I don't know if you all got the memo, but today is lights out for the Screengrab. It's been fun. We'll never know for sure whether we were cut down in the prime of life just as we were about to ascend to undreamed-of heights or five minutes before we finally wore out our welcome for good, but either way, I'm going to miss the place when I'm dancing for nickles in front of the bus station. We could go down all stoic and stiff upper lip as if it weren't killing us inside, but who the hell are we, Clive Brook? (That's one of the beloved obscure movie references that have made us such a blockbuster hit.) But if we're going to get maudlin, at least we can show a little class and get maudlin about the loss of something grander than our own paychecks. So, before we leave some cheese on the table for the student loan collection officers and slip out the back window and over that hill there, we'd like to burn off some bandwidth by listing our precursors: some of the people who had barely begun to show what they could do in movies before they were cruelly yanked away.

Two points: Jean Harlow, Jean Vigo, F. W. Murnau, James Dean, Phil Hartman, River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, Natasha Richardson-- all the prematurely departed who have taken on legendary status or seem well on their way to claiming it, aren't here, not as any implied put-down of them but because we wanted to concentrate on some people who perhaps haven't had their full fifteen minutes of public mourning. And if we missed somebody, the comments box is right there. Do the right thing.

PHILLIP BORSOS (1953-1995)

Borsos built up a strong reputation in the '70s based on his documentary shorts (Cooperage, Spartee, and Nails) before hitting a home run with his first feature film, the 1982 Western The Grey Fox, a Canadian production that won seven "Genie" awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and, for its American star Richard Farnsworth, "Best Foreign Actor." More recently, it was selected for preservation by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada. The movie was a cult success when released in the U.S., and Borsos went to Hollywood, though the high-profile pictures he made there in 1985, The Mean Season and One Magic Christmas, failed to keep up the momentum. He made two more features, Bethune (1990) and Far From Home: Adventures of Yellow Dog; it was around the time he working on the last one that he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died before the picture was released in 1995.

BARRY BROWN (1951-1978)

As a young actor makiing his way in the 1970s, Brown developed a screen image as a sweetly decent old-fashioned boy cast adrift, a James Stewart throwback in a Robert Mitchum world. His big break came in 1972 when he was cast in a pair of offbeat Westerns, Phil Kaufman's The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid, and, as the lead alongside Jeff Bridges, in Robert Benton's Bad Company. Both films were critically respected but neither was a hit, and his next big movie, Peter Bogdnaovich's Daisy Miller, was an attempted vehicle for Cybill Shepard that did no one involved in it any good. Alcoholism and depression hampered his career, and after starring in a cheesy action film called The Ultimate Thrill, he continued to work on the stage and in TV but made no more movies except for a small role that the director Joe Dante wrote for him in the 1979 horror comedy Piranha. He died a year before its release, a suicide.

MERRITT BUTRICK (1959-1989)

In his short life, Butrick managed to get involved in two different TV-based cults. He first attracted attention on Anne Beatts's high school sitcom Square Pegs, where he was cast as a punk. Standards & Practices forced Beatts to soften the character, but Butrick managed to turn this to his advantage, playing "Johnny Slash" not as the stereotypical angry dweeb but a confused, sweet soul whose brain is phoning its instructions to its body in from distant cloud. (Whether through influence, imitation, or great minds thinking alike, Gary Oldman brought much the same spirit to his Sid Vicious.) By the time the show premiered, he had already made his movie debut in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, playing the son of James T. Kirk. (The character was later killed off in a calamitously staged scene in Star Trek III, a low moment for the franchise on every level.) His other movie credits include Head Office, Shy People, and Fright Night Part II, but his most memorable later role may have been on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which he played an alien trying to get his hands on a drug to ease the suffering on his home planet, which had been ravaged by plague. At the time, Butrick knew that he was dying of AIDS.

KATRIN CARTLIDGE (1961-2002)

American audiences will always associate Cartlidge for her work with Mike Leigh, though by the time she entered movies, she was already a familiar face to British audiences after five years on the TV serial Brookside. She was stunning in Leigh's Naked as Lesley Sharp's flatmate, huddled in on herself, her eyes bright and wary but not quite comprehending, a woman who always feels as if she might scream but is hoping that something will make her laugh instead. Leigh subsequently built Career Girls around her and also shoehorned her into a small role in Topsy Turvy. She also appeared in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, in the title role of Lodge Kerrigan's Claire Dolan, in Chris Menges's The Lost Son, as Rade Serbedzija's English lover in Before the Rain, as Varya in Mihalis Kakogiannis's film of The Cherry Orchard, in Kathryn Bigelow's The Weight of Water, as a TV reporter in the Bosnian film No Man's Land, and as one of Jack the Ripper's victims in From Hell. She died suddenly from complications of pneumonia and septicaemia. Von Trier's Dogville is dedicated to her.

JOHN CAZALE (1935-1978)

Cazale earned instant immortality by creating the role of Fredo in the Godfather films, thus ensuring that his character's name will come up whenever someone is fumbling for a shorthand way of saying that someone should perhaps not be trusted with matches. This achievement is all the more impressive if you've read Mario Puzo's novel and know that Cazale basically built that underwritten character from the ground up, brick by brick, which in turn must have inspired Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola to be sure and do right by him when they wrote the screenplay for Part II. Not counting a short film made in 1962, The Godfather was his movie debut; in the six years left to him, he played Gene Hackman's assistant in Coppola's The Conversation, partnered with Pacino again in Dog Day Afternoon, and played Sal in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, alongside his fiance, Meryl Streep. If that was a batting average, it would make Ted Williams smash his own slugger and piss on the pieces in envious despair. Cazale had already been diagnosed with bone cancer when he was making The Deer Hunter; he died before it was released.

BARBARA COLBY (1939-1975)

With her deep, nasal twang and the kind of choppers that look as if they were made to chew gum the way a vampire's fangs are made to draw blood, Colby was the stuff of which legendary comic character actors are made. She had a special way of delivering the most devastating wisecracks in a warm way, as if she thought you'd hate to miss out on this great zinger she had about your wardrobe. She got her first real movie roles in 1974 and 1975, making her debut in a little movie called Memory of Us, and then playing Jeff Goldblum's receptionist in California Split and appearing in the road movie Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins. By that time, she had attracted attention for her work on TV, notably in an episode of Columbo that was directed by the young Steven Spielberg, in which she played one of those ninnies who thinks that the best way to handle a man you know is guilty of murder is to blackmail him into marrying you, and a recurring role as a hooker on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Hired as a regular on the spin-off series Phyllis, she had completed the first three episodes before she and a fellow actor were shot to death in a Los Angeles parking lot. The crime was never solved.

RUPERT CROSSE (1927-1973)

In the 1969 William Faulkner adaptation The Reivers, Crosse gave the kind of performance where you can all but see the film's nominal star, Steve McQueen, saluting him and telling him what an honor it is to have the picture stolen from him by such a worthy adversary. Some of the galloping high spirits of that performance can also be seen in his debut, in the 1959 improvisation-based Shadows, directed by John Cassavettes. Cassavettes later gave him a role in Too Late Blues, and he turns up briefly at the start of Ride in the Whirlwind, written by and starring his pal Jack Nicholson. Crosse was overdue for a breakout role when Nicholson and director Hal Ashby offered him the second lead in The Last Detail, but the routine physical required to get the production insured revealed that he had lung cancer and wound be dead within the year. In Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Nicholson gave props to Ashby for his decision to give Crosse a few days to think about whether he wanted to spend his last months working on the movie or if, as he eventually concluded, he had other priorities.

STEVE GORDON (1938-1982)

After several years in televion, Gordon made his movie debut as a director with the 1981 Dudley Moore film Arthur, which he also wrote. That movie had a lot that was stale in the set-up and a lot that was misconceived in the execution, so the fact that it made audiences howl the way it did is a tribute to Gordon's way with a one-liner. The writer Cynthia Heiml toasted Gordon for finally bringing some new, good jokes, actual jokes, to the screen, and Pauline Kael paid him the back-handed compliment of saying that, as a director, he was a long way from being able to do with images what he could already do with words. Sadly, he would get no farther; Gordon died of a heart attack a year later, leaving Arthur looking very lonely on his IMDB page.

Click here for Part Two