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From the CNN alert that arrived in this morning’s email:
‘From Here to Eternity’ actress Kerr dies
Deborah Kerr, who shared one of Hollywood’s most famous kisses and made her mark with such roles as the correct widow in “The King and I” and the unhappy officer’s wife in “From Here to Eternity,” has died. She was 86.
Kerr, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, died Tuesday in Suffolk in eastern England, her agent, Anne Hutton, said Thursday.
For many she will be remembered best for her kiss with Burt Lancaster as waves crashed over them on a Hawaiian beach in the wartime drama “From Here to Eternity.”
. . .
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Kerr a six times for best actress, but never gave her an Academy Award until it presented an honorary Oscar in 1994 for her distinguished career as an “artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance.”
She had the reputation of a “no problem” actress.
“I have never had a fight with any director, good or bad,” she said toward the end of her career. “There is a way around everything if you are smart enough.”
. . .
She played virtually every part imaginable from murderer to princess to a Roman Christian slave to a nun.
In “The King and I,” with her singing voice dubbed by Marni Nixon, she was Anna Leonowens, who takes her son to Siam so that she can teach the children of the king, played by Yul Brynner.
Her best-actress nominations were for “Edward, My Son” (1949), “From Here to Eternity” (1953), “The King and I” (1956), “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” (1957), “Separate Tables” (1958), and “The Sundowners” (1960).
Among her other movies is “An Affair to Remember” with Cary Grant. …
I’m in serious fan mourning here. I absolutely adore Deborah Kerr. She was one of the most… well, I can’t put it any better than “an “artist of impeccable grace and beauty, a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood for perfection, discipline and elegance.” ‘Though I can add: She also possessed the most impeccable diction of any English speaker, ever.
One film the CNN obit doesn’t mention, which ranks right up there with From Here to Eternity, Heaven Knows Mr. Allison, The Innocents, and The King and I, is The Chalk Garden, a quiet but riveting little drama about secrets and lies, with Ms. Kerr’s cool demeanor masking something intense just beneath the surface, and a teenage Hayley Mills in an exceptionally fine performance. The cast is rounded out by Sir John Mills (Hayley’s dad) and Dame Edith Evans; all four are such brilliant actors, it’s nearly impossible to focus on just one. (And talk about a four-way lesson in perfect English diction!)
(Strangely, I’m the only person I know who’s never been wowed by An Affair to Remember — even though I love Cary Grant, too.)
Another film the article doesn’t mention: Ms. Kerr took her Broadway performance in Tea and Sympathy to the screen. While this isn’t among her top films, it is required “gay viewing”; John Kerr (no relation) is a student who is “different” (is he gay, or isn’t he?), and Ms. Kerr is the faculty wife who senses that he’s not at all like the other boys. Well worth watching at least once; I think a few scenes willl make you men cringe with recognition (such as the scene in which Mr. Kerr recruits a dorm mate to teach him how to walk like a “real” man).
One more note: You know the Columbia Pictures logo lady? I’ve always thought she looked like Deborah Kerr in costume as the Statue of Liberty.
Also of note today (although I bet I’m the only one who knows who she was): Teresa Brewer died overnight, too. She was a singer — a cute, very perky little singer, quite popular in the 1950s, and best known for “‘Til I Waltz Again with You” and “Music, Music, Music” (you know: “Put another nickel in / In the nickelodeon / All I want is lovin’ you / And music, music, music”). I liked her a lot.
I can’t say I was a big fan of Joey Bishop — but then, save for the inimitable style of Frank Sinatra, I can’t say there was much I liked about the whole boozin’-and-broad-chasin’ Rat Pack mentality. But Bishop, the third in today’s three celebrity deaths, certainly deserves a mention in… well, in passing.
Here’s one we missed — and it’s no wonder: We can’t find even one other story on the Web about it. Kudos to MassResistance Watch for keeping an eye on missives from the nasty MassResistance:
Massresistance posted this past week that J. Edward Pawlick, the guy who started the virulent anti-gay MassNews passed away this past weekend, however no obituary was published in either the Boston Globe or the Boston Herald.
I have a lot to thank Pawlick for. It was because of him that I became involved in the Equal Marriage movement. After I started reading MassNews I couldn’t wait to debunk the garbage he was posting and I started speaking out.
Every year he would have predictions about Massachusetts and none of them would come true. (I bet the small plane pilots will miss him too since he paid for a lot of anti-gay airplane banners.)
In the past few years I’ve written sparingly about Pawlick mostly because it was clear the poor guy was going off the deep end. To give you a little insight into Pawlick’s mind here are his predictions for 2004…
Oh, yes, do click the link for Pawlick’s Criswell-like predictions (and for a handful of reader comments).
French mime artist Marcel Marceau diesMarcel Marceau, the world’s best-known mime artist who for decades moved audiences across the globe without uttering a single word, has died aged 84.
. . .
Marceau was born in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg on March 22, 1923. He was brought up in Lille, where his father was a butcher. When World War Two came, his father was taken hostage and later killed by the invading Nazis and in 1944 Marcel joined his elder brother in the Resistance.
He later joined the French Army and served with occupation forces in Germany at the end of the war. …
. . .
For Marceau, mime had a philosophical and political level.
One of his most famous sketches was “The Cage,” in which he struggled to escape through an invisible ring of barriers, only to find that one cage succeeds another and there is no escape.
In Czechoslovakia before the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, he recalled that audiences understood it as an allegory about capitalism. After the invasion, they saw in it an image of themselves under Russian domination.
“I am a progressive, a man who deals for peace, and who has struggled for enlightenment in the world. I am not just an entertainer,” he said.
“I want to be a man who will represent as an active witness my time, and who wants to say, without words, my feelings about the world.”
Our beloved Esmeralda has died, leaving the surviving cast of “Bewitched“
From AP:
Actress Alice Ghostley Dies at 81Alice Ghostley, the Tony Award-winning actress best known on television for playing Esmeralda on “Bewitched” and Bernice on “Designing Women,” has died. She was 81.
Ghostley died Friday at her home in Studio City after a long battle with colon cancer and a series of strokes, longtime friend Jim Pinkston said.
. . .
Miles Kreuger, president of the Los Angeles-based Institute of the American Musical, said part of Ghostley’s charm was that she was not glamorous.
“She was rather plain and had a splendid singing voice, and the combination of the well-trained, splendid singing voice and this kind of dowdy homemaker character was so incongruous and so charming,” Kreuger said. …
. . .
Ghostley’s film credits include “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Graduate,” “Gator” and “Grease.” …
. . .
“I knew I didn’t look like an ingenue,” she told The Globe. “My nose was too long. I had crooked teeth. I wasn’t blond. I knew I looked like a character actress.
“But I also knew I’d find a way,” she added. …
Evangelist Tammy Faye Messner was remembered Monday night as a compassionate, forgiving child of God and a “bold witness for the Lord.”About 300 people filled the Victory Christian Center to bid farewell to Mrs. Messner, whose ties to the Inland area date to the 1980s when she and her then-husband Jim Bakker made the desert a favorite getaway. They bought their first desert house in 1984.
Mrs. Messner served as choir director, church organist and special soloist at the church. A color picture of her adorned a podium at the front.
Mrs. Messner died July 20 in Kansas City, Mo., after a long battle with inoperable cancer. She made her final appearance on “Larry King Live” a few days before her death, telling viewers that she couldn’t swallow food and weighed only 65 pounds.
At the service, many remembered Mrs. Messner for making the flea market circuit in the Coachella Valley, where she invariably stopped and prayed for everyone who came to her and said they were troubled.
. . .
She was also remembered for always having a kind word for a harried waitress or anyone she encountered on her famed shopping sprees in local department stores.
Sadly, Tammy Faye was picketed by you-know-who, too:
“Before the service, about 10 protesters from a Baptist church in Kansas stood at an intersection on Bob Hope Drive carrying placards criticizing Mrs. Messner because of her personal life and her well-known acceptance of gay people.“About 18 people staged a counter-protest across the street.”
Jane Wyman Dead at 93
From CNN:
Jane Wyman, an Academy Award winner for her performance as the deaf rape victim in “Johnny Belinda,” star of the long-running TV series “Falcon Crest” and Ronald Reagan’s first wife, died Monday morning at 93.Wyman died at her Palm Springs home, said Richard Adney of Forest Lawn Memorial Park and Mortuary in Cathedral City. No other details were immediately available.
Wyman’s film career spanned from the 1930s, including “Gold Diggers of 1937,” to 1969’s “How to Commit Marriage,” co-starring Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason. From 1981 to 1990 she played Angela Channing, a Napa Valley winery owner who maintained her power with a steely will on CBS’ “Falcon Crest.”
Her marriage in 1940 to fellow Warner Bros. contract player Reagan was celebrated in the fan magazines as one of Hollywood’s ideal unions. While he was in uniform during World War II, her career ascended, signaled by her 1946 Oscar nomination for “The Yearling.”
The couple divorced in 1948, the year she won the Oscar for “Johnny Belinda.” Reagan reportedly cracked to a friend: “Maybe I should name Johnny Belinda as co-respondent.”
After Reagan became governor of California and then president of the United States, Wyman kept a decorous silence about her ex-husband, who had married actress Nancy Davis. In a 1968 newspaper interview, Wyman explained the reason:
“It’s not because I’m bitter or because I don’t agree with him politically. I’ve always been a registered Republican. But it’s bad taste to talk about ex-husbands and ex-wives, that’s all. Also, I don’t know a damn thing about politics.”
A few days after Reagan died on June 5, 2004, Wyman broke her silence, saying: “America has lost a great president and a great, kind and gentle man.”
From KOMO TV:
Merv Griffin dies at age 82
Merv Griffin, the big band-era crooner turned impresario who parlayed his “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune” game shows into a multimillion-dollar empire, died Sunday. He was 82.
Griffin died of prostate cancer, according to a statement from his family that was released by Marcia Newberger, spokeswoman for The Griffin Group/Merv Griffin Entertainment.
From his beginning as a $100-a-week San Francisco radio singer, Griffin moved on as vocalist for Freddy Martin’s band, sometime film actor in films and TV game and talk show host, and made Forbes’ list of richest Americans several times.
His “The Merv Griffin Show” lasted more than 20 years, and Griffin’s said his capacity to listen contributed to his success.
. . .
But his biggest break financially came from inventing and producing “Jeopardy” in the 1960s and “Wheel of Fortune” in the 1970s. After they had become the hottest game shows on television, Griffin sold the rights to Coca Cola’s Columbia Pictures Television Unit for $250 million in 1986, retaining a share of the profits.
. . .
He was also a longtime friend of former President Reagan and his wife, Nancy. …
We’re still reeling over the death of Ingmar Bergman. Granted, both men were well up in years, but both on the same day…? It’s a lot for any true lover of film to take.
From the New York Times:
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director whose chilly canticles of alienation were cornerstones of international filmmaking in the 1960s, inspiring intense measures of admiration, denunciation and confusion, died on Monday at his home in Rome, Italian news media reported today. He was 94. He died on the same day as Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who died at his home in Sweden earlier Monday.
“With Antonioni, not only has one of the greatest living directors been lost, but also a master of the modern screen,” said the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. His office said it was making plans for Mr. Antonioni’s body to lie in state on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
Tall, cerebral and resolutely serious, Mr. Antonioni harkens back to a time in the middle of the last century when cinema-going was an intellectual pursuit, when purposely opaque passages in famously difficult films spurred long nights of smoky argument at sidewalk cafes, and when fashionable directors like Mr. Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard were chased down the Cannes waterfront by camera-wielding cineastes demanding to know what on earth they meant by their latest outrage.
Mr. Antonioni is probably best known for “Blow-Up,” a 1966 drama set in Swinging London about a fashion photographer who comes to believe that a photograph he took of two lovers in a public park also shows, hidden in the background, evidence of a murder. But his true, lasting contribution to cinema resides in an earlier trilogy — “L’Avventura” in 1959, “La Notte” in 1960 and “L’Eclisse” in 1962 — which explores the filmmaker’s tormented central vision that people had become emotionally unglued from one another.
. . .
One interviewer asked him to look back over his life. “In a world without film, what would you have made?” he was asked.
Mr. Antonioni replied: “Film.”
Lots more at the link, and well worth the read.
Also worth reading is this piece at The Guardian:
Ingmar Bergman left in the early hours of yesterday morning. Within a few hours, Michelangelo Antonioni had followed him through the exit door. It remains to be seen whether this signals the onset of some art-house apocalypse - some Biblical purge of revered European auteurs - but the omens are hardly encouraging. How are Godard, Resnais and Rohmer bearing up? Can we urge them to stay indoors, wrap up warm, and maybe put on some old DVDs. Anything to keep them out of circulation until the curse has run its course.
In the meantime I’m hunting parallels between Bergman and Antonioni, two men who are destined to be forever linked in death. Thankfully there are some obvious ones. Both were near contemporaries who came to epitomise the foreign-language film scene during its creative and commercial heyday in the 1950s and 60s. Both were regarded as rigorous, high-minded directors who typically chose to focus on modern man’s sense of alienation in a God-less universe. Both, to their detractors, could be aloof, portentous artists who made great demands of their viewer … and all in return for the revelation that we are all lost and lonely and doomed to die. Gee, thanks a bunch.
And yet these directors were very different too. If Bergman was the great high priest of the European art-house, then Antonioni was its puckish intellectual. His films were at once more playful and more spare than Bergman’s. L’Avventura and L’Eclisse are cerebral, teasing puzzle pictures. Blowup is a roguish, vogueish mystery play. Zabriskie Point offered a freewheeling, anthropological tour of an American counter-culture that - one suspects - never really existed outside of Antonioni’s head to begin with.
The Guardian reports:
The legendary Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman died this morning at his home on the island of Faro. According to his daughter, Eve, the director of The Seventh Seal and Persona died peacefully in his sleep. He was 89.
. . .
Such was Bergman’s stark, uncompromising vision that he found himself a byword for existential gloom, a man whose films offered a pitiless vision of a Godless universe. Yet while there is no denying the serious nature of Bergman’s work, the stereotype conveniently ignored the lush eroticism of films shown in films such as Summer With Monika, or the joyous comedy that runs through Smiles of a Summer Night or A Lesson in Love.
A frequent sufferer of depression, the director knew the importance of keeping his demons at arm’s length. “If I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage,” he said. “Lilies often grown out of carcasses’ arseholes.”
. . .
In later years, Bergman rarely left his home on the remote Swedish island of Faro and earned a reputation as a recluse, a stern old magus locked away from all but his nearest and dearest. In the course of a rare interview in 2004, he admitted that his own personal favourites of his films were Winter Light, Persona and Cries and Whispers. However, he added that he now rarely watched any of his movies because he found them “too depressing”.
A colossus of world cinema, Ingmar Bergman influenced a generation of film-makers who were inspired both by his effortless command of the medium and his high-minded sense of its moral and artistic possibilities. In 1988, Woody Allen hailed him as “probably the greatest artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”
