Celeste Holm, a versatile, bright-eyed blonde who soared to Broadway fame in "Oklahoma!" and won an Oscar
in "Gentleman's Agreement" but whose last years were filled with
financial difficulty and estrangement from her sons, died Sunday, a
relative said. She was 95.
Holm had been hospitalized about two weeks ago with dehydration after a fire in actor Robert De Niro's
apartment in the same Manhattan building. She had asked her husband on
Friday to bring her home, and she spent her final days with her husband,
Frank Basile, and other relatives and close friends by her side, said
Amy Phillips, a great-niece of Holm's who answered the phone at Holm's
apartment on Sunday.
Holm died around 3:30 a.m. at her longtime apartment on Central Park West, Phillips said.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
SAG-AFTRA Mourns the Passing of Fern Persons
SAG-AFTRA mourns the passing of former SAG National Board member Fern Persons, who died Sunday in Denver. Persons would have been 102 on July 27.
A working actress all of her life, Persons joined AFTRA on Dec. 5, 1937, and was the fifth member of the SAG Chicago Branch when she joined on August 31, 1953. She was elected to the Chicago Branch Council in 1962 and served for 44 years until 2006, when she stepped down only because she could no longer drive. She also served more than 30 years on the AFTRA Chicago Local Board.
Persons was elected to the SAG National Board in 1976, and served on that body until 1998. During that time, from 1977-81, she was elected SAG 5th national vice president. She served as a SAG Regional Branch Division representative on TV/Theatrical and Commercials negotiating committees throughout the 1980s and intermittently through the 1990s.
Finally, as co-chair of the Chicago AFTRA/SAG Seniors Committee from 1984 to 2003, Persons spearheaded many projects designed to increase employment opportunities for senior members. She was the force behind the creation of the AFTRA/SAG Senior Radio Players in 1996, which continues to this day in Chicago as the SAG-AFTRA Senior Radio Players.
Because of Persons’ decades of union leadership and contributions to the lives of Chicago actors and broadcasters, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley declared July 27, 1999 Fern Persons Day. Person's was honored in 2006 with the AFTRA Founders Award and, in 2009, she was awarded SAG's prestigious Howard Keel Award. This past May, Persons donated $100,000 to Chicago's Kaufherr Members Resource Center endowment fund. In appreciation, the KMRC video suite was renamed The Fern Persons Video Suite.
SAGACTORONELINE Editor note: I knew Fern in her national capacity. She stood up for actors who live and love their craft outside of LA and NYC. He knowledge and drive helped us through productive years, including our overlapping time on the National board 1995 to 1999.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Doris Singleton RIP: I LOVE LUCY and Sit Com Star
From SAG-AFTRA andThe Alternative Film Guide
I Love Lucy actress Doris Singleton, Lucy Ricardo’s snooty, class-conscious neighbor in the highly popular ’50s sitcom, died Tuesday, June 26. Doris Singleton was 92.
Initially, Singleton was a big-band singer and radio actress. In the early ’50s, she started appearing on the new medium of (commercial) television. She is best remembered as I Love Lucy‘s pretty, smartly dressed, meticulously coiffed Carolyn Appleby, always doing her best to appear above her two frumpier, lower middle-class, bourgeois neighbors: Lucille Ball’s aforementioned Lucy Ricardo and Vivian Vance’s Ethel Mertz.
Doris Singleton: Busy TV actress
Doris Singleton’s handful of TV movie roles included those in Michael Caffey’s The Boy Who Stole the Elephant (1970), featuring veterans David Wayne and June Havoc; George Schaefer’s biopic Amelia Earhart (1976), with Susan Clark in the title role and John Forsythe; and Jack Bender’s Deadly Messages (1985), a thriller starring Kathleen Beller and Michael Brandon, and Singleton’s last appearance in front of the camera.
Doris Singleton: Only three movies
According to the IMDb, Doris Singleton could be spotted in only three feature films: an uncredited part in Franklin Adreon’s crime drama Terror at Midnight (1956), toplining Scott Brady; as John Lund’s romantic interest — and a judo-expert investigator — in R.G. Springsteen’s low-budget comedy Affair in Reno (1957); and a supporting role in Harry Keller’s Voice in the Mirror (1958), a drama about alcoholism featuring Richard Egan, Julie London, Walter Matthau, and Troy Donahue.Monday, July 16, 2012
Celeste Holm, Broadway Star, Oscar-winning actress, dies at 95
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Actress Celeste Holm in 1997.
(Kevork Djansezian / Associated Press)
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Related photos »
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Ernest Borgnine, Oscar-Winning Actor, Dies at 95
SAG Lifetime Achivement Award Winner Ernest Borgnine RIP
Ernest Borgnine, Oscar-Winning Actor, Dies at 95
United Artists
Ernest Borgnine, left, as the title character in "Marty," with Betsy Blair. More Photos »
Borgnine earns SAG Lifetime Achivement Award (click here).
Earnest Borgnine supporting Child Literacy.
By ANITA GATES
NEW YORK TIMES (click here for access)
Ernest Borgnine,
the rough-hewn actor who seemed destined for tough-guy characters but
won an Academy Award for embodying the gentlest of souls, a lonely Bronx
butcher, in the 1955 film “Marty,“ died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 95.
His death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was announced by Harry Flynn, his longtime spokesman.
Mr. Borgnine, who later starred on “McHale’s Navy”
on television, made his first memorable impression in films at age 37,
appearing in “From Here to Eternity” (1953) as Fatso Judson, the
sadistic stockade sergeant who beats Frank Sinatra’s character, Private
Maggio, to death. But Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote “Marty” as a television
play, and Delbert Mann, who directed it (it starred Rod Steiger), saw
something beyond brutality in Mr. Borgnine and offered him the title
role when it was made into a feature film.
The 1950s had emerged as the decade of the common man, with Willy Loman
of “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway and the likes of the bus driver
Ralph Kramden (“The Honeymooners”) and the factory worker Chester Riley (“The Life of Riley”)
on television. Mr. Borgnine’s Marty Pilletti, a 34-year-old blue-collar
bachelor who still lives with his mother, fit right in, showing the
tender side of the average, unglamorous guy next door.
Marty’s awakening, as he unexpectedly falls in love, was described by
Bosley Crowther in The New York Times as “a beautiful blend of the crude
and the strangely gentle and sensitive in a monosyllabic man.”
Mr. Borgnine received the Oscar for best actor for “Marty.” For the same
performance he also received a Golden Globe and awards from the New
York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review and the British
Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Mr. Borgnine won even wider fame as the star of the ABC sitcom “McHale’s
Navy” (1962-66), originating the role of an irreverent con man of a PT
boat skipper. (The cast also included a young Tim Conway.) He wrote in
his autobiography, “Ernie” (Citadel Press, 2008), that he had turned
down the role because he refused to do a television series but changed
his mind when a boy came to his door selling candy and said, although he
knew who James Arness of “Gunsmoke” and Richard Boone of “Have Gun, Will Travel” were, he had never heard of Ernest Borgnine.
Over a career that lasted more than six decades the burly, big-voiced
Mr. Borgnine was never able to escape typecasting completely, at least
in films. Although he did another Chayefsky screenplay, starring with
Bette Davis as a working-class father of the bride in “The Catered Affair” (1956), and even appeared in a musical, “The Best Things in Life Are Free” (1956), playing a Broadway showman, the vast majority of the characters he played were villains.
Military roles continued to beckon. One of his best known was as Lee Marvin’s commanding officer in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), about hardened prisoners on a World War II commando mission. He also starred in three television-movie sequels.
But he worked in virtually every genre. Filmmakers cast him as a gangster, even in satirical movies like “Spike of Bensonhurst” (1988). He was in westerns like Sam Peckinpah’s blood-soaked classic “The Wild Bunch” (1969) and crime dramas like “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955).
He played gruff police officers, like his character in the disaster blockbuster “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), and bosses from hell, as in the horror movie “Willard” (1971). Twice he played a manager of gladiators, in “Demetrius and the Gladiators” (1954) and in the 1984 mini-series “The Last Days of Pompeii.”
Mr. Borgnine’s menacing features seemed to disappear when he flashed his
trademark gaptoothed smile, and later in life he began to find good-guy
roles, like the helpful taxi driver in “Escape From New York” (1981) and the title role in “A Grandpa for Christmas,” a 2007 television movie.
“McHale’s Navy” and the 1964 film inspired by it were his most notable
forays into comedy, but in 1999 he began doing the voice of a recurring
character, the elderly ex-superhero Mermaidman, in the animated series
“SpongeBob SquarePants.” He continued to play that role until last year.
He began his career on the stage but unlike many actors who had done the
same, Mr. Borgnine professed to have no burning desire to return there.
“Once you create a character for the stage, you become like a machine,”
he told The Washington Post in 1969. In films, he said, “you’re always
creating something new.”
Ermes Effron Borgnino was born on Jan. 24, 1917, in Hamden, Conn., near
New Haven. His father was a railroad brakeman. His mother was said to be
the daughter of a count, Paolo Boselli, an adviser to King Victor
Emmanuel of Italy.
The boy spent several years of his childhood in Italy, where his mother
returned during a long separation from her husband. But they returned to
Connecticut, and he graduated from high school there.
He joined the Navy at 18 and served for 10 years. During World War II he
was a gunner’s mate. After the war he considered factory jobs, but his
mother suggested that he try acting. Her reasoning, he reported, was,
“You’ve always liked making a damned fool of yourself.”
He studied at the Randall School of Drama in Hartford, then moved to
Virginia, where he became a member of the Barter Theater in Abingdon and
worked his way up from painting scenery to playing the Gentleman Caller
in “The Glass Menagerie.”
In the late 1940s he headed for New York, where by 1952 he was appearing
on Broadway as a bodyguard in the comic fantasy “Mrs. McThing,”
starring Helen Hayes. He had already made his movie debut playing a
Chinese shopkeeper in the 1951 adventure “China Corsair.”
Mr. Borgnine never retired from acting. In the 1980s he starred in another television series, the adventure drama “Airwolf,”
playing a helicopter pilot. He took a supporting role as a bubbly
doorman in the 1990s sitcom “The Single Guy.” His last film appearance
was in “The Man Who Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez,” not yet
released, in which he plays an elderly man who becomes a celebrity to
Latino employees at the nursing home where he lives. On television, he
was in the series finale of “ER” in 2009 and appeared in a cable film,
“Love’s Christmas Journey,” last year.
His other films included “The Vikings” (1958); “Ice Station Zebra” (1968); “Hoover” (2000), in which he played J. Edgar Hoover; and “Gattaca” (1997).
Mr. Borgnine, who lived in Beverly Hills, was married five times. In
1949 he married Rhoda Kemins, whom he had met when they were both in the
Navy. They had a daughter but divorced in 1958. On New Year’s Eve 1959 he and the Mexican-born actress Katy Jurado were married; they divorced in 1962.
His third marriage was his most notorious because of its brevity. He and
the Broadway musical star Ethel Merman married in late June 1964 but
split up in early August. Mr. Borgnine later contended that Ms. Merman
left because she was upset that on an international honeymoon trip he
was recognized and she wasn’t.
In 1965 he married Donna Rancourt; they had two children before
divorcing in 1972. In 1973 he married for the fifth and last time, to
Tova Traesnaes, who under the name Tova Borgnine became a cosmetics
entrepreneur.
She survives him, as do his children, Christofer, Nancee and Sharon
Borgnine; a stepson, David Johnson; six grandchildren; and his sister,
Evelyn Verlardi.
Asked about his acting methods in 1973, Mr. Borgnine told The New York
Times: “No Stanislavsky. I don’t chart out the life histories of the
people I play. If I did, I’d be in trouble. I work with my heart and my
head, and naturally emotions follow.”
Sometimes he prayed, he said, or just reflected on character-appropriate
thoughts. “If none of that works,” he added, “I think to myself of the
money I’m making.”
Multimedia
George Brich/Associated Press
Mr. Borgnine outside his home in Hollywood, Calif., in 1969. More Photos »
NEW YORK TIMES (click here for access)
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Ray Bradbury RIP at 91
My favorite writer growing up is dead. He inspired my love of science
fiction, writing, acting and my passion for believing in the wonders of
the mind and of being who you are, your own way!
www.youtube.comScience fiction author Ray Bradbury regales his audience with stories about his life and love of writing in "Telling the Truth."
www.youtube.comScience fiction author Ray Bradbury regales his audience with stories about his life and love of writing in "Telling the Truth."
From the Chicago Tribune..click here:
Ray Bradbury,
whose books took readers on imaginary journeys to the outermost edges
of the galaxy without leaving their own back yards, has died at age 91,
according to published reports. The author of classic books such as
"Fahrenheit 451" and "The Martian Chronicles" was born in Waukegan, Ill,
on Aug. 22, 1920, the son of a utility lineman. He was living in Los
Angeles at the time of his death, his home for the past several decades.
Bradbury's daughter confirmed his death to the Associated Press on Wednesday morning. She said her father died Tuesday night in Southern California.
Bradbury's daughter confirmed his death to the Associated Press on Wednesday morning. She said her father died Tuesday night in Southern California.
Author of more than 27 novels
and story collections and more than 600 short stories, Bradbury has
frequently been credited with elevating the often maligned reputation of
science fiction. Some say he singlehandedly helped to move the genre into the realm of literature.
“The only figure comparable to mention would be [Robert A.] Heinlein and then later [Arthur C.] Clarke,” said Gregory Benford, a UC Irvine physics professor and Nebula Award-winning science fiction writer. “But Bradbury, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, became the name brand.”
Much of Bradbury's accessibility and ultimate popularity had to do with his gift as a stylist — his ability to write lyrically and evocatively of lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense of visual clarity and small-town familiarity.
Bradbury frequently attempted to shrug out of the narrow “sci-fi” designation, not because he was put off by it, but rather because he believed it was imprecise.
“I'm not a science fiction writer,” he was frequently quoted as saying. “I've written only one book of science fiction [“Fahrenheit 451”]. All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.”
Ray Douglas Bradbury was born Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Ill., to Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and the former Esther Marie Moberg. As a child he soaked up the ambiance of small-town life — wraparound porches, fireflies and the soft, golden light of late afternoon — that would later become a hallmark of much of his fiction.
“When I was born in 1920,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2000, “the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn't exist. TV didn't exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.”
“The only figure comparable to mention would be [Robert A.] Heinlein and then later [Arthur C.] Clarke,” said Gregory Benford, a UC Irvine physics professor and Nebula Award-winning science fiction writer. “But Bradbury, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, became the name brand.”
Much of Bradbury's accessibility and ultimate popularity had to do with his gift as a stylist — his ability to write lyrically and evocatively of lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense of visual clarity and small-town familiarity.
Bradbury frequently attempted to shrug out of the narrow “sci-fi” designation, not because he was put off by it, but rather because he believed it was imprecise.
“I'm not a science fiction writer,” he was frequently quoted as saying. “I've written only one book of science fiction [“Fahrenheit 451”]. All the others are fantasy. Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.”
Ray Douglas Bradbury was born Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Ill., to Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and the former Esther Marie Moberg. As a child he soaked up the ambiance of small-town life — wraparound porches, fireflies and the soft, golden light of late afternoon — that would later become a hallmark of much of his fiction.
“When I was born in 1920,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2000, “the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn't exist. TV didn't exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.”
Sunday, May 6, 2012
TV icon from Andy Griffith Show George Lindsey RIP
George Lindsey, best known as Goober Pyle Dead at 83.
George "Goober" Lindsey, most widely known for playing Goober Pyle on the iconic television series The Andy Griffith Show, died Sunday in Nashville after an extended hospitalization. He was 83.
As long as his health allowed, he was still making people smile. The Hee Haw star showed up at Ray Stevens' CD release party Feb. 28 at The Rutledge to lend support to his good friend and fellow comedian. Stevens beamed from the stage as he thanked Lindsey for being there.
"He was in a wheelchair that night, and he was really going out of his way to show up for that," says Stevens, who was friends with Lindsey for 35 years. "That's the kind of friend he was."
Actor Andy Griffith said in a statement that accompanied the family's Sunday morning announcement of Lindsey's death: "George Lindsey was my friend. I had great respect for his talent and his human spirit. In recent years, we spoke often by telephone. Our last conversation was a few days ago. We would talk about our health, how much we missed our friends who passed before us and usually about something funny. I am happy to say that as we found ourselves in our eighties, we were not afraid to say, 'I love you.' That was the last thing George and I had to say to each other. 'I love you.' "
Lindsey's career was much broader than the confines of Mayberry. Lindsey also appeared in M*A*S*M*A*S*H, Gunsmoke, Herbie the Love Bug and C.H.I.P.S. He was in movies including Take This Job and Shove It and Cannonball Run II, was a judge for the Miss USA pageant for years, and lent his voice to an assortment of animated Disney characters in movies including The Aristocats, The Rescuers and Robin Hood. He recorded a comedy album in 1971, Goober Sings!, and was a member of the Hee Haw cast for 20 years.
Lindsey, who lived in Nashville at the time of his death, was born in Fairfield, Ala., Dec. 17, 1928, to parents George Ross Lindsey and Alice Smith Lindsey, and grew up in Jasper, Ala. His mother was disabled, and his father struggled to find work. He was the couple's only child and was primarily raised by his grandparents.
He enjoyed spending time at his Aunt Ethel's gas station where the mechanics wore felt caps to keep the grease and oil from the cars from dripping in their hair. Their caps inspired the beanie Lindsey wore as Goober on the "Andy Griffith Show."
From an early age, Lindsey had a sharp sense of humor and comedic timing and became interested in acting at age 14 after seeing a production of Oklahoma! Also an athlete, he played football in high school and went to college at Florence State Teachers College (now the University of North Alabama) on a football scholarship. While there, he also participated in the school's theatrical productions.
Lindsey graduated in 1952 with a teaching certificate and a degree in biological science and physical education. He joined the Air Force and was stationed at Pinecastle Air Force Base in Orlando, where was recreation director. While in Orlando, he met Joyanne Herbert, who became his wife and the mother of his two children, daughters Camden and George Jr. Lindsey and Herbert were married from 1955 to 1991.
Lindsey was discharged from the military in 1956 and moved back to Alabama, where he was a teacher and a basketball coach at a high school outside Huntsville. From there, he and his wife moved to New York City in the late 1950s, where the teacher and would-be actor enrolled in classes at the American Theater Wing. After graduation, Lindsey found work with small parts in local theaters before launching his professional career with significant roles in Broadway plays All-American and Wonderful Town, which led him to Los Angeles with the dream of being a television actor.
He signed with William Morris Agency and after appearing in small roles on multiple television shows, he landed the part of Goober Pyle on The Andy Griffith Show in 1964 — about two years after he first tried out for the role of Gomer Pyle, which was awarded to Jim Nabors. Lindsey acted on the show until it was canceled in 1968, and from there, he took the Goober character to the spinoff Mayberry R.F.D. The show was canceled in 1971. The comedy album won the attention of executives at country variety show Hee Haw, the actor's professional home for the next 20 years.
"Hee-Haw was a great place for George to continue doing what he loved to do, and nobody can crawl inside his head, but he seemed to be pretty happy doing what he was doing when I was there," Stevens says. "I know I enjoyed doing the Hee-Haw shows. It was a big happy family. I think he had a pretty full life."
Lindsey also toured heavily as a comedian, often opening shows in the late '70s for The Oak Ridge Boys. Joe Bonsall remembers the joke Lindsey opened his set with every night.
"He would say, 'I was backstage splashing toilet water on my face and the lid fell on my head,'" Bonsall says. "And of course he wrote it, he was very proud that he wrote all of his own jokes. The first words you heard out of his mouth when you saw him off stage was a joke. It never stopped with George, and I guess that's what you got to be to be a great comic."
In addition to his work on screen, Lindsey was also heavily involved in charity work. He's a recipient of the Minnie Pearl Humanitarian Award, and he raised more than $1.7 million for the Alabama Special Olympics through his George Lindsey Celebrity Golf Tournament.
"Goober was a very caring man," Bonsall explains. "He just cared about stuff and he cared about people. He cared about what people were going through and he was so good with people. People would come up to him and he would put his arm around them and they would just light up because that was Goober. I always enjoyed our times with him."
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Ben Gazzara, Risk-Taking Actor, Is Dead at 81
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Source: New York Times (click here).
Ben Gazzara, an intense actor whose long career included playing Brick in the original “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway, roles in influential films by John Cassavetes and work with several generations of top Hollywood directors, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 81.A veteran of more than 133 films, dozens of TV roles and a three time Broadway Tony Award Winner, he studied under Lee Strassberg and was friends with many of Hollywood and New York's "greatest generation."
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his lawyer, Jay Julien, said. Mr. Gazzara lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Gazzara studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, where the careers of stars like Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger were shaped, and like them he had a visceral presence. It earned him regular work across half a century, not only onstage — his last Broadway appearance was in the revival of “Awake and Sing!” in 2006 — but in dozens of movies and all sorts of television shows, including the starring role in the 1960s series “Run for Your Life.”
If Mr. Gazzara never achieved Brando’s stature, that was partly because of a certain laissez-faire approach to his career: an early suspicion of film, a reluctance to go after desirable roles.
“When I became hot, so to speak, in the theater, I got a lot of offers,” he said in a 1998 interview on “Charlie Rose.” “I won’t tell you the pictures I turned down because you would say, ‘You are a fool.’ And I was a fool.”
And yet Mr. Gazzara’s enduring reputation may well rest on his film work, specifically the movies he made with Mr. Cassavetes, the actor and director revered by cinephiles for his risk-taking independent projects and a directorial style that encouraged spontaneity.
The two had had bit parts in the 1969 comedy “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” but it was in “Husbands” (1970), directed by Mr. Cassavetes, that they, along with Peter Falk, really made an impression as unhappily married men out for a drunken night on the town together. As Mr. Gazzara wrote in his autobiography, “In the Moment” (2004), the on-camera camaraderie was so convincing that people assumed the three men had been lifelong friends; in fact they had barely known one another when the filming began, though they became friends during it.
Mr. Gazzara’s most important role for Mr. Cassavetes was in “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976), in which he played a strip club owner in debt to the mob. “It’s a thoughtful, intelligent interpretation of a role that just may not have as much depth to it as he’s ready to give it,” Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Gazzara’s performance.
In 1977 Mr. Gazzara had a supporting role behind Mr. Cassavetes and his wife, Gena Rowlands, in the backstage story “Opening Night,” with Mr. Cassavetes again directing. Speaking of Mr. Cassavetes recently, Mr. Gazzara said, “He set the climate for an actor to feel free to give whatever, and if it didn’t work, it didn’t work.” Mr. Cassavetes died in 1989.
Two years after making “Opening Night,” Mr. Gazzara joined forces with another important director, Peter Bogdanovich, who gave him a rare leading role in “Saint Jack,” an adaptation of Paul Theroux’s novel about an American who operates a brothel in Singapore. He worked again for Mr. Bogdanovich in “They All Laughed” (1981), as a private detective who falls in love with the woman he is assigned to follow. The woman was played by Audrey Hepburn, with whom Mr. Gazzara had a brief romance after they met on the set of the 1979 film “Bloodline.”
Mr. Gazzara worked with numerous other notable directors, among them Otto Preminger, whose courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959) featured Mr. Gazzara as a military man who is tried for killing his wife’s rapist and defended by James Stewart’s small-town lawyer. In David Mamet’s 1997 film, “The Spanish Prisoner,” he played the possibly duplicitous boss of an inventor who has come up with a valuable idea. Wearing a slick white suit, he was a producer of pornographic movies in the Coen brothers’ “Big Lebowski” in 1998. In Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” in 1999, he was a mobster.
Beginning in the early 1980s Mr. Gazzara spent substantial stretches of time acting in movies in Italy, where he had a villa in Umbria. He appeared in Marco Ferreri’s 1981 adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s “Tales of Ordinary Madness”; “Il Camorrista” (1986), directed by Giuseppe Tornatore; and Stefano Mignucci’s “Bandits” (1995).
“You go where they love you,” he said in a 1994 interview with Cigar Aficionado, explaining his work in Italy.
Mr. Gazzara had parallel careers on the stage and in television. His first significant stage role was as a two-faced bully named Jocko in “End as a Man,” about life in a Southern military academy. Developed at the Actors Studio, it opened on Broadway in 1953. “Jocko is attractive, clever and alert on the surface, but evil at the core,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times, “and Mr. Gazzara’s acting perfectly expresses this ambivalence.”
Then, in March 1955, came “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” in which he played the alcoholic son Brick to Burl Ives’s Big Daddy in the Tennessee Williams classic, with Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie. Elia Kazan directed. The play ran till November 1956, but Mr. Gazzara left the cast early to take another Broadway role, in “A Hatful of Rain,” which opened in the fall of 1955. He played a dope addict named Johnny Pope, and the performance earned him a Tony Award nomination.
But his next Broadway venture, “The Night Circus,” closed in less than a week in 1958, and he did not return to Broadway until a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude” in 1963. His other Broadway work included a 1976 production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opposite Colleen Dewhurst, which earned him another Tony nomination, as did his dual roles in a 1975 double bill of O’Neill’s “Hughie” and David Scott Milton’s “Duet.”
Mr. Gazzara also acted in Off Broadway and regional productions, among them “Nobody Don’t Like Yogi,” a one-man show about Yogi Berra, which Mr. Gazzara began performing in 2003 and took all over the country for two years.
He was a familiar presence on television. “Run for Your Life,” in which he played a terminally ill man, was seen on NBC from 1965 to 1968, earning him two Emmy nominations. He was nominated again for his role as the father of a young man with AIDS in the 1985 television movie “An Early Frost”; his old friend Ms. Rowlands played his wife. He won a supporting-actor Emmy for his work in the 2002 HBO film “Hysterical Blindness,” playing the romantic interest of a character again played by Ms. Rowlands.
Mr. Gazzara was born Biagio Anthony Gazzara on the East Side of Manhattan on Aug. 28, 1930, the son of Antonio Gazzara, a laborer who did carpentry and laid bricks, and the former Angela Cusumano. Both his parents had immigrated from Italy, and they often spoke Italian at home, giving Mr. Gazzara a language skill that served him well when he began making films there. He grew up in a building at 29th Street and First Avenue, where, he wrote in his autobiography, he slept on the fire escape in summer and occasionally heard screams from the patients at Bellevue psychiatric hospital.
When he was about 11, he saw a friend act in a play at the Madison Square Boys Club and was bitten by the acting bug himself. He performed in shows there and, when he was older, found his way to the Dramatic Workshop in Midtown. A radio actress he met there, Louise Erickson, who would become his first wife, told him about the Actors Studio, and in 1951 he successfully auditioned for it.
That marriage ended in 1957. In 1961 he married the actress Janice Rule, whom he had met in 1958 when they appeared in a short-lived production of “The Night Circus.” They had a daughter, Elizabeth. That marriage, too, ended in divorce, not long after Mr. Gazzara met a German model, the former Elke Stuckmann, while filming the war movie “Inchon” in Seoul in 1979.
They were married in 1982; she and his daughter survive him, as does another daughter, Danja, his wife’s child from a previous relationship, whom Mr. Gazzara adopted. A brother, Anthony, also survives.
Mr. Gazzara was treated for oral cancer in 1999, but he said his bigger health battle was against depression, lasting on and off for decades. In a 2005 appearance before a group of mental health professionals, he recalled dealing with the condition 25 years earlier while shooting “They All Laughed.”
“I was in a depression during the whole shooting, and I was terrific in that film,” he said. “And I don’t remember doing it.”
NBC
Ben Gazzara in the television series “Run for Your Life” in 1966. More Photos »
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Leo Friedman
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Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Cheetah, RIP
Primate Actor from 'Tarzan' Films, Dies
The chimpanzee, who was about 80 at his time of death, appeared in the early 1930s installments of the famous franchise.
One of the most famous animal actors in Hollywood history is gone.
Cheetah, the chimpanzee sidekick from Tarzan films, died of kidney failure over the weekend at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, Florida. The Tampa Tribune reports that he was roughly 80 years old.
Hardly the only primate to take on the iconic role, Cheetah probably received the most exposure. He appeared in the 1932-1934 installments of the franchise, at the beginning of its heyday when Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller took over the title role.
In addition to having the distinction of being famous, Cheetah's longevity was one of his greatest accomplishments. Suncoast outreach director Debbie Cobb noted that chimpanzees generally live between 35 to 45 years in captivity, and only 25 to 35 years in the wild.
She also spoke highly of his character.
"He was very compassionate," Cobb told the Tampa Tribune. "He could tell if I was having a good day or a bad day. He was always trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day. He was very in tune to human feelings."
Cheetah moved to the sanctuary around 1960, where he remained the most famous of its primate residents until his death. His interests included finger-painting, watching football and nondenominational Christian music.
Among Cheetah's Tarzan features were Tarzan and His Mate and Tarzan the Ape Man, where he starred alongside Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan, who played "Jane."
O’Sullivan’s daughter, actress Mia Farrow, reacted to Cheetah's passing on her Twitter account, painting a less flattering portrait than Cobb.
"My mom, Tarzan's Jane, referred to Cheetah-the-chimp as 'that bastard,'" she wrote, "saying he bit her at every opportunity."
From The Hollywood Reporter (click here).
Cheetah, the chimpanzee sidekick from Tarzan films, died of kidney failure over the weekend at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, Florida. The Tampa Tribune reports that he was roughly 80 years old.
Hardly the only primate to take on the iconic role, Cheetah probably received the most exposure. He appeared in the 1932-1934 installments of the franchise, at the beginning of its heyday when Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller took over the title role.
In addition to having the distinction of being famous, Cheetah's longevity was one of his greatest accomplishments. Suncoast outreach director Debbie Cobb noted that chimpanzees generally live between 35 to 45 years in captivity, and only 25 to 35 years in the wild.
She also spoke highly of his character.
"He was very compassionate," Cobb told the Tampa Tribune. "He could tell if I was having a good day or a bad day. He was always trying to get me to laugh if he thought I was having a bad day. He was very in tune to human feelings."
Cheetah moved to the sanctuary around 1960, where he remained the most famous of its primate residents until his death. His interests included finger-painting, watching football and nondenominational Christian music.
Among Cheetah's Tarzan features were Tarzan and His Mate and Tarzan the Ape Man, where he starred alongside Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan, who played "Jane."
O’Sullivan’s daughter, actress Mia Farrow, reacted to Cheetah's passing on her Twitter account, painting a less flattering portrait than Cobb.
"My mom, Tarzan's Jane, referred to Cheetah-the-chimp as 'that bastard,'" she wrote, "saying he bit her at every opportunity."
From The Hollywood Reporter (click here).
Friday, December 23, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
'Col. Potter' Has Died: Actor Harry Morgan Was 96
Harry Morgan discusses Col. Sherman Potter on M.A.S.H - EMMYTVLEGENDS
Dragnet to M*A*S*H star Harry Morgan RIP
Harry Morgan, as Col. Potter.
His hometown newspaper writes that Morgan "came a long way from the young man who acted in Muskegon [Mich.] High School productions."
"He was born Harry Bratsburg and graduated from Muskegon High School in 1933," The Muskegon Chronicle says.
Morgan's movie credits include roles in The Ox-Bow Incident, High Noon, The Glenn Miller Story and How the West Was Won.
But as the AP says, it was his role as the fatherly Col. Sherman Potter for which Morgan will be most remembered. "M*A*S*H was so damned good," he once told the AP. "I didn't think they could keep the level so high."
Enlarge CBS/Landov
Col. Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan) was a father figure to Cpl. Radar O'Reilly (Gary Burghoff).
M*A*S*H, a sitcom about an Army medical unit during the Korean War, was one of the best satires on television. As doctors cracked wise, it was often Morgan's character who provided the moral outrage.
"Every month there's a new procedure we have to learn because somebody's come up with an even better way to mutilate the human body," Potter said in one episode. "Tell me this, captain, how the hell am I supposed to keep up with it? If they can invent better ways to kill each other, why can't they invent a way to end this stupid war?"
Potter was decent, sympathetic and embodied a kind of folksy middle-American sensibility.
"He just seemed and carried himself like the last reasonable man in the middle of craziness," said James Poniwozik, television critic for Time magazine.
In 1983, Morgan spoke at a press conference about ending a series so beloved that the last show drew a record 125 million viewers. He said someone had asked him if he thought M*A*S*H had made him a better actor.
"And I said I didn't know about that, but I know it's made me a better human being and there aren't many shows you can say that about," he said.
Morgan alluded to his long career as a character actor, performing on Broadway, in movies and on the TV show Dragnet before he got cast in M*A*S*H during its fourth season.
"I've done about a hundred movies plus and this is my eighth television series, and believe me in my experience there's never been a congregation of actors put together that would come within a mile of this bunch," he said, trying to hold back tears. "And I'm gonna miss them very much."
Jamie Farr, who played the cross-dressing company clerk, Cpl. Max Klinger, said that even in a cast filled with cutups, Morgan was infamous for being funny.
"He was terrible; he was absolutely the worst," Farr said, affectionately. "I wish you could see some of the outtakes; we had some great ones."
Farr said he spent most of Wednesday exchanging emails and phone calls with members of the cast. He said Mike Farrell, who played B.J. Hunnicutt, was a huge presence in Morgan's last days; he kept everyone updated from the hospice with emails. The last one he sent Wednesday said Morgan had died around 3 a.m., peacefully and in his sleep.
From NPR News (click here).
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Career Fair and other Events at Henderson Campus
Please click on link below to view:
http://sites.csn.edu/newsweb/SpecialEvNov1411/index.html
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Monday, November 7, 2011
Sid Melton, Comic Actor of Film and TV, Dies at 94
By PAUL VITELLO
From the New York Times (click here for the latest entertainment news).
Sid Melton, the jug-eared character actor best known for his regular roles in the television shows “Make Room for Daddy” and “Green Acres,” and for his unflagging reliability as the comic relief in many science-fiction and noir films of the 1950s, died on Wednesday in Burbank, Calif. He was 94.
Sid Melton, the jug-eared character actor best known for his regular roles in the television shows “Make Room for Daddy” and “Green Acres,” and for his unflagging reliability as the comic relief in many science-fiction and noir films of the 1950s, died on Wednesday in Burbank, Calif. He was 94.
Sid Melton as a guest on the television show "Green Acres."
Mr. Melton’s acting career spanned more than a half-century, from his stage debut in a road production of the Broadway play “See My Lawyer” in 1939, to a recurring role as the husband (deceased, appearing in flashbacks and dreams only) of Sophia, the mother of Bea Arthur’s character in “The GoldenGirls,” the television sitcom, between 1985 and 1992.
At 5-foot-3, with a thin-lipped grin that seemed to stretch from ear to ear and the speaking voice of a Brooklyn cabbie, circa 1950, Mr. Melton played the funny man in most of the 140 movie and TV roles in which he was cast.
He later landed a regular job in 1949 with Lippert Pictures, a B-movie studio that churned out scores of low-budget movies, most of them made in less than a week. As a member of the studio’s ensemble, he played nebbishy or comic roles in dozens of films, including “The Treasure of Monte Cristo,” “Mask of the Dragon,” and “Lost Continent,” in which he is eaten by a triceratops.
In the early 1950s TV show “Captain Midnight,” which was part of CBS’s Saturday morning children’s lineup, he was the hero’s sidekick, Ichabod Mudd. Well into the 1990s, Mr. Melton said, old fans of the show greeted him with Mudd’s signature self-introduction, “Mudd with two D’s,” as if it were a secret handshake.
Mr. Melton appeared on the sitcom, “Make Room for Daddy,” later known as “The Danny Thomas Show,” from 1953 to 1964, as Uncle Charley Halper, the owner of the nightclub where the character played by Mr. Thomas performed.
He also played Alf Monroe, one of two incompetent carpenter siblings on the improbable, campy and very popular sitcom, “Green Acres,” which ran from 1965 to 1971. A recurring gag was that Alf’s “brother” Ralph was a woman, a fact that only Oliver, played by Eddie Albert, seemed to find odd.
Sidney Meltzer was born May 22, 1917, in Brooklyn, one of five children of Isidor and Fannie Meltzer. His father was a well-known comedian in Yiddish theater. He was married once, in the 1940s, but the marriage was annulled. “After that he kept dogs, mainly wire-haired terriers,” said David Lawrence, his brother-in-law.
He is survived by two nephews, Adam and Dean Lawrence.
Mr. Melton once told a reporter that despite his long-established comic persona, he would have loved “to do drama, not comedy.”
“I am not a comic,” he told The Christian Science Monitor in a 1970 interview. He considered himself an actor playing comic roles, he said.
On the other hand, he added, he liked the steady work that came his way in comic roles, and he had come to accept the limits of his physical inheritance. “I am not too tall and handsome,” he said.
From the New York Times (click here for the latest entertainment news).
Monday, September 19, 2011
Deloris Hope RIP at 102 years young
From KCRW and People.com:
Dolores Hope, the radiant wife of comedian Bob Hope, died peacefully Monday at her home in Toluca Lake, Calif., a family friend confirms to PEOPLE. She was 102 and had been in relativity good health until the past few months.
The former Dolores DeFina, born in the Bronx, was singing in a Manhattan nightclub under the professional name Dolores Reade when newcomer Bob Hope, after a performance in a Broadway show, walked into the club with the dancer George Murphy. Hearing Reade sing "It's Only a Paper Moon," Hope said to Murphy, "I'm going to marry her." He did, Feb. 19, 1934.
Lucille Ball once said, "The smartest thing Bob Hope ever did was marry Dolores."
Bob and Dolores honeymooned in Europe and sailed home on the Queen Mary – its final voyage before she was converted into a troop carrier for service during World War II. Hope, by then a famous radio comedian, began entertaining American servicemen overseas for the USO – and his wife often made the trips with him, sleeping on their coats and never complaining about the discomforts.
Giving up her career to raise their children – they had four: Tony, Linda, Kelly and Nora – Dolores was also active in charities, an inveterate golfer (like her husband), an animal fancier and an avid follower of current events. Then again, she and Bob had met every President and First Lady from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to Bill and Hillary Clinton. She considered herself a political independent.
While Bob traveled continuously, she kept adding on to their homes in Palm Springs and Toluca Lake (in the San Fernando Valley), which prompted her husband to quip when he got back from one trip, "Hey, I need a map."
Despite having put her singing career on hold for fifty years, Dolores reactivated it when she was in her late 80s, releasing CDs of old standards and singing at the Rainbow and Stars nightclub in New York's Rockefeller Center with her dear friend Rosemary Clooney. Both the CDs and the singing engagement were critical hits.
As she admitted, she paid to produce the CDs herself, "but it's better than buying another piece of jewelry," she said with a laugh.
A devout Catholic who liked to have a martini after Mass – Bob's den in the Toluca Lake house served as her private chapel – Dolores once asked Bob where he wanted to be buried. "Oh, just surprise me," he told her.
Bob Hope died in 2003, age 100, and is buried in the San Fernando Mission Cemetery. Dolores will have the plot beside him, and private services for family are planned for Friday.
ET.com first reported her passing.
From KCRW and People.com:
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