpe, a soldier during the Napoleonic Wars, starring Sean Bean. Clegg made a few films for the cinema: Sweeney 2, the second spin-off from Sweeney, McVicar (1980), a relentlessly powerful study of villain John McVicar’s time in prison, with Roger Daltrey, G’Olé!, the official FIFA documentary on the 1982 World Cup, The Inside Man (1984), a Cold War thriller with Dennis Hopper and Any Man’s Death (1990), about a missing journalist in the African civil war, with John Savage. Clegg’s last work was on Sharpe’s Peril (2008), the final in the series about which he also made a documentary film.
LEONARD
COHEN (
The Canadian singer-songwriter,
philosopher-poet and novelist
had little to do with the cinema, although he did appear in a few
titles, but
many (approaching some 250) films and television programmes have used
his songs
as part of their soundtracks. Cohen’s appearances as an actor were few
and far
between: just four odd shorts, playing a singer in The
Ernie Game
(a Canadian film from 1967) and a
TV appearance on Miami Vice in 1986. However, his songs have
been heard on everything from Altman’s McCabe
and Mrs
Miller and A
Wedding
to Pump Up the Volume and Natural Born Killers, and from Breaking the Waves and Shrek
to EastEnders.
MIKE CONNORS (
The Armenian-American actor, born
Krekor Illevado Ohanian in 
began reading law but then moved on to theatre studies. A fine baseball player
(hence his being called ‘Touch’), he was discovered by director William A.
Wellman. In Republic Pictures’ Sudden
Fear (1952), with Joan Crawford, he
appeared under the name of Touch Connors, which served him well in several
films and TV series. The former included such choice low-grade delights as Jaguar, Roger Corman’s Day the World Ended, Swamp Women and The Oklahoma Woman, and Voodoo Woman
and Shake, Rattle and Rock! He also
played an Amalekite Herder in DeMille’s The
Ten Commandments. Then, as Michael Connors his career looked up with much
TV work including undercover agent Nick Stone in 37 episodes of Tightrope and the films Panic Button, Good Neighbour Sam, Where Love Has Gone, Harlow, Situation
Hopeless… But Not Serious, the
remake of Stagecoach and Kiss the
Girls and Make Them Die. The Mannix TV series brought (by then ‘Mike’)
Connors his most famous role as LA private eye Joe Mannix for nearly 200 shows
from 1967, and for which he won a Golden Globe. Later movies included Avalanche Express, Nightkill, Gideon
etc. After playing Joe Mannix in a
RAOUL
COUTARD (
The great French
cinematographer
Raoul Coutard was formerly a war photographer who served in the
Indochina War
and later worked in
PAUL
COWAN (
Film producers don’t always get the
recognition they deserve.
However, line producer and associate producer Paul Cowan was arguably
responsible for some of the most iconic films to come out of the
KATHLEEN
The American actress Kathleen Crowley came sixth in the Miss
America pageant of 1949, representing
MIREILLE DARC (
The French actress Mireille Darc (birth name Mireille
Algroz) has died of a heart condition aged 79. 
She studied in
ROBERT DAY (
Robert Day was the epitome of the commercial filmmaker who
could put his directorial touch on any type of film. In a long career he helmed
sixteen feature films and over 120 television movies and series episodes.
Starting as a clapper boy he progressed to operating the camera on many classic
British films from 1941, including The
Wooden Horse, The Holly and the Ivy, The Red Beret, The Man Between, An
Inspector Calls and 1984 (the 1956
version). His first directing job was in 1956 on The Green Man, the Launder & Gilliat comedy with Alastair Sim.
His other features included Grip of the
Strangler and Corridors of Blood, both with Boris Karloff, First Man Into Space, Life in Emergency Ward
10, a spinoff from TV, Two-Way
Stretch, The Rebel, She for Hammer, and four Tarzan
pictures, two of which he co-wrote. He also co-wrote The Big Game starring
Stephen Boyd. For
GLORIA
DeHAVEN (
The American actress Gloria DeHaven
was the daughter of
actor-director Carter DeHaven and actress Flora Parker DeHaven. Her
first
(uncredited) appearance on film was in Chaplin’s Modern
Times (1936), for 
which
her father was assistant director.
She
became a contract player at M-G-M from 1940, appearing in some of the
studio’s
most popular musicals, including Best Foot
Forward with Lucille Ball, Thousands
Cheer with Gene Kelly, Broadway Rhythm, with George Murphy, Two Girls
and a
Sailor, with Van
Johnson and June Allyson, Three Little
Words, with Fred Astaire, and Summer
Stock with Judy Garland. She made films with other studios
(Fox, Universal,
RKO,
JONATHAN DEMME (
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.
ROGER
DUMAS (
The French actor Roger Dumas appeared
in some 150 films and
TV series across sixty years. Although he was never out of work, many
of his
films were for home consumption only. 
His
first film in 1954 was Wild Fruit,
a family saga with Gérard
Blain. He worked with Brigitte Bardot in The
Bride Is Too Beautiful (1956); with Louis De Funes in Squeak-Squeak (1963); and with Belmondo
and Françoise Dorléac in
the action movie That Man From Rio
(1964) which did get a wide release. He was directed by Claude Chabrol
in An Orchid for the Tiger (1965)
and also
in Line of Demarcation (1966), a
story of the Nazi invasion of
PAMELA ENGEL (
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
PIERRE
ÉTAIX (
Actor, director,
writer and clown
Pierre Étaix made only a handful of films in his long career as an
entertainer,
mainly focussed on comedy. Trained as an illustrator, he also performed
in the
MIGUEL FERRER (
The American actor was the son of José Ferrer and Rosemary
Clooney 
and the cousin of George Clooney. He studied acting at the Beverly Hills
Playhouse but became a musician, singing and playing drums. For some time he
toured with his mother and Bing Crosby but when Crosby died Miguel turned to
acting. On TV from 1981, he made a few forgettable films until his first major
movie, Star Trek III: The Search for
Spock. More films and more TV followed until RoboCop came along in 1987 and the role of Bob Morton. Later movies
included Tony Scott’s Revenge and
William Friedkin’s The Guardian. Then
there was Twin Peaks, in which series
he played FBI Agent Albert Rosenfield, a role he repeated in two subsequent
movie versions. A mixture of film, television and voice-over work (like his
father, he had a rich, deep voice) kept Ferrer constantly busy. From 2000 his credits
included Traffic, John Sayles’s
BRUCE FORSYTH (
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
BERNARD FOX (
The Welsh actor Bernard Fox was successfully typecast as blundering or buffoonish old parties, a good character player who went on to make his mark in Hollywood. After rep he joined Brian Rix’s Whitehall farce company and in 1962 was invited to the US where he appeared in many TV shows, including Bewitched (as Dr Bombay), Hogan’s Heroes, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Perry Mason, The Dick Van Dyke Show, etc. In his film work he was in both versions of the Titanic story (1953 and 1997), Strange Bedfellows, One of Our Spies Is Missing, Munster, Go Home!, Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, Yellowbeard, 18 Again!, The Mummy (1999), etc. His last work was as Dr Bombay again in Passions (the Bewitched sequel), and an episode of Dharma & Greg (2001).
STEPHEN FURST (
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
ZSA
ZSA GABOR
(
The
Hungarian-American actress Zsa
Zsa Gabor was born in 
including
the can-can dancer Jane Avril in John
Huston’s Moulin Rouge
(1953), probably her best film. Always publicity-conscious,
she became known not for her acting but for having nine husbands,
including the
hotelier Conrad Hilton and actor George Sanders in marriages that
seldom lasted
more than five years, apart from her last to Prinz von Anhalt which ran
for
thirty years. Zsa Zsa was a socialite with a very likeable personality
which
she was always willing to parody. Having claimed she was a good
housekeeper,
she admitted that “every time I leave a man, I keep his house.” Her
first
LISA GAYE (6 March
1935-14 July 2016)
The
American actress, singer and dancer was the daughter of actress
Margaret Griffin. Her sisters were Debra Paget and Teala
Loring,
her brother Ruell Shayne and all three were in showbusiness. Lisa won a
Universal contract at 17 and from 1954 to 1970 she made over ninety
appearances on TV or in pictures, although most of her films were
exploitationers. On TV she appeared with George Burns & Gracie
Allen, Robert Cummings and in many popular drama series – 77 Sunset Strip, Perry Mason,
Black Saddle, Colt 45, Sea Hunt, Wagon Train, Laramie, Maverick,
Rawhide, Have Gun – Will Travel and Cheyenne, etc. Her
first films in 1954 included The
Glenn Miller Story, Yankee Pasha and Magnificent Obsession,
all uncredited except for Drums
Across the River with Audie Murphy. Lisa will always be
remembered for her dancing in Rock
Around the Clock and for Shake, Rattle & Rock!,
both from 1956 and both cashing in on the new rock ‘n’ roll sounds. She
appeared with Dean Martin in Ten
Thousands Bedrooms (1957); with William Campbell in Night of Evil and
with Fernando Rey in Face
of Terror (both 1962); with Scott Brady in Castle of Evil
(1966); and with Fernando Lamas in The
Violent Ones (1967). After I Dream of Jeannie, The Flying
Nun and the Mod
Squad TV series, Lisa retired in 1970 to look after her
family.
DON GORDON (
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.
BRAD GREY (
Born in the
TAMMY
GRIMES (
Essentially a stage
performer, the American actress and singer Tammy Grimes occasionally
appeared
in films. Her Broadway debut was as the understudy for Kim Stanley in Bus Stop
(1955) and 
she continued to work in theatre and also
in cabaret. Noël Coward
saw her in a nightclub act singing in her distinctive throaty voice and
put her
into his play Look After Lulu, for
which she won a Theatre World Award. Grimes’s biggest hit was the
starring role
in Meredith Willson’s Titanic musical The
Unsinkable Molly Brown, for which she won a Tony Award in
1960. She won
another Tony for playing Amanda in Coward’s Private
Lives.
Had she played Molly Brown in the film version (Debbie Reynolds got the role), then Tammy Grimes’s career in movies might have been better. As it was she appeared in Three Bites of the Apple, her first film in 1967, followed by Arthur! Arthur!, Play It As It Lays, Somebody Killed Her Husband, and Stanley Kramer’s The Runner Stumbles. During the 1980s Grimes was in Can’t Stop the Music with the Village People, America (her only co-starring film role), Mr North, James Ivory’s Slaves of New York, and a few others including her last feature film, High Art, in 1998. Tammy Grimes was married three times: to Christopher Plummer (with whom she had a daughter, actress Amanda Plummer), then to the actor Jeremy Slate and finally to composer Richard Jameson (in 1971) until his death in 2005.
BARBARA HALE (18 April
1922-26
“Tell me, Perry, how did you know
that…?” These words were often spoken by 
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 (
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 
the Royal Shakespeare Company in
BARRY
HANSON (
Yorkshire-born Barry Hanson was one
of the great producers
of British television whose career appears to be a catalogue of
highlights. Starting
in the theatre at
CURTIS
HANSON (
Until Curtis Hanson made 
plus
a
couple of TV movies. He also wrote some of his own films and worked on
screenplays for other directors. Mad about movies from an early age,
Hanson
became a journalist interviewing directors for Cinema
magazine, and thereby worked his way into the film business.
His first screenplay was for The Dunwich Horror
(1970), for American International Pictures, which starred
Sandra Dee. He directed his own horror screenplay for Sweet
Kill (1972) and in 1982
co-wrote White Dog
with its director Sam Fuller. He directed Losin’
It (1983), one of
Tom Cruise’s early films, and then began to reveal real mettle with The Bedroom
Window (1987), a thriller starring
Steve Guttenberg and Isabelle Huppert. After Bad
Influence (1990) with
Rob Lowe came The Hand
That
Rocks the
Cradle (1992), a
scary story of revenge. Surprisingly, Meryl Streep starred in Hanson’s
tough action
movie, The River
Wild (1994), but it
wasn’t until 1997 that he found his true voice in bringing James
Ellroy’s
deviously tortuous novel
TY HARDIN (
The American actor Ty Hardin, who has died aged 87, 
was a US
Army man who made good in
ROBERT HARDY (
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
RICHARD HATCH (
After studying piano as a child, the American actor Richard
Hatch opted for the theatre, 
eventually moving from LA to
TONY HAYGARTH (
The Liverpool-born actor and poet Tony Haygarth worked
mainly in the theatre and on television, but also appeared in many films. His
early working life included jobs as a lifeguard, a circus performer and a psychiatric
nurse before he started in repertory theatre. He also worked with the
GLENNE HEADLY (
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
JOHN HEARD (
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
Stage, film and TV actress Florence
Henderson 
was
in show
business from an early age. At 18 she was cast in the Harold Rome
musical Wish You Were Here, while
her first TV
appearance was in a tribute to Rodgers & Hammerstein in 1954.
She made
umpteen TV shows but is best-known for playing the mother in The Brady Bunch series and its various
spin-offs, plus she also played Carol Brady in The
Love Boat. Her first film was Song
of Norway
in 1970 and then Shakes the Clown
22 years later, a black
comedy from Bobcat Goldthwait. She played Grandma in The
Brady Bunch Movie (1995) and in the 2000s appeared as herself
in Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star,
graced For Heaven’s Sake, was
Carmen
in Venus and
Vegas, played Betsy
Ross in The Christmas
Bunny, and Mrs
Robinson in Fifty Shades of Black.
Florence Henderson was a huge supporter of charities and helped to
raise
millions in her lifetime. Her last film, Grandmothers
Murder Club, is due out in 2017.
STEVEN
HILL (
The American actor will be remembered
as District Attorney
Adam Schiff in the long-running TV series Law
& Order (1990-2000). Before that he had appeared in
many high-profile
films and on television throughout his career. Having been a founder
member of
the Actors’ Studio in
ARTHUR
HILLER (
The Canadian director (born of Polish
parents) worked on a
long line of middle-brow American movies, comedies and dramas, with
equal
professionalism. 
However, Arthur Hiller never
acquired a signature style, despite his avowed
admiration of the Italian Neo-Realism films of the 1940s. There was
nothing
personal about his work but he made some of
SKIP HOMEIER (
Born George Vincent Homeier,
TOBE HOOPER (
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
DAVID
HUDDLESTON (
American David Huddleston was a fine
character actor, good
in both comedy and dramatic roles. 
He
was never a star with his name over the
title, except perhaps on stage where he memorably played Benjamin
Franklin in
the musical 1776 in 1998 and 2003.
He
worked in films and on TV for some 55 years, beginning in television in
1960.
Films he will be remembered for include Howard Hawks’ Rio
Lobo (1970), Robert
Benton’s Bad Company (1972), as
Olson
Johnson in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles
(1974), memorable for his “No Irish” gag, Peter Hyams’ Capricorn
One (1977) and as the eponymous star of Santa
Claus (1985) with Dudley Moore,
for which he was perfect casting. He was also the title character in
the Coen brothers’
The Big Lebowski (1998) and played
the Judge in Mel Brooks’ musical remake of The
Producers (2005). His last work was
in a segment of the 2014 thriller Locker
13. With many other films and
constant TV roles, David Huddleston was never out of work.
JOHN HURT (
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.
SAEED JAFFREY
(
Indian actor first in theatre and
radio during the 1950s,
then came to the
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.
FRAN
JEFFRIES (
Fran Jeffries was a
JOHN KARLSEN (
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
CHRISTINE KAUFMANN
(
The German actress was born in
MOHAMED
KHAN (
The Egyptian-British film director
began to make his name after
he returned to
ABBAS
KIAROSTAMI (
In his time the
Iranian film
director Abbas Kiarostami had also been a producer, a writer, an editor
and a
cinematographer, as well as a poet and photographer. From 1970 to 2013
he
directed and wrote over forty features, documentaries and shorts,
making him
the most important filmmaker to come out of 
Initially
he studied fine
arts at university and then worked as a graphics designer. Joining the
Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults
in
Kiarostami’s films
were a mixture
of intellectual thinking and positive spirituality, often centring on
life and
death. As censorship increased he left Kanoon and later on actually
quit
His last feature, Like Someone
In Love
(2012), about a sex worker finding a connection with a widowed
man, was shot in
FRED J. KOENEKAMP
(
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.
JOHN
KRISH (
The film director and writer John
Krish was mainly noted for
his documentaries often sponsored by government, trade unions or
charities.
After working on Target for Tonight (1941) he contributed to some 30
documentaries from 1945 but not always pleasing his sponsors. For
British
Transport Films he made The Elephant Will
Never Forget (1953) on the sad
departure of
GEORGE KOSANA (
The American actor and sometime
production manager will be remembered for his contribution to George A.
Romero’s zombie classic Night of the
Living Dead (1968) in which he played Sheriff McClelland. He also appeared
as himself in various documentaries on Romero’s film, and played a police chief
in Romero’s comedy There’s Always Vanilla
and other exploitation movies such as The
Booby Hatch (1976), John Russo’s
comedy about a scientist who checks his clients’ levels of eroticism. Later on
came Incest Death Squad (2009) and Living Dead (2012), the latter directed
by a (but not the) Robert Aldrich,
with Kosana as Sheriff McClelland again. Awaiting release is John Russo’s My Uncle Is a Zombie! A short but not
uninteresting career.
MARTIN LANDAU (
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
DALIAH LAVI (
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
HERSCHELL
GORDON LEWIS
(
Styled “the godfather of gore”,
actor-producer-director
Herschell Gordon Lewis was the first filmmaker to really pile on the
blood in
his films. With titles like Blood Feast (which was issued with sick bags
in the cinema), Colour Me Blood
Red (the poster said “drenched in
Crimson Colour”), A Taste of Blood
and The Gore
Gore Girls,
his films left nothing to the
imagination. One of his most celebrated films, Two
Thousand Maniacs
(1964), saw Yankee tourists
being tortured and killed by Southern rednecks. Apparently both Quentin
Tarantino
and John Waters were influenced by his oeuvre.
Lewis’s working life began as a teacher in
JERRY LEWIS (
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.
WILLIAM
LUCAS (
After a number of jobs, actor William
Lucas 
gained a
scholarship to the
KÁROLY MAKK (
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
GARRY
The actor, director, writer and
producer Garry Marshall was
born in 
and
TV producer Ronny Marshall Hallin. He
started as a journalist, writing a sports column, graduated to writing
jokes
for comedians and then scripts for TV shows featuring Jack Paar, Dick
Van Dyke,
Joey Bishop, Danny Thomas and Lucille Ball. His first TV series,
written with
Jerry Belson, were Hey, Landlord and Neil Simon’s The
Odd
Couple.
ELSA MARTINELLI (
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
ALEC McCOWEN (
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
PAUL
McDOWELL (
Although better-known
as a
musician and singer with The Temperance Seven trad jazz band, Paul
McDowell was
also an actor, comedian, writer, painter and teacher. The
Temperence Seven began at art
school in the 1950s, a 1920s style band dressed in Victorian garb which
at its
height had a No. 1 chart hit with ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’. McDowell’s
(mainly
minor) film appearances included Brecht’s The
Life Story
of Baal, The Thirty-Nine Steps (with Robert Powell), Don
Siegel’s Rough Cut, National
Lampoon’s European
Vacation, Peter Yuval’s Dead End
City and Julian Doyle’s Chemical Wedding,
an evocation of Aleister Crowley
and McDowell’s last appearance in 2008. He contributed
scripts for TV comedy shows starring Sheila Hancock, Harry Secombe,
David Frost
and The Two Ronnies, and appeared on TV in The
World of Beachcomber, The Good Life, Porridge, Going Straight, Dave
Allen at
Large, Wodehouse Playhouse, Robin’s Nest, Kenny Everett, Blackadder,
Only Fools
and Horses, Mr Bean and The Two of
Us
etc. He also acted in TV dramas such as Scoop,
Crown Court, Churchill’s People,
JOHN
McMARTIN (
The American actor was better known
as a leading man in the theatre
and for his television work, although he contributed to a number of
films, too.
He was first noticed off-Broadway in Little
Mary Sunshine, Rick Besoyan’s 1959 musical with Eileen
Brennan. 
Never
reaching Broadway it ran at several off-Broadway houses for over 1000
performances and came to
McMartin’s first film part was in A Thousand Clowns (1965). He repeated the role of Oscar in Bob Fosse’s film of Sweet Charity (1969) with Shirley MacLaine; he was in All the President’s Men (1976), and also in his Dream Lover (1986); in Brubaker (1980) and Legal Eagles (1986), both with Robert Redford, in Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981), Pennies From Heaven (1981) with Steve Martin, Who’s That Girl (1987) with Madonna, The Dish (2000) with Sam Neill, Kinsey (2004) with Liam Neeson, and No Reservations (2007) with Catherine Zeta-Jones. John McMartin’s last appearance was in the Tina Fey sitcom Unbreakable Jimmy Schmidt (2015).
DINA MERRILL (
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
TED
V.MIKELS
(
Low budgets, schlock-horror and
sexploitation were the chief ingredients of the films of American
independent writer-producer-editor-director
and actor Ted V. Mikels. He was born Theodore Vincent Mikacevich but
his father
shortened the family name to Mikels (pronounced Michaels). He began his
career
as a magician and ventriloquist, later deciding to film his act. When
he moved
to
TOMAS MILIAN (
The Cuban-born 
American-Italian actor and singer trained at the Actors Studio
in
ROBERT ELLIS MILLER
(
Robert Ellis Miller’s career as a director began in 1958
with ten years working in American television. His first feature film in 1966
was Any Wednesday (aka Bachelor Girl Apartment) with Jane Fonda and Jason Robards. This was followed by Sweet November with Sandy Dennis, and The
Heart Is a Lonely Hunter from the novel by Carson McCullers, for which Alan
Arkin and Sondra Locke were both Academy Award-nominated. The Buttercup Chain (1970) was nominated at
MARY TYLER MOORE (
The
American actress Mary Tyler Moore began her career as a dancer and her
first TV appearance was in a Hotpoint commercial during the popular
show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet 
in 1952 with the real-life Nelson family. Umpteen more television shows ensued until she made a break for films with X-15 (1961), a Cold War space drama. Then came 158 episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show as the ditsy wife of Van Dyke’s scriptwriter. The film musical Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) with Julie Andrews might have made her a movie star but ensuing film roles, including Change of Habit with Elvis Presley, were nothing great. Back on TV she was in Phyllis, then Rhoda, and her own show, playing the same character, Mary Richards in all three. Ordinary People (1980) was the film that showed her at her dramatic best and she was nominated for an Oscar. This was followed by Six Weeks and Just Between Friends before she returned to TV for the Lincoln mini-series playing Mary (who else?) and in many other series and TV movies. Her last film was Against the Current (2010), and her final TV appearance was on Hot in Cleveland (2013). On stage she was in an ill-fated musical of Breakfast at Tiffany’s with Richard Chamberlain in 1967, but she won six Emmy Awards for her TV work and Tony Awards for Whose Life Is It Anyway? and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.
She was married three times and had a son, Richie, who died in 1980.
Her own company MTM Enterprises made many successful TV shows.
ROGER MOORE (
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
(
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.
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,
JEANNE MOREAU (
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.
MICHÈLE
MORGAN (
Michèle Morgan was a great beauty
and a natural asset to the cinema. 
She began her film career in 1936 in
MARNI
NIXON (
The American singer,
actress
and vocal teacher Marni Nixon worked in film, TV, opera, musicals and
classical 
concerts, but will be chiefly remembered for her work as a voiceover
and
playback artist who dubbed many famous actresses whose own singing
voices were
perhaps less than perfect. Marni had always performed as a child and
later sang
in choirs including the Roger Wagner Chorale. She studied singing and
opera but
her film career started in 1942 in The
Bashful Bachelor. She was the voices Ingrid Bergman heard in Joan of Arc. Then she sang for Margaret
O’Brien in
BARRY NORMAN (
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
BILL
NUNN (
American actor Bill Nunn, son of
William G. Nunn Jr, a scout
for 
the
Pittsburgh Steelers American football team, first appeared uncredited
in Burt Reynolds’ Sharky’s Machine (1981). After some TV work he
was taken up by Spike Lee to play Grady in his film School
Daze (1988) and then
Lee used him again in Do the Right
Thing (1989) in which Nunn played
the
larger-than-life character of Radio Raheem who gets murdered by police
on the streets
of
MICHAEL NYQVIST (
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.
HUGH
O’BRIAN (
If for nothing else the American
actor Hugh O’Brian will be
remembered for one particular part, 
the
title role in the TV series The Life and
Legend of Wyatt Earp. He
was allegedly the first television sex symbol, having been an all-round
athlete, and he fitted easily into the role of the western Marshal and
all the
other action movie roles he played. He was in, among many others, Vengeance Valley, Buckaroo Sheriff of Texas,
Cave of Outlaws, Red Ball Express, Son of Ali Baba, The Raiders, The
Lawless
Breed, Seminole, The Man from the Alamo, etc, and even in the
musicals Meet Me
at the Fair and There’s No Business
Like Show Business (both 1954). Then came television and many
shows before Wyatt Earp rode into
town for 227
episodes from 1955 to 1961, cementing O’Brian’s status as a star. More
television and the odd film – Come Fly With
Me, Love Has Many Faces, Ten Little Indians,
ANITA PALLENBERG (
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
MICHAEL PARKS (
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.
BILL PAXTON (17 May 1955-25 February 2017)
From the time he entered the film business, the American actor and sometime writer, 
producer
and director Bill Paxton, seemed to be cast in eccentric character
roles. He entered films as a set-dresser for Roger Corman’s New World
Pictures company and made his film acting debut in Corman’s Crazy Mama
(1975). Later on he studied acting at New York University and then
secured several TV appearances while also making short films. He was in
The Lords of Discipline and a number of minor movies including Taking Tiger Mountain written by William S. Burroughs and then came The Terminator and Commando, both with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Many films followed, including Weird Science, Aliens, Near Dark, Slipstream, Next of Kin, Predator 2, Tombstone, Future Shock, True Lies and Apollo 13 (as NASA astronaut Fred Haise). He was Frank in Frank and Jessie, about the James brothers, he chased a storm in Twister, searched for the RMS Titanic, and played Jeff Tracy in Thunderbirds (2004). More recently, apart from TV shows, Paxton graced Soderbergh’s Haywire, was in Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise, Nightcrawler and Term Life. Paxton’s last film, The Circle,
with Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, is due for release in 2017, in a career
that notched up nearly a hundred film and TV appearances.
TIM PIGOTT-SMITH (
When Tim Pigott-Smith’s
family moved to 
he worked in
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
Tim Pigott-Smith was a patron of
Friendship Works, a charity operating in the
JON
POLITO (
The American
character actor Jon
Polito was often seen in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, 
namely
Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The
Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski and
The Man Who Wasn’t There. Perhaps never a star, he was,
however, a face you
might recognise without necessarily putting a name to it. With over two
hundred
film and TV credits to his name he was a very busy man, starting out on
television in 1981 and working continuously up until his death. His
last film, The Maestro, is due out
in 2017. Over
the years he played cops, detectives, hoods, judges, bankers and other
businessmen with equal aplomb, in films such as The
Freshman, Highlander,
The Crow, The
Tailor of
Panama, The Singing Detective,
Flags of
Our Fathers
and American Gangster.
As
well as working for the Coens, Polito was directed by Clint Eastwood,
Ridley
Scott, Michael Apted, Tom Hanks, Andrew Bergman, Tim Burton and many
others. On stage he
appeared in American Buffalo,
Curse of
the Aching
Heart, Total
Abandon and a revival of Death of
a Salesman,
while on television Polito appeared in everything from As
the
World Turns (1983) and Crime
Story (1986-8) to Seinfeld (1998), Desperate Housewives
(2005) and Modern Family
(2014-16).
The award-winning Indian actor
enjoyed 
great success in Bollywood,
SIMON
RELPH (
A producer like his father Michael
Relph (1915-2004), Simon
Relph was also involved in directing, albeit as a second unit or
assistant
director. His first work in features was in 1962 as an assistant on Twice Round
the Daffodils,
produced by the Carry On team of Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas
with whom he worked again
the same year on Carry On Cruising.
Early on in his career Relph Jr was involved in straight commercial
work (frequently
with Dirk Bogarde) such as Doctor in
Distress, Hot Enough for June and
The
High Bright Sun, and on Deadlier Than the Male, Nobody
Runs Forever and Some Girls Do.
However, he occasionally
stepped out with more relevant themes such as brainwashing in The Mind Benders, again with Bogarde,
and the problems of youth in A Place
to Go,
both produced by his father.
Simon worked with Bryan Forbes and
Richard Attenborough on Séance on a Wet
Afternoon, a film that
scooped a number of awards. During the 1970s Relph the director was
associated
with several prestige productions, starting with Anne
of the Thousand Days, followed by Olivier’s Three
Sisters, John Schlesinger’s Sunday
Bloody Sunday and Yanks,
Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, Mary, Queen of Scots, The
Triple Echo, the film of Rattigan’s Bequest
to the Nation, The Hireling,
A Touch
of Class
and Zardoz.
He had directing and producing duties
on Warren Beatty’s Reds and Richard
Eyre’s The Ploughman’s Lunch, after
which he
settled just for the role of the producer for The
Return of the Soldier, Privates
on Parade, Wetherby, Comrades, Danny,
the Champion of the
World, Enchanted
April, Louis Malle’s Damage,
The Secret
Rapture, The
Land Girls and Hideous Kinky, among
others. Simon Relph’s last work was as executive producer on Birdsong, a TV adaptation of Sebastian
Faulks’ novel in 2012 – a fitting end to an illustrious
career.
DEBBIE
REYNOLDS (
The 
had become something of a movie icon on
account of her
appearances in the Star Wars films,
her mother was a true
CLAUDE RICH (
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:
DON RICKLES (
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.
EMMANUELLE RIVA (
It was a great disappointment when, after she had been
nominated for an Oscar in 2013, 
the 85-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Riva
did not receive the award for her role in Michael Haneke’s Amour. However, she did win the best leading actress Bafta and was
voted actress of the year in the London Critics’ Circle Awards, along with securing
many other nominations and wins around the world. Riva also received a Bafta
nomination for
BRIAN
RIX (
Although popular in
his day as a farceur, Lord Rix will
leave as his legacy his tireless campaigning for the rights of disabled
people.
He and his wife, actress Elspeth Gray, 
had
a Down’s syndrome daughter, Shelley,
the first of their four children. In the 1950s there was no provision
for
children with that condition but Rix was determined to improve the
situation by
joining many charities for the mentally handicapped. He worked for
Mencap from
1987 and was their president until he died. Before that Brian Rix was
mostly
known as an actor-manager at
JOE ROBINSON (
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
GEORGE A. ROMERO (
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.
FRANCO ROSSO (29 August 1941-9 December 2016)
The Italian-born
British filmmaker made his name with his first feature
ANDREW
SACHS (
The Berlin-born actor Andrew Sachs
will forever 
be
remembered as Manuel, the hapless waiter from
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 (
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
SHEILA
SIM (5 June 1922-19 January 2016)
The British actress is probably better known as the wife of Richard Attenborough. They met as students at RADA and married in 1945. Her first film was Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), followed by Great Day (1945) Dancing with Crime (1947) and The Guinea Pig (1948) in which she appeared with her husband. Sim and Attenborough were famously in the first cast of the Agatha Christie play, The Mousetrap, in 1952. Like Christie Sim gave the run no more than six months. However, Richard had a ten per cent stake in the production which came in handy when he was raising money to film Gandhi. Other of her films include Dear Mr Prohack, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Magic Box, West of Zanzibar and The Night My Number Came Up, her last film in 1955 after which she retired to bring up their three children. The Attenboroughs were instrumental in founding Denville Hall, the actors home in Northwood where, along with Sheila’s brother, actor Gerald Sim, they spent their last years together.
ALAN SIMPSON (
From 1957, the scriptwriting partnership of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson produced some of the best comedy programmes on radio and television for some sixty years. They met in hospital when they were both suffering from tuberculosis and started writing for the hospital radio station. They began scripting for BBC radio in 1951 for Derek Roy’s show Happy-Go-Lucky, then with Eric Sykes contributed to Frankie Howerd’s Fine Goings On and eventually Hancock’s Half Hour (1954-59) which transferred to BBC Television from 1956 to 1961. They had also written for Bernard Braden and contributed ten one-off scripts for BBC TVs Comedy Playhouse, one of which, The Offer, about two rag and bone men, became Steptoe and Son (1962-74). The duo wrote Citizen James, a series for Sid James, and other TV shows for Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd and Leslie Phillips plus television movies and an adaptation of Clochemerle. In the cinema they were not that successful. Apart from movie spin-offs of Steptoe and Son and Up the Chastity Belt for Frankie Howerd, there was The Rebel (1961) written when Hancock was at the height of his fame, The Bargee (1964), with Harry H. Corbett, The Spy With a Cold Nose (1966), the film version of Joe Orton’s Loot (1970) and a short called Le Petomane (1979) with Leonard Rossiter as the Frenchman with a music hall farting act. However, Alan Simpson and Ray Galton were essentially TV writers and in their heyday they were the best there was and their material still stands up today. They both received the OBE in 2000 and were awarded a Bafta Fellowship in 2016. Alan Simpson is survived by his writing partner Ray Galton, now aged 86.
DOUGLAS SLOCOMBE (
Although I had seen many of the films
Douglas Slocombe had
photographed, it wasn’t until 1963 that I made a note of his name from
the
credits of Joseph Losey’s The Servant,
in which the lighting and the photography were some of the best I had
ever encountered,
the whole look of the film being sharply contrasted in black and white,
the
chiaroscuro effect, a trick Slocombe used even for films in colour
which he
shot as if they were in monochrome. He started out as a photojournalist
for
Life magazine and Paris-Match before World War II, was a newsreel
cameraman
during the hostilities and subsequently joined Ealing Studios at the
end of the
war. After some short documentaries, his first feature film work
(uncredited)
was on San Demetrio London (1943),
Ealing’s account of the
Douglas Slocombe (right) with his friend, the 103-year old cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky;
photo: Frances Cameron-Wilson
LIZ
SMITH (
Scunthorpe-born actress Liz Smith
(real name Betty Gleadle)
came
to professional acting at the late age of fifty. After an uncredited
role
in John Boorman’s Leo the Last
(1970)
she was discovered by Mike Leigh, who cast her as Pat’s mother in his
first film
Bleak Moments.
After that she mainly worked in television, including Last
of the Summer Wine, Bootsie and Snudge,
David Copperfield, Emmerdale Farm, Nicholas Nickleby, The Vicar of
Dibley, Lark
Rise to Candleford and The Royle
Family as Nana Norma, for which she will be best remembered.
However, there
were more films, including It Shouldn’t Happen
to a Vet, The
Duellists, Agatha, The French
Lieutenant’s Woman,
Britannia Hospital,
A Private
Function, Little
Dorrit, We Think the World of You, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife
and Her Lover, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory
and Secrets and Lies – Mike Leigh
again. Liz Smith generally played mums, grans and old ducks in Dickens
adaptations, at which she excelled. She was married to Jack Thomas and
had two
children. She was awarded the MBE in 2009. Her autobiography, Our Betty,
is a delightful memoir of an unusual but rewarding life.
ROGER SMITH (
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
JAMES
STACY (
The American actor James Stacy first wanted to be a professional football player but turned to acting at a friend’s suggestion. His first uncredited film appearance was in Sayonara (1957) with Marlon Brando. He was a sailor in South Pacific (1958) and continued in small parts on TV in Cheyenne, The Donna Reed Show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Perry Mason etc and the title role in Lancer, as well as Disney’s Summer Magic. In the 1970s he was in The Streets of San Francisco, Marcus Welby M.D. and Gunsmoke. However, in 1973 he lost an arm and a leg in a motorcycle accident but returned to work in 1975 in a role created for him by Kirk Douglas in Posse. He continued to work mainly on TV until 1992 but more trouble lay ahead. In 1995 he was arrested for child molestation, but fled and tried suicide. In 1996 he was charged again for child abuse and served six years in jail. Stacy was divorced from both Connie Stevens and Kim Darby. The good news is that he was Emmy-nominated twice for Just a Little Inconvenience (1977) and Cagney & Lacey (1981).
HARRY DEAN STANTON
(
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
KAY
STARR (
The popular American singer who had
great success in the
1950s with her chart hits ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and ‘Rock and Roll Waltz’
possessed a distinctively husky voice that endeared her to her many
fans. Born
Katherine Starks in
DAVID STOREY (
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
JEREMY
SUMMERS (
The British film and TV director
Jeremy Summers enjoyed a
long career from the early 1950s up to 2001, directing many popular
genre
films, comedies, musicals, horror and action adventures and some
high-profile
television series without ever helming any real classics of the cinema.
He was
a journeyman director like many in the British film industry who could
turn
their hand to whatever came along. He began as an assistant director on
Derby Day,
the Anna Neagle romantic comedy-drama from 1952. Then, in 1960,
he directed and co-wrote Depth Charge,
a B-movie released by British Lion. More features followed – The Punch and Judy Man, with Tony
Hancock,
Crooks in Cloisters, Ferry Across the
Mersey with Gerry and
the
Pacemakers, San Ferry Ann and Dateline Diamonds, by which time he was
also directing for TV His other film work included The
Vengeance of Fu Manchu, Five Golden Dragons, House of a Thousand
Dolls, Eve and Nightmare.
The
rest of his career was taken up with more television, including Tenko, Howard’s Way,
WOLFGANG
SUSCHITZKY (
Viennese-born cinematographer
Wolfgang Suschitzky, who has
died aged 104, fled from fascism in
Other features he worked on include No Resting
Place (1951), Cat
and Mouse
(1958), The Bespoke
Overcoat (1955), The
Boy Who Loved Horses (1961), The
Small World of Sammy Lee
(1963), Ulysses (1967), The Vengeance of She (1968), Ring of Bright Water (1969) and Living Free
(1972), Entertaining
Mr Sloane
(1970), Theatre of
Blood
(1973), Something to
Hide
(1972), Good and Bad at Games
(1983,
TV) and The Chain
(1984), both by Jack Gold, and Claudia
(1985), from a story by Mohamed Khan (q.v.). Perhaps Wolf’s
most memorable contribution was on Get
Carter (1971), Mike Hodges’ British
gangster film with Michael Caine in one of his best roles
and Suschitzky’s cinematography at its finest. He received a special
award from
Bafta for his cinematography in 2012, his one hundredth birthday year.
Wolfgang Suschitzky created a
photographic dynasty in that
his son Peter Suschitzky is also a celebrated cinematographer (Privilege, Lisztomania, The Rocky Horror
Picture Show, The Empire Strikes Back, Mars Attacks! and
many of David
Cronenberg’s films). Wolf’s grandson Adam, son of Peter, is a noted
director of
photography on television. He also had a daughter, Julia Donat, and
another
son, Misha Donat, who is a musician and film composer (Charlie
Bubbles, The
White
Bus, etc).
MICHAEL TUCHNER (
The Berlin-born film and television director lived in
PETER
VAUGHAN (
The British actor Peter Vaughan had
an immensely successful
career on stage, film and television over a period of some 75 years
from
provincial rep (at the age of 16), right up to his last film, Albatross (2011). Here was a great
character actor who could play any part, charming or villainous, with
equal
conviction. 
He may be best remembered for his role in
the sitcom (and film) of Porridge,
as the arch-criminal Harry
Grout who ruled with relish over Slade Prison’s family of felons.
He began his career on stage but by
1954 was on television,
too, until he started appearing, uncredited, in films such as The 39 Steps with Kenneth More, Sapphire, Village
of the Damned and Make
Mine Mink, playing policemen in all four. More police roles
came his way in
I Thank a Fool, The
Devil’s Agent, Hancock
(on TV), and The Victors. Stepping
out of character in 1964
Other of his films include Hammer’s Fanatic with Tallulah Bankhead, the
Boultings’ Rotten to the Core, The Naked
Runner, The Bofors Gun, Straw Dogs,
The Pied Piper, Ken
Russell’s Savage Messiah and Valentino, John Huston’s The
Mackintosh
Man, Terry Gilliam’s Time
Bandits and Brazil,
and The French
Lieutenant’s Woman. He was particularly moving as Anthony
Hopkins’s father
in The Remains of the Day. Vaughan was married twice, both to
actresses, first to Billie Whitelaw for 14 years from 1952 and then
Lillias
Walker for fifty years until his death.
ROBERT
VAUGHN (
American actor Robert
Vaughn
initially did stage work but soon entered 
television and saw most of his career
on the box. Having appeared in many of the popular series – As the
World Turns,
Gunsmoke, Dragnet,
etc – he finally got his own
show, The Lieutenant
in 1963 and then The
Man from
U.N.C.L.E.
in 1964 which made his name forever. He carried a spear in his first
film, The Ten
Commandments (1956), and then made a
few B-pictures including Roger Corman’s Teenage
Cave Man
(1958). His first major role was in The Young
Philadelphians (1959) earning him an Oscar nomination and
it was followed by The Magnificent Seven
(1960). After that it was a mixture of TV and movies, with
just a few outstanding films such as Borderlines,
Bullitt, Julius Caesar, The Mind of Mr Soames, The Towering
Inferno, S.O.B., Superman
III etc. Vaughn turned up in TV
series of The A
Team and The
Magnificent
Seven (playing a judge) and he won
an
Emmy for Washington Behind
Closed Doors
(1977). In
ANDRZEJ
WAJDA (6 March
1926-6 October 2016)
The Polish director
Andrzej Wajda became famous during the 1950s for his extraordinary
trilogy of
films documenting 
depicted
the escape by many
Poles during the Nazi invasion of 1944, fleeing via the sewers of
DEBORAH WATLING (
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
MORAY WATSON (
Sometimes cast as a military man in films and television,
actor Moray Watson was a captain in the army before studying drama at the
Moray Watson
MICHAEL WEARING (
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.
FRITZ
WEAVER (
American actor Fritz
Weaver made
his Broadway acting debut in Enid Bagnold’s The
Chalk Garden
in 1955, for which he earned a Tony Award nomination. He won
a Best Actor Tony for Robert Marasco’s Child’s
Play but lost out to James Mason in
the film version of 1972. He had been in television since 1948 and
continued
for much of his career on the small screen. Never perhaps a star,
Weaver was
always a reliable character actor who brought dignity to any role he
played. He
was in more films as his career progressed, from his first, Sidney
Lumet’s Fail-Safe
(1964), through Guy Green’s A Walk in the
Spring Rain (1970), Mike Nichols’ The
Day of the Dolphin, Marathon
Man, Frankenheimer’s Black
Sunday, Donald Cammell’s Demon
Seed, Lumet’s Power,
the remake of The
Thomas Crown Affair, and The Cobbler
(2014), with Adam Sandler. His last film was The
Congressman (2016), with
Treat Williams.
FRED WEINTRAUB (
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
ADAM WEST (
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
GENE
WILDER (
The American comedy actor began his
career in the theatre in
an off-Broadway 
production of Arnold Wesker’s Roots in 1961. He continued on stage and
on television until his
first film in 1967, a small part in Bonnie
and Clyde. Having met director Mel Brooks he was cast in The Producers (1967) as the hysterical
accountant Leo Bloom and subsequently made his best films with Brooks:
as the
drunken cowboy in Blazing Saddles
and
the Doctor in Young Frankenstein,
which
he co-wrote with Brooks. He had also made an impression in Start the Revolution Without
Me (1970), Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory (1971) and Woody Allen’s Everything
You Always Wanted to Know About Sex… (1972). Wilder took
to writing and directing and, although The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother and The World’s
Greatest Lover
were reasonably good, his Haunted
Honeymoon and The
Woman in Red were not as funny as they should have been. He
worked with Richard Pryor (who had co-written Blazing
Saddles) on Silver
Streak (1976), Stir
Crazy
(1982), See No Evil, Hear No Evil
(1989) and Another You (1991). He
also made films with the third of his four wives, Gilda Radner (she
died in
1989): Hanky Panky, The Woman in Red and Haunted Honeymoon. Wilder also did
further stage work in
was the
voice of Elmer in Yo Gabba Gabba!
(2015).
HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS
(
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.