Ok, I'll go along w/ that.

TCM will probably be rerunning her interviews w/ Robert Osborne over the next week or so. I believe she did one solo and then another with Robert Mitchum at her side. We'll see if she had anything to say about the matter.

David Broder died

Washington (CNN) -- David Broder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post political columnist, died Wednesday from complications relating to diabetes, the newspaper said.

He was 81.

Broder, known as the "dean of the Washington press corps," won the Pulitzer in 1973 for his coverage of the Watergate scandal. He covered every national political convention since 1956, according to the Post.

"David spent his professional life with political leaders at all levels of society, from precinct captains to presidents, on Capitol Hill, and in State Houses and City Halls in all fifty states," Broder's family said in a statement posted on the Post's website....

Holy Toledo Batman. Alfred is dead.

http://www.tmz.com/2011/03/17/alfred-bat...n-the-avengers/

Michael Gough had quite a long career; many years before the Batman films, he appeared in a number of British horror films from the 1950s through the 1970s. Off the top of my head:

Horror of Dracula (UK: Dracula)
Horrors of the Black Museum
Konga
Phantom of the Opera (1962)
Dr. Terror's House of Horrors
The Skull
Berserk
Trog
The Legend of Hell House

I'm sure there were many others, but these just popped into my head. The Batman films gave his career quite a shot in the arm when many actors would have already retired.

RIP

Signor V.

The big news is, Alfred was still alive?

I was like 8 or 9 years old when that show was originally on, and he was like a hundred then!

Well, God bless him. To the Bat Grave, Robin.

Yeah, that was pretty tasteless of me .

Of coure I'm no expert having not seen ANY of the Batman movies, but...

Could some of us be confusing Michael Gough with the 'Alfred' from the original Batman tv series, Alan Napier (1903–1988) ???

Napier would've been around 65 then...and from my recollection he DID appear quite a bit older. But then again when you're 10 years old everybody over age 40 would probably look ancient!!!

Sure sounds like it. Here is a photo of Alan Napier.



I remember in the mid-1980s there were two talk shows that had Batman (TV show) "reunions" and Napier was on one of them. This was probably within a year or so of his death, and I remember that even though he was in a wheelchair by then, he was still quite lucid and talkative. In fact, they had a hard time keeping him quiet! I just wish I could remember the name of the show or who hosted it. Probably the IMDb could supply the answer, but the ol' ComputerSaurus doesn't want to deal with those complicated pages.

Signor V.

Pinetop Perkins, one of the last old-school bluesmen who played with Muddy Waters and became the oldest Grammy winner this year, died at his home of cardiac arrest. He was 97.
Perkins was having chest pains when he went to take a nap and paramedics could not revive him, said Hugh Southard, Perkins' agent for the last 15 years.
The piano man played with an aggressive style and sang with a distinctive gravelly voice.
B.B. King said in a statement that he was saddened by the loss of his friend.

"He was one of the last great Mississippi Bluesmen," King said. "He had such a distinctive voice, and he sure could play the piano. He will be missed not only by me, but by lovers of music all over the world."

Perkins accompanied Sonny Boy Williamson on the popular King Biscuit Time radio show broadcast on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas, in the 1940s. He toured with Ike Turner in the 1950s and joined Waters' band in 1969.

"He is the blues, he is the epitome of it," Southard said. "He lived it, breathed it."

Perkins won a Grammy in February for best traditional blues album for Joined at the Hip: Pinetop Perkins & Willie 'Big Eyes' Smith. That win made Perkins the oldest Grammy winner, edging out late comedian George Burns, who was 95 when he won in the spoken category for Gracie: A Love Story in 1990.

Perkins also won a 2007 Grammy for best traditional blues album for his collaboration on the Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen: Live in Dallas. He also received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2005.

Even at his age, he was a regular fixture at Austin blues clubs, playing regular gigs up to last month. He had more than 20 performances booked this year, Southard said. After they won the Grammy this year, Smith and Perkins discussed recording another CD. Perkins was born in Belzoni, Mississippi, in 1913 and was believed to be the oldest of the old-time Delta blues musicians still performing.

In an 80-year career, he played at juke joints, nightclubs and festivals. He didn't start recording in his own name until he was in his 70s and released more than 15 solo records since 1992.
That drive to keep playing the blues is what kept him alive, Southard said. Smith said Perkins once told him he was happiest when he was playing music.

Just saw that Elizabeth Taylor has died.

http://www.etonline.com/news/109032_Breaking_News_Elizabeth_Taylor_Has_Died/index.html

Just heard on the radio that Elizabeth Taylor has died.

Hospitalized recently for congestive heart failure...and in bad health for past few years.

Not unexpected but VERY sad...one of the last BIG movie stars.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110323/ap_on_en_mo/us_obit_taylor

RIP, Liz...

RIP Liz

I heard it here before I saw it on yahoo news!

Gosh, remember when you couldn't find one single movie magazine without Liz on the cover???? She was really beautiful and a good actress as well. She came close to death at least a couple times in her life. Sad news.


TIS

RIP

A true loss to the music world. As the article said, there are very, very few of the real old-time bluesmen left. I'm glad he lived long enough to receive that Grammy.

For those who are interested in the history of blues, particularly Delta blues, I suggest reading "The Land Where the Blues Began" by Alan Lomax. It's a difficult book to get through, IMO, because Lomax's turgid and at-times pompous writing style often gets in the way of the fascinating stories told (to Lomax) by the musicians themselves. But, difficult though it may be, the book is ultimately quite rewarding and thought-provoking. (Pinetop Perkins was, unfortunately, omitted from this book.)

RIP

Signor V.

I never read that book Signor V, because I can't stand Lomax. Maybe I will try it again.
Everyone's got to go. It is humbling to think that at one time people like Pinetop, BB or the like were the new brash youngsters coming up.

I totally understand.

There was an "interesting" (if one could call it that) news item today regarding the still-living Zsa Zsa Gabor:

Upon hearing of the death of Elizabeth Tayor, 94 year old Zsa Zsa became hysterical. Recalling the recent passing of actress Jane Russell, Zsa Zsa started screaming, "Celebrities die in threes! I'm next!" She was hospitalized, and, as far as I know, she's still there as I write this.

Signor V.

I am only seeing this on a breaking news banner. Democrat, Geraldine Ferraro has passed away at 75.





TIS

Holy crap, TIS, you're right! I didn't realize she had cancer...

Geraldine Ferraro Dead at 75

Too much old school liberal politician for my taste, but she was a pioneer. Even if pioneers do tend to get the arrows.

Actor Farley Granger, best known for the Hitchcock films Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951) has died at age 85.

NY Times obituary

Bo Schembechler was a details man, and he knew what he was doing when he put two freshmen in a dorm room together in the summer of 1986. Vada Murray did not meet NCAA academic standards to play his first year. Warde Manuel was a stellar high school student. Bo figured Manuel could help Murray learn proper study habits.

It was a smart plan, but it hit a snag.

"That first semester," Manuel recalled Thursday, Murray "kicked my ass."

Murray, a former Michigan safety, died Wednesday after a battle with lung cancer. He was 43. He was not a smoker. He left behind his wife, Sarah, and three children, Deric, Kendall and Harper -- ages 12, 8 and 6.

It is the worst kind of unfair. But this is not about how Murray died. It's about how he lived. It's about a man who arrived at the University of Michigan in 1986 and was told he didn't belong -- and who proved, for the next 25 years, that he did. From starting safety to Ann Arbor police officer, Murray epitomized the values Schembechler tried to teach...

Vada Murray

It seems to have gone unnoticed that actor Kenneth Mars died nearly two months ago (February 12) of pancreatic cancer at age 75. He was unforgettable in the original version of The Producers (1968, as Franz Liebkind) and in Young Frankenstein (1974, as Inspector Kemp).

RIP

Signor V.

Director Sidney Lumet has passed away.

Sidney Lumet, the director behind American movie classics such as 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon and The Verdict, died Saturday. He was 86.

Lumet died from lymphoma at his home in New York City his stepdaughter, Leslie Gimbel, tells The New York Times.

The film director, famous for creating art impassioned by social justice and satire, told The Times in 2007 that he made movies not as an attempt to change the world, but for his own love of the field.

"I do it because I like it," he said. "And it's a wonderful way to spend your life."

But his films, which painted portraits of real issues such as corruption and justice, did just that. His movies received 46 Academy Award nominations throughout his career. Although he never personally won the honor for Best Director – which was remedied in 2005 with an honorary award from the Academy – six of his films won Oscars during the peak of his career, between 1974 and 1976. Lumet himself was nominated for Best Director for The Verdict, Network, 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon.

Lumet, despite having a very Hollywood career, was a New Yorker at heart, and the city he loved was the backdrop for many of his greats, including Serpico (1973) and The Pawnbroker (1964).

"Locations are characters in my movies," he said. "The city is capable of portraying the mood a scene requires."

New York seemed to be his most constant love affair. His first three marriages – to actress Rita Gam (1949-1954), socialite Gloria Vanderbilt (1956-1963) and the daughter of Lena Horne, Gail Jones (1963-1978) – ended in divorce. In 1980 he married Mary Gimbel.

He is survived by Gimbel, his two daughters from his marriage with Jones (Amy and Jenny Lumet), his stepdaughter Leslie Gimbel, his stepson Bailey Gimbel, nine grandchildren and a great grandson.

I just heard on the news that singer Phoebe Snow died today in New Jersey from complications of a massive brain hemmorhage she suffered a year ago. Varying reports gave her age as either 58 or 60.

I remember her from years ago; "Poetry Man" was probably her best-known song.

Very sad. I hadn't heard of her in a long time until today's news, though I read she had planned to record a new album before the stroke incapacitated her.

RIP

Signor V.

SV,

I just heard that on the radio this morning too. I do remember "Poetry Man" but don't know any of her other songs. Too bad.



TIS

Hazel Dickens passed away. I first heard her do "Coal Tattoo" on a cassette tape of protest songs. She also did some of the music for the movie "Matewan". She appeared in "Matewan" and "Harlan County". Dickens was also involved in the musical arm of the Civil Rights movement, touring the South with the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project. She was probably best known for her feminist/worker songs but saw herself as a humanist. She was a good guitarist as well as singer. She had a unique voice.




Obit


Hazel Dickens, a clarion-voiced advocate for coal miners and working people and a pioneer among women in bluegrass music, died on Friday in Washington. She was 75.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Ken Irwin, her longtime friend and the founder of Rounder Records, her label for more than four decades.

Ms. Dickens’s initial impact came as a member of Hazel and Alice, a vocal and instrumental duo with Alice Gerrard, a classically trained singer with a passion for the American vernacular music on which Ms. Dickens was raised. Featuring Ms. Dickens on upright bass and Ms. Gerrard on acoustic guitar, Hazel and Alice toured widely on the folk and bluegrass circuits during the 1960s and ’70s, captivating audiences with their bold, forceful harmonies and their empathetic approach to songs of struggle and heartbreak.

They recorded four albums during this period, the first of which, “Who’s That Knocking,” for Folkways in 1965, is considered one of the earliest bluegrass records made by women. All-female string bands like the Coon Creek Girls had been popular before the emergence of bluegrass in the 1940s and ’50s, and female country singers like Rose Maddox and Jean Shepard occasionally released bluegrass-themed projects. But Hazel and Alice were expressly a bluegrass act, using the same tenor- and lead-vocal arrangements as many of their male counterparts.

Ms. Dickens reflected on her early days on the bluegrass circuit with Ms. Gerrard in a 1999 interview for the American roots music magazine No Depression. “I’m not sure if they looked at us as a novelty, or if they took us seriously,” she said of the male acts with whom they shared bills. But, she added, “There were a lot of them, especially down through the years, that gave us respect.”

The influence of the staunchly traditional duo extended beyond bluegrass to commercial country music. Hazel and Alice’s arrangement of the Carter Family’s “Hello Stranger” became the blueprint for Emmylou Harris’s version of the song, and their adaption of “The Sweetest Gift (A Mother’s Smile)” inspired Naomi Judd, then a single mother in rural Kentucky, to start singing with her daughter Wynonna.

Long revered by feminists, Ms. Dickens’s music, and especially her songwriting, assumed an even more political cast almost as soon as she began pursuing a solo career in the wake of the duo’s breakup in 1976. Several of her songs, including “Coal Tattoo” and the rousing organizer’s anthem “They'll Never Keep Us Down,” served as the musical voice of conscience for Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning 1976 documentary, “Harlan County, U.S.A.”

Whether she performed solo or with a country-style band, Ms. Dickens’s atavistic mountain inflection and delivery were inimitable, and never so much as when she sang a cappella on “Black Lung,” a harrowing dirge she wrote for her oldest brother, who died of that disease. In 1987 she sang another a cappella ballad, “Hills of Galilee,” during a funeral scene in “Matewan,” John Sayles’s movie about coal mining in Appalachia....

2 that I noticed had bid Laden... we all should've!

i still think castro and the short guy from korea will die this year

Yvette Vickers dies a mysterious death.


Yvette Vickers Dies Mysterious Death
By Stephen M. Silverman

Tuesday May 03, 2011 09:25 AM EDT

She caused guys at the drive-in movies of the '50s and the readers of Playboy to swoon, counted Cary Grant and the actor Jim Hutton (father of Timothy Hutton) among her lovers, and even appeared – briefly – opposite Paul Newman in the Oscar-winning Hud. But when it came to Hollywood endings, pinup model and actress Yvette Vickers reached a heartbreaking fadeout.

As her uncollected mail gathered cobwebs outside, inside Vickers's dilapidated Los Angeles home last Wednesday, police, acting on a concerned neighbor's tip, discovered the mummified remains of the onetime 36"-24"-36" cult star of the space-alien B-movies Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and Attack of the Giant Leeches.

Vickers was 82, had long been a recluse – and could have been dead for as long as a year, reports the Los Angeles Times.

An autopsy has been ordered, though foul play is not suspected. If anything, her sad demise almost seems like something out of a movie in which Vickers once played a cameo, as a giggling girl in Billy Wilder's acid-etched 1950 portrait of a glamorous movie life gone sour, Sunset Boulevard.

"She kept to herself, had friends and seemed like a very independent spirit," her neighbor in Benedict Canyon, actress Susan Savage, told the Times. "To the end she still got cards and letter[s] from all over the world requesting photos and still wanting to be her friend."

Still, the Times also quotes Boyd Magers, editor and publisher of the movie publication Western Clippings, as saying the once "bright, intelligent" actress grew "paranoid" in her later years and was convinced she was being stalked.

"We've all been crying about this," said Savage. "Nobody should be left alone like that."
Brief Career at Paramount
Vickers's earliest professional work was in commercials for White Rain shampoo. According to Variety, it was Billy Wilder who discovered the actress, though her studio career was short-lived and completely finished after a major role in Paramount's 1957 crime drama Short Cut to Hell, a directorial effort by actor James Cagney that flopped at the box office.

Turning to B movies and TV Westerns, Vickers also appeared on Broadway, acted right up until 1990's horror flick Evil Sprits (starring Virginia Mayo, Karen Black and Laugh-In's Arte Johnson) and even recorded a couple of jazz albums – one, a tribute to her parents.

Both the Times and Variety report her birth name as Yvette Vedder, born in Kansas City, Mo., to jazz-musician parents Charles and Iola Vedder. Entering UCLA at the precocious age of 16, she studied journalism but left school to seek an acting career. Her Playboy appearance, shot by "King of the Nudies" filmmaker Russ Meyer, was in July 1959, the same year she starred in Attack of the Giant Leeches, in which she was, well, attacked by giant leeches.

"I did want to play other kinds of parts and to go on into bigger pictures," Vickers is quoted as saying in author Tom Weaver's 2006 Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes, "but these things just eluded me."

Her relationship with Hutton was said to have lasted 15 years, and she and Grant reputedly remained friends after their affair. Married and divorced twice ("at least," says the Times), Vickers leaves no survivors.