The Screengrab : obituary

Claude Berri, 1934-2009

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:45:00 GMT

The French filmmaker Claude Berri passed away this week at age 74. One of the most esteemed figures in the national cinema of the 1980s, Berri was a total package as a filmmaker: he was a highly celebrated director, who won an Oscar and was nominated for a dozen Cesar awards, though he won none; he was an actor of no small talent; he was a skillful screenwriter; and even in the days when his best days as a director were behind him, he served as a producer for a number of influential and important films.

Berri was born to a Jewish family in Paris, and his entire family was immersed in the film industry. His sister, Arlette Langmann, is a notable French screenwriter and film editor; his brother-in-laws are director Jean-Pierre Rassam and producer Paul Rassam; and two of his sons (Julien Rassam and Thomas Langmann) and one of his nephews (Dmitri Rassam) are actors. Best known for his films Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, he won his Academy Award for the short film Le Poulet when he was 32 years old. As a producer, he worked on a range of projects, from Roman Polanski's Tess to Abdel-Latif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain.

In addition to his extensive resume as a filmmaker, Berri served as a judge at the Cannes Film Festival, oversaw several animated films, and nurtured the careers of a number of actors, including Gerard Depardieu and Emannuelle Beart. After his death from a stroke caused by a degenerative neurological condition on Monday, French president Nicolas Sarkozy eulogized him as "the most legendary figure of French cinema".

Robert Prosky, 1930-2008

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hollywood lost one of its most reliable stalwarts -- and the Screengrab lost one of its favorite character actor "That Guy!"s -- when Robert Prosky died Tuesday in a Washington, DC hospital from complications following heart surgery. He was 77 years old.

Probably best-known for his television work, especially as the dispatch sergeant who replaced Michael Conrad's Sgt. Esterhaus on Hill Street Blues, Prosky -- born Robert Prozuczek in Philadelpia -- also had a lively screen career and appeared in nearly three dozen big-screen productions, from Michael Mann's Thief to Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking. Already in his fifties when he netted his first movie role, Prosky specialized in playing world-weary older men, from working-class fathers to judges. He had a light touch with character, and one of his most beloved film roles was as the Al-Lewis-like horror movie host Grandpa Fred in the cult hit Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

For all his work in film, though, Prosky was most closely identified with his work on stage, and it was the theater which he enjoyed the most. He appeared in over 200 stage productions, nearly half of them at the Arena Stage in his beloved hometown of Washington, D.C. Although he did a great deal of work elsewhere -- including, famously, originating the role of Shelly "The Machine" Levene in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross -- he worked most of his life to support and raise the profile of the theater in Washington.

B.R. Chopra, 1914-2008

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Bollywood lost one of its most legendary directors today when B.R. Chopra, the commercially successful but often controversial filmmaker who managed to bring a tone of moral seriousness and ethical inquiry to an industry most often given over to frothy, lightweight musical entertainments, passed away at the age of 94. As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, Chopra's death from natural causes was announced by his son, also a film producer and a member of what has grown to be a prominent family in the Indian film industry.

Originally trained as a journalist and setting out to support a large family with only his determination to succeed as a filmmaker, crag-faced Baldev Raj Chopra initially encountered failure in his film career, helming a few forgettable romantic comedies before scoring mild success with popular thrillers that showed the influence of Hitchcock. It was in the 1950s that Chopra's career truly blossomed, mirroring the success of the industry itself; and, as time went on, he proved himself capable of scoring popular successes with traditionally-minded audiences while still seeking to push the boundaries of what was allowed in Indian film of the day.

Chopra's best-known film was Naya Daur, a 1957 musical that played up the conflict between technocratic urbanism and rural agricultural life at a time when India's leadership was pushing for more urban development and a transition from old-style community values. Though he worked with many of the biggest Bollywood stars, he sometimes made a statement by eschewing big names, such as in the 1980 drama Insaf ka Tarazu (dealing with the often-taboo subject of rape); he likewise bucked the Bollywood trend of featuring songs in every film in movies like the popular courtroom drama Kanoon. Though he directed his last film in 1992, he continued to act as a producer for his won B.R. Films company until 2006, when he released another controversial film -- Baabul -- which challenged the treatment of women in traditional Indian society. His most well-known work in the west, oddly, was not a film, but a television series: in 1988, he produced a serialization of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, which found an audience in the U.S. thanks to being syndicated by PBS.

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Mr. Blackwell, 1922-2008

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Richard Blackwell -- known to the world simply as Mr. Blackwell -- has died at the age of 86. Born Richard Selzer in Brooklyn, he took advantage of the endless possibilities for re-invention offered by the entertainment industry and became an icon in that time-honored way: finding a job that needed doing, and becoming the person who did it. Catty, witty, sensitive, and often brutal, he single-handedly invented the role of celebrity fashion critic and honed it to perfection decades before the internet and cable TV's endless Hollywood navel-gazing made it a common pursuit.

After a minor and unsuccessful stint as an actor on Broadway (where he briefly played, of all things, the leader of the Dead End Kids, a part made famous by Huntz Hall), he began working as a fashion designer. He later claimed to have pioneered the concept of designer jeans, but while his New York shop developed a small but loyal clientele, it wasn't until 1960 that he made a name for himself not by the praise he recieved for his own designs, but by complaining about what he saw as a trend towards absurd, overblown and unflattering fashions on the starlets of the day. Within a decade, he'd established himself as the country's foremost fashion critic, particularly when it came to the gowns sported by starlets at awards shows. His annual "Worst Dressed List" became, for some, an event to be anticipated as hotly as the Oscars or the Emmys.

Though Mr. Blackwell's pun-filled, sarcastic assessments were usually aimed at the people wearing hideous fashions, he was quick to recognize that it wasn't really their fault. Being a fan of Hollywood high fashion, and often on friendly terms with some of the celebrities he skewered, he was of two minds about his reputation as the bitchiest man in showbiz, and was insistent that he never meant to attack people -- only their clothes. "The job of fashion designers is to dress and enhance women, to make their beauty more evident," he told reporters early in his career. "Maybe I should have named the ten worst designers instead of blaming the women who wear their clothes." Had he done so, though, he might not have become famous for his acid comments, nor might he have become a gay icon in an era that had precious few of them. In the 21st century, the overwhelming force of media saturation has given us hundreds of witless wannabes who will crack none-too-wise about other peoples' fashion choices, but Mr. Blackwell will always be the first, and, informed by his own background and his genuine appreciation of the people he mocked, he will likely always be the best.

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Rudy Ray Moore, 1927-2008

Edie Adams, 1927-2008

Rudy Ray Moore, 1927-2008

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Rudy Ray Moore, the actor, comedian and musician who was perhaps more responsible than anyone for creating the lasting urban archetype of the flamboyant, hustling pimp, has died at the age of 81. The man born Rudolph Frank Moore in Fort Smith, Arkansas passed away yesterday in Akron, Ohio of complications from diabetes, according to a family friend.

Moore, whose own past as a lowlife hustler has always been difficult to trace -- given that he was the only source, and grotesque comic exaggeration was his stock in trade -- came of age putting out so-called "party records" for black audiences. Unapolagetically ribald and wild, often distributed on the gray market and issued at a rapid clip, "party records" were also where Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx saw their first success, but Moore never found a mainstream audience as did those men. His work was always ruder, cruder, and more sexually explicit than even Foxx's blue material -- which made him a natural for the blaxploitation era. His two most famous roles were honed from characters created in his stand-up and party-record days: Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law, and the unforgettable super-pimp Dolemite, the role which brought him his greatest fame. So closely was he associated with the role that many fans simply called him "Dolemite" for the rest of his career.

Rudy Ray Moore's persona in Dolemite, The Human Tornado, Petey Wheatstraw, and the ridiculous but unforgettable Disco Godfather -- which friends said was not much of an exaggeration of his real personality, honed from years of, as he put it, "listening to lying drunks outside of liquor stores" -- won him legions of fans when the hip-hop generation came of age, and in his latter days, he supported himself by appearing in projects produced by kids who remembered stealing furtive listens to his comedy records as kids. For an entire generation of black kids -- and a few very lucky white ones -- he was Dolemite, and fucking up motherfuckers was his game.

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Don LaFontaine, 1940-2008

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Regardless of whether your taste in film runs to blockbusters, independent fare or even artsy foreign films, you know Don LaFontaine's voice. In fact, no matter whose face you've seen most often at your neighborhood theatre, LaFontaine's is the voice you've heard the most. In the course of his forty-year career, he did so many voice-overs for television and film -- rising to his pinnacle of fame as "The 'In a World' Guy' due to that phrase's numbing regularity in movie trailers -- that he became known in the industry as the Voice of God.

It was not only the quality of LaFontaine's work, with its steady, rich, almost commanding tone, that made him a success; it was also its regularity. Starting in the mid-1960s, he embarked on an amazingly productive career that saw him voice the narration for over 3,000 television shows, an incredible 5,000 movies, and an absolutely mind-bending 350,000 commercials. LaFontaine also maintained a good sense of humor about his work, parodying his role as the Voice of God in nearly a dozen places, from Family Guy to Arrested Development. In a profile a few years ago on 60 Minutes, a day in the life of Don LaFontaine saw him knocking out as many as 75 voice-over jobs in a single day's work, and doing so in, to invoke a phrase rarely applied correctly in today's Hollywood, a consummately professional manner.

LaFontaine suffered a collapsed lung several months ago and never recovered; he passed away yesterday of complications from pneumothorax. It's hard to imagine what movie trailers will be like without him; so omnipresent was he as a cultural voice that things seem eerily silent in his absence.

Anthony Minghella, 1954 - 2008

Peter Smith — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:45:00 GMT

The Screengrab's Paul Clark is away from a workable computer, but asked me to post this tribute to Anthony Minghella:

MSN is reporting that Oscar-winning filmmaker Anthony Minghella passed away last night from a brain hemorrhage. Minghella, whose next film, the HBO/BBC production No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, is set to premiere next month in the UK, was fifty-four years old.

To many moviegoers, Minghella was best known as the director of prestige pictures such as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain. In fact, so associated was he with high-toned adaptations that he recently appeared as the moderator of a literary program in last year's Atonement. But his best work was not so easily pigeonholed. In his directorial debut, 1990's Truly Madly Deeply, Minghella employed a quirky sense of humor in service of a story about letting go of a departed loved one. In addition, to dismiss his best-known works as mere Oscar-bait is to overlook their emotional violence and often strange visions. Minghella's most recent film, the underseen Breaking and Entering, hinted at a move toward more personal projects.

Minghella began his career as a writer, writing numerous episodes of Jim Henson's The Storyteller for television and later serving as creator for The Storyteller: Greek Myths. He was also well-versed in theatre, having recently directed a production of Madame Butterfly for the New York Metropolitan Opera, and adapted Beckett's short drama Play for 2000's Beckett on Film Project. Minghella also headed the British Film Institute for a number of years.

My deepest condolences to Minghella's friends and family. For those of us who didn't know Minghella personally, there can be no greater tribute to his life than to celebrate his work. Personally, I plan to revisit Truly Madly Deeply, still my favorite film of his, and one that feels appropriate under the circumstances.

Breaking: Anthony Minghella Dead at 54

Peter Smith — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:30:00 GMT

This just in: Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, is dead at fifty-four. Little is known right now, but expect more details as the day goes on. We'd previously reported that Minghella was considering an English-language remake of last year's arthouse hit The Lives of Others. That sounds like a bad idea, but it's a damn shame to see Minghella go. More to follow.

R.I.P. Tony Silver, Director of Style Wars

Peter Smith — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:20:00 GMT

Sad news: Gothamist reports that Tony Silver, co-director of the classic hip-hop documentary Style Wars, died last weekend. The film, which first aired on PBS in 1983, is predominantly concerned with the then-flourishing art of graffiti, but expands to cover other elements of early hip-hop culture, including breakdancing and rapping. Not only is it endlessly quotable (my favorite: "'Destroy all lines?' What'd the lines ever do to you?"), but it also offers an unforgettable portrait of a different, grimier New York — a half-subterranean dystopia of train-yards, access tunnels and drainage culverts that, seen from today's corporate city, seems almost science-fictional. If you haven't seen Style Wars, check out the trailer here; the whole thing is floating around on Google Video, but we here at Screengrab assure you that it's well worth a DVD purchase (particularly since the DVD includes priceless "where are they now" footage which reveals, among other things, that Skeme's mother is still busting his chops.) We tip our hat to Mr. Silver, and thank him for the great film.

Roy Scheider, 1932-2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Roy Scheider has died in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 75. He had battled cancer in recent years; the cause of death has been reported as complications from a staph infection. Scheider made his film debut in a 1962 horror movie called The Curse of the Living Corpse and throughout the 1960s worked on the stage and on such TV soaps as The Edge of Night, Love of Life, and The Secret Storm. He began to get small movie roles in the late '60s, and had a breakout year in 1971, when, as a thirty-nine-year-old juvenile, he played Jane Fonda's pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman's police partner in The French Connection. (In interviews, and ultimately in a commentary track on The French Connection DVD, Scheider liked to tell a story about how he won the part after someone saw him blow a stage audition and was impressed with the brio with which off the director.) Scheider got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role, which would ultimately lead to his getting his first leading role in The Seven-Ups, a 1973 cop thriller directed by the French Connection producer Philip D'Antoni. But it was of course the 1975 Jaws that was Scheider's biggest hit and the movie that made him a familiar face to the public at large, and beloved to a generation of pop-eyed movie freaks. As the land-locked seaside Sheriff Brody, Scheider was the tentpole of a central triumverate that also included Richard Dreyfuss (wisecracking, brainy, Method) and Robert Shaw (macho, demented, classically theatrical). It was Scheider's job to anchor what would become the most successful movie ever made by serving as the likable audience identification figure, he pulled it off with a smooth, pro's grace.

Scheider starred in a number of other movies (including William Friedkin's Sorcerer, Last Embrace, Still of the Night, and Blue Thunder) but never again found himself at the center of anything near as big a blockbuster. He was also forced, by contractual committment, to appear in Jaws 2, which cost him the chance to star in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter. He did get an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for serving as the director Bob Fosse's alter ego in the 1979 All That Jazz; he didn't want, but his work in that picture will be remembered as among the best performances of his career. However, by the mid-1980s he was only getting big parts in smaller-budgeted pictures (such as 52 Pick-Up, made for Cannon Films) and indie productions (such as 1997's The Myth of Fingerprints) and appearing in smaller parts in such films as Fred Schepisi's The Russia House, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, and Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker. He also starred in the first season of the TV series SeaQuest DSV and played studio chief George Schaefer in RKO 281, an HBO film about the making of Citizen Kane. He kept working at a furious rate, and in one of his last appearances, as a serial killer on Death Row last year in an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, he showed that he was still capable of doing memorable work when the material he was given managed to meet him halfway.

Extremely Sad Breaking News: Heath Ledger Has Died

Gwynne Watkins — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:34:00 GMT

Twenty-eight-year-old Heath Ledger, one of Hollywood's most promising young actors, was found dead in his Manhattan apartment two hours ago, reportedly surrounded by sleeping pills. Ledger started out his career as a teen heartthrob, garnering young fans and critical derision with pap like A Knight's Tale — but like Leonardo DiCaprio and James Spader before him, Ledger quickly dropped the pretty-boy act for edgier fare that showed off his true range. His breakthrough performance as a taciturn gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain garnered him a slew of Best Actor nominations, including a bid for the Oscar (which he lost to Philip Seymour Hoffman). Ledger had plenty of cinematic prospects ahead: his interpretation of The Joker in The Dark Knight is already the year's most buzzed-about performance, and he was slated for the lead in Terry Gilliam's next film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. His death is a great loss for his generation of actors. (Speaking of which, between Ledger and Brad Renfro, we're starting to get seriously worried. Ryan Gosling, please tell us you're doing okay.)

Ion Fiscuteanu, 1937-2007

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

It takes a special kind of actor to dominate the screen in a role that requires him to remain physically prone and grow increasingly comatose over the course of a two-hour, thirty-three-minute movie. Ion Fiscuteanu pulled that feat off as the title character of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the 2005 black comedy that stormed the festival circuit, heralded the resurgence of the Romanian film industry, and won Mr. Fiscuteanu the Best Actor prizes at festivals in Copenhagen and his native Transylvania. Now Fiscuteanu has died, at the age of seventy, reportedly after a bout with colon cancer, which was one of the hundred or so ailments that the clueless, distracted doctors in the movie tried to ascribe to his character in the movie. Fiscuteanu was best known for his theater work, but also appeared in a handful of other movies, most notably the 1992 The Oak. But he will probably be best remembered for his unlikely starring role as the luckless Lazarescu, a modern image of man's impotence in the face of bureaucratic indifference and neglect, barely mustering the strength to raise a middle finger in protest as he's wheeled through the exit door. — Phil Nugent

Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007)

Peter Smith — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

Norman Mailer's death on November 10, at the age of eighty-four, was a great blow to American letters, and also to film lovers, robbing us as it did of a major literary artist whose relationship to the movies was just about unique. Mailer always said that he was seduced into writing by the novels of James T. Farrell, and he claimed Ernest Hemingway as a personal hero. Both Hemingway and Farrell reacted to the new primacy of movies by stripping their writing down, but Mailer wasn't really quite of that school. His style was sometimes downright baroque, and he loved to delve deep into the psyches of his characters, of real people, of himself and the events in which he was taking part. Nor did he have much truck with the common attitude among literary figures of his era that the movies were the enemy. Mailer loved the novel as a form and feared that it might be dying out, but he tried to keep it alive by writing as if he were making a movie on the page. And he went about that goal not cynically or opportunistically but whole-heartedly.

Mailer loved the pulpy immediacy of movies and envied them for their ability to insinuate themselves in modern audience's consciousness and place their stamp on society. At the same time, he deplored the unadventurousness of mainstream Hollywood fare of the 1950s and early 1960s, the period when he was making his name and finding his voice as a writer. In his novels An American Dream and Why Are We In Vietnam? and also in the great journalistic works in which he cast himself as reporter-hero, Mailer wrote the movies that he thought American filmmakers should have been making: unpredictable, crazy, symbolically charged and determined to grapple with current events and the deeper concerns of the country. Years later, in his awesome The Executioner's Song, he shifted gears and created the ultimate docudrama of post-sixties America, epic in scope, spare in style and altogether emotionally confounding. To read the books and then compare them with the movies that Hollywood did make of The Naked and the Dead and An American Dream is to see just how inadequate Hollywood would have been to make good on Mailer's ideas, even if it had wanted to take him up on it. To see the 1982 TV movie version of The Executioner's Song, starring a young Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore, and adapted for the small screen by Mailer himself, is to see that Mailer himself had better ideas about what movies ought to be than he had about how to make them.

That was already clear from the movies that Mailer made himself in the sixties — Wild 90 (1968), Beyond the Law (1968) and Maidstone (1970). These were edited down from hours and hours of unshaped improvisations with Mailer, who plays the lead in all three, and his actor buddies and various other celebrities taking off from a vague situation (a buncha gangsters hanging out, a buncha cops hanging out. . .) and saying and doing whatever comes into their heads. The proudest moment in all these hours of celluloid comes at the end of Maidstone, in which cast member Rip Torn, feeling unfulfilled at the end of the shoot, attacks a surprised Mailer with a hammer after everyone else thought the film had wrapped; the two men end up tussling on the grass while Mailer's children, with whom he had been shooting home movies with leftover film stock, can be heard crying off-camera.

These movies were based on Mailer's theory about bringing an exciting new level of "reality" to movies, a theory that he explicated in such essays as "Some Dirt in the Talk" and "A Course in Film-Making," and also in his essay on Brando and Last Tango in Paris. When Mailer's long-unavailable films were brought back for a special retrospective screening in New York this past summer, Gerald Howard called Maidstone "a video transmission from the faraway Planet '60s — a civilization in the throes of a crackup" and described the agony of waiting so long to see it after reading the "extraordinary essay" about its making. The fact that the film is unwatchable, to Howard, was kind of beside the point. That the essays Mailer wrote about what he was trying to do as a filmmaker are so much more vibrant and intellectually thrilling than what he did, is not just an example of empty hype. They're proof not that he wasn't onto something but that he was a writer, not a filmmaker. The essays will outlast the movies, and some distant future generation may feel disappointed if nobody finally cares enough to preserve the last prints of his beloved eyesores.

Mailer also gave scattered appearances in other people's films, playing Stanford White in Milos Forman's Ragtime (1981) and Harry Houdini in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2 (1999). He had a celebrated dust-up on The Dick Cavett Show and once brought his comedy stylings to the set of Gilmore Girls.

He also wrote scripts for TV movies about Robert Hansson and the O.J. Simpson trial, to be directed by his friend Lawrence Schiller. He contributed sound bites to documentary features on James Toback, the romance of Greenwich Village, the exploitation of 9/11, the Ali-Foreman fight, and Deep Throat. He contracted to write and star, with his actress daughter Kate, in an updated version of King Lear (with a Mafia setting, and with Norman to play "Don Learo") that was to be directed by Jean-Luc Godard and financed by Golan-Globus productions. Mailer apparently decided that this was too much even for him and fled the set, with his daughter in tow, after one day of shooting, though Godard went ahead and finished the film, or finished something anyway, with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. If Mailer made a public ass of himself and worse on more than one occasion, so did a lot of other people who didn't also manage to dash off The Armies of the Night. You will be missed, sir.

— Phil Nugent

Paul Norris, 1914 - 2007

Peter Smith — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

We got word from the folks at DC Comics this morning that artist Paul Norris, co-creator of the character Aquaman, has died at the age of ninety-three. While Aquaman has yet to show up in movie theaters, rumors of a forthcoming "screwball comedy" based on the character started circulating in 2004, then began afresh last year with the success of the fake-Aquaman-movie plot on Entourage. For now, Norris' memory is honored by this failed WB pilot, as well as countless episodes of Super Friends. — Gwynne Watkins

Peter Viertel, 1920 - 2007

Peter Smith — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

The writer Peter Viertel has died, at eighty-six, a little more than two weeks after the death of Deborah Kerr, to whom he was married for forty-seven years. A novelist, journalist, memoirist and all-around freelance word merchant and world traveler of the old school, Viertel wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Saboteur, adapted Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea for the movies, and did on-location script doctoring on John Huston's Beat the Devil and The African Queen. (In 1992, he commemorated his experiences with Hemingway, Huston and other notables in his book Dangerous Friends.) Yet his best-known accomplishment, and the work that made him a cult figure to generations of readers and movie fans, was his 1953 novel White Hunter, Black Heart. Readily acknowledged to be have been based on the time he spent in Africa with Huston while making The African Queen, the book details the verbal jousts between screenwriter "Pete Verrill" and the flamboyant, high-living director "John Wilson", described by the narrator as "the leading exponent of the 'screw-you-all' type of personality." The book is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written about the movie business. (It was filmed in 1990, with Jeff Fahey as the writer and with the movie's director, Clint Eastwood, swaggering around talking as if the Dust Bowl had settled in his larynx, as the Huston figure.) — Phil Nugent

Robert Goulet, 1933 - 2007

Peter Smith — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Robert Goulet has died, after a sudden illness, while waiting for a lung transplant. He was seventy-three. Goulet struck gold in 1960 when he was cast as Lancelot in the original Broadway production of the musical Camelot. That triumph led to a successful recording career and a string of TV appearances, notably as a favorite guest of daytime talk-show host Mike Douglas. He also returned to the Broadway stage, most recently in a revival of La Cage aux Folles.

But to movie audiences, Goulet had his own special niche: he was one of the pioneers of the straight-faced, ironic cameo appearance by the celebrity who may or may not be in on the joke. Goulet, who appeared in several "straight" dramatic roles on such TV series as Police Woman and Fantasy Island, never developed much skill as an actor, but whether playing the villain in a Naked Gun movie or getting shot through the roof in Beetlejuice or parodying himself by name in Scrooged or a memorable episode of The Simpsons, he seemed like a nice guy and a good sport. He may have been a sacred object to many a fan of Broadway ballads, but to a generation of movie lovers, he came to be fondly regarded as the Chuck Norris who sings. The two halves of his career came seamlessly together in the high point of his movie career, the great moment in Louis Malle's 1981 Atlantic City where, again playing a clueless version of himself, he presides over a publicity event in a casino lobby and attempts to serenade a woman (Susan Sarandon) who has just been informed that her husband's been murdered. — Phil Nugent

Deborah Kerr, 1921 - 2007

Peter Smith — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Deborah Kerr has died, after a long bout with Parkinson's, at eighty-six. The Scottish-born Kerr first made her mark in English movies with big, challenging roles in the Powell and Pressburger films The Life and Death of Major Blimp and Black Narcissus. In 1946, she made her first Hollywood film, co-starring with Clark Gable in The Hucksters, but probably her best-remembered screen pairing was with Burt Lancaster in the 1953 From Here to Eternity, where their iconic kissing scene lying on a beach set an enduring standard for thirtysomething romance. (Sixteen years later, director John Frankenheimer reunited the two of them for The Gypsy Moths, a yawner perhaps most notable for featuring the then forty-eight-year-old actress's only nude scene.)

Although she could be a charming ingenue, from the start of her career there was always something about Kerr that suggested a maturity beyond her years. If that put off some executives who liked their actresses simpering, it made for a strong presence and the ability to bring suggestions of depth and emotional complication to the right role. She triumphed in such parts as the adulterous military wife in From Here to Eternity and the loving but discontented wife of an Australian rover (Robert Mitchum) in The Sundowners, directed — like Eternity — by Fred Zinnemann. She won Oscar nominations for both those films, as she did for The King and I and Separate Tables. (She was nominated a total of six times without winning, though she was given a special honorary career Oscar in 1993.) She basically retired from movies after 1969, though she came back once to star in the small 1985 English picture The Assam Garden and sometimes turned up on TV until 1986; she also starred in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee's Seascape in 1975. Her survivors include her husband of forty-seven years, Peter Viertel, the author of the novel White Hunter, Black Heart. — Phil Nugent