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Obit watch: October 24, 2021.

Sunday, October 24th, 2021

Two different people sent me this one, and neither one mentioned my hot button.

Val Bisoglio, actor.

He began acting under the tutelage of Jeff Corey and appeared on the New York stage in productions such as “Kiss Mama,” “A View from the Bridge” and “Wait Until Dark,” as well as in New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park with Arthur Penn.

He has 65 credits in IMDB. High points include: “Saturday Night Fever” (he was the father of Travolta’s character), “Cover Up” (ahem), “M*A*S*H” (he played “Sal Pernelli”, the cook. Not Igor, the guy who served the food, but the cook.), “B.J. and the Bear”, “Rockford Files”, “St. Ives” (the Charles Bronson movie based on a pseudonymous novel by Ross Thomas), “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” (“The Zombie“: if memory serves, he was a lower level mob thug), and “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”.

His most famous role (and the hot button one): he played “Danny Tovo”, the restaurant owner, on 138 episodes of “Quincy, M.E.”

And yes! He did do a “Mannix”! (“Run Till Dark”, season 5, episode 7.)

Paul Salata. He originated the “Mr. Irrelevant” award for the last player drafted in the NFL college draft.

He wanted to celebrate the unheralded honor of being picked last because players at the end of the line rarely get noticed — even though one might have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than of being picked by an N.F.L. team. Mr. Rozelle blessed the idea, and Mr. Irrelevant was born.
“Everyone who is drafted works hard, and some of them don’t get any recognition,” Mr. Salata told The New York Times in 2017. “They do their work and should be noticed.”

…

Starting in 1976, Mr. Salata and his friends in Orange County raised money to fly the last player picked in the draft to Southern California, where he would receive a champion’s welcome. In the years since, the players — some of whom who had never been to California — have been paraded through Newport Beach, taken to Disneyland and feted at a banquet, where they received the “Lowsman Trophy,” which depicts a player fumbling a football.
Mr. Salata and his team also fulfilled some of the players’ requests, including surfing lessons, visits to the Playboy Mansion and being a guest announcer on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Many Mr. Irrelevants never made it past their first season or even past their first training camp, but a handful have stuck around in the N.F.L. In February the Tampa Bay Buccaneers kicker Ryan Succop became the first Mr. Irrelevant to score in and win a Super Bowl. He had been drafted last in 2009 by the Kansas City Chiefs.

James Michael Tyler, “Gunther” on “Friends”. I’m sorry if I am giving him the short end of the stick here, but this just came in, and I have never seen an episode of “Friends”.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 23, 2021.

Saturday, October 23rd, 2021

Your Peter Scolari roundup: NYT. THR. Variety.

Mr. Scolari’s stage work over the years included two Broadway plays in which he portrayed sports figures. In “Magic/Bird” (2012), about the basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, he played several characters, including the basketball coaches Pat Riley and Red Auerbach and the team owner Jerry Buss.
Two years later he played the Yankee star Yogi Berra in “Bronx Bombers,” a role that required him to spout Yogi-isms. The critic Charles Isherwood, in The Times, wrote that he “delivers these in a nicely offhand style that manages to keep the zing without turning each verbal pratfall into a cartoon caption.”

Posted in Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 6, 2021.

Wednesday, October 6th, 2021

Eddie Robinson has passed away. He was 100.

I’m not going to snark here. He was part of baseball for 60 years, as a player:

At 6 feet 2 inches and 210 pounds — good size for his era — the left-handed-hitting Robinson clubbed 16 home runs and drove in 83 runs to help the 1948 Indians capture the team’s first pennant since 1920 en route to defeating the Boston Braves in a six-game World Series. Playing in every Series game, Robinson batted .300.
He drove in more than 100 runs and played in the All-Star Game in three consecutive seasons in the early 1950s, with the Chicago White Sox and the Philadelphia Athletics, and in 1951 became the first White Sox player to drive a home run over the roof of the old Comiskey Park.
The Yankees obtained Robinson before the 1954 season in a multiplayer trade with the Athletics. He pinch-hit and played behind first basemen Joe Collins and Bill Skowron and flashed his power when 16 of his 36 hits in 1955 were home runs. He played in his second World Series when the Yankees lost to the Brooklyn Dodgers in seven games that October.

As a scout:

In his memoir, “Lucky Me” (2011, with C. Paul Rogers III), Robinson wrote how the Yankee owner George Steinbrenner offered him the team’s general manager’s post in June 1982 and related that he “considered George one of my real friends in baseball.” But he decided to work as a Yankee scout and consultant instead, since he was well aware of Steinbrenner’s reputation as a difficult boss.
“It didn’t take long for George and me to get crossways,” Robinson recalled. He told how Steinbrenner had cooled to him after he agreed only reluctantly to be present for an October 1982 draft session; he and his wife had had a trip to Europe planned. He continued as a Yankee scout through 1985.

…

After his playing days, Robinson was a coach for the Orioles, a farm director for several teams, the general manager of the Atlanta Braves and the Texas Rangers, and a scout for the Red Sox, whom he worked for in 2004, his last year in baseball, as well as for the Yankees before that.

How long was he in baseball? This long:

Robinson played a role in a poignant baseball event in the summer of 1948.
When Babe Ruth, dying of cancer, was about to take the field at Yankee Stadium on the afternoon of June 13 for a ceremony retiring his No. 3, Robinson was in Cleveland’s dugout.
“He looked like he needed help physically, and I took a bat out of the bat rack and gave it to him,” Robinson told Major League Baseball in a 2020 interview. “He carried it up to home plate, and he used it as a kind of a crutch. When he came back, I got the bat and had him sign it.”
Nat Fein of The Herald Tribune in New York won a Pulitzer Prize for his rear view photograph depicting Ruth in Yankee pinstripes leaning on the bat, which belonged to Feller.

Cynthia Harris.

A veteran of the New York stage, Harris joined the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company in 1971, playing the role of Sarah originated by Barbara Barrie, and in 1993 co-founded The Actors Company Theater, where she served as artistic director and appeared in dozens of productions.

She also knocked around TV a bit: she was Wallis Simpson in the “Edward and Mrs. Simpson” mini series, played Dr. Asten’s wife on a couple of episodes of “Quincy”, and the mother of Paul Reiser’s character on “Mad About You”, among other roles.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2021.

Thursday, September 23rd, 2021

Melvin Van Peebles.

A Renaissance man whose work spanned books, theater and music, Mr. Van Peebles is best known for his third feature film, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” which drew mixed reviews when it was released in 1971, ignited intense debate and became a national hit. The hero, Sweetback, starred in a sex show at a brothel, and the movie sizzled with explosive violence, explicit sex and righteous antagonism toward the white power structure. It was dedicated to “all the Black brothers and sisters who have had enough of The Man.”

…

In addition to making movies, Mr. Van Peebles published novels, in French as well as in English; wrote two Broadway musicals and produced them simultaneously; and wrote and performed spoken-word albums that many have called forebears of rap.
Over the course of his life he was also a cable-car driver in San Francisco, a portrait painter in Mexico City, a street performer in Paris, a stock options trader in New York, the navigator of an Air Force bomber, a postal worker, a visual artist and, by his own account, a very successful gigolo.

…

…Columbia Pictures then hired him to direct “Watermelon Man” (1970), a satirical comedy about a white bigot, played by Godfrey Cambridge, who turns into a Black man.
Columbia wanted Mr. Van Peebles to shoot alternative endings — one in which the protagonist becomes a Black militant, and another in which he discovers that it was all a dream. Mr. Van Peebles said he “forgot” to shoot the second ending.
Disliking working for a studio, he set out to be an independent filmmaker. To make “Sweetback,” for $500,000, he combined his $70,000 savings with loans, used a nonunion crew and persuaded a film lab to extend him credit.
The plot of the movie concerns a man who attacks two crooked police officers and then escapes as a fugitive to Mexico, vowing to return and “collect some dues.” Only two theaters, in Detroit and Atlanta, would show the movie at first, but it caught fire and for several weeks outgrossed “Love Story.” Its American box office exceeded $15 million (about $100 million in today’s money), a bonanza for an independent film at the time.

Barbara Campbell Cooke. She actually passed away in April at 85, but her family didn’t make an announcement until recently.

Their story started out as if lifted from one of his love songs. Sam Cooke was 18 and Barbara Campbell was only 13 when they met on the South Side of Chicago.

She married Sam Cooke in 1959 (or 1958, according to Wikipedia). When he died in 1964, she married Bobby Womack (who worked with Sam Cooke) three months later. He was 19, she was 29, and a lot of fans were not happy.

But it upset many people to see Mr. Womack, sometimes in Mr. Cooke’s clothes, squiring Mr. Cooke’s widow about. The couple received hate mail, including a package containing a baby doll in a coffin. At a Nancy Wilson concert, when Ms. Wilson introduced the couple sitting in the audience, the crowd booed. In his telling, Mr. Womack, goaded by his new wife, took to cocaine. He also began a sexual relationship with the Cookes’ daughter, Linda, by then a teenager. When Barbara found them in bed, she shot Mr. Womack, the bullet grazing his temple. (Ms. Cooke was not charged, according to Mr. Womack’s book.) They divorced in 1970.

The sad goes on. The Cookes had a son who died at 18 months. Ms. Cooke and Mr. Womack also had a son who strugged with addiction and killed himself at 21.

Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack’s brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.
“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”

Al Harrington. He was “Ben Kokua” in the good 5-0 (his character replaced Kono), and was a surf shop owner in the bad 5-0. Also a couple of appearances on “Jake and the Fatman”, among other credits.

When Harrington left the show in 1975, he launched a second-act career as a Waikiki showroom headliner and recording artist known affectionately as “The South Pacific Man.” He retired from the stage in 1992, and spent the next 13 years living on the mainland doing film work in Utah and California.

Roger Michell, director. Most of his films were British, but he’s perhaps best known for “Notting Hill” (that Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant movie) and “Changing Lanes” (the Ben Affleck/Samuel L. Jackson movie).

Later films included Hyde Park on Hudson, a historical drama starring Bill Murray as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and The Duke, a real-life art heist story starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren that premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival.

NYT obit for George Holliday.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 17, 2021.

Friday, September 17th, 2021

Jane Powell. THR.

She was one of the old time greats: she co-starred with Fred Astaire in “Royal Wedding”, and also had a starring role in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. Unfortunately, she had trouble finding good roles after that. She did some TV work, including appearances on “Fantasy Island” and “The Love Boat”, and was a semi-regular on “Growing Pains”.

She also performed in touring productions of musicals, including “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music” and “Carousel.” She made her Broadway debut in 1974, when she replaced her friend and frequent MGM co-star Debbie Reynolds as the title character in the hit revival of the 1919 musical “Irene.”
She never returned to Broadway, although she played the queen in a 1995 New York City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” and occasionally appeared Off Broadway. She seemed headed back to Broadway in 2003, when she played the mother of the entrepreneurial Mizner brothers in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Bounce” in Chicago and Washington. But the show was poorly received and never made it to New York. (It was later reworked, retitled “Road Show” and staged at the Public Theater in New York in 2008, without Ms. Powell in the cast.)

I don’t intend for this to be all Norm Macdonald all the time, and I know “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. But this is a cool story, and I believe this person is telling the truth.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 5, 2021.

Thursday, August 5th, 2021

Col. Dave Severance (USMC – ret.) has passed away. He was 102.

The flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, captured by an Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, was taken when the battle for Iwo Jima was far from over. In the days that followed, Colonel Severance earned the Silver Star, the Marines’ third-highest decoration for valor after the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. The citation stated that in a firefight for a heavily defended ridge, he “skillfully directed the assault on this strong enemy position despite stubborn resistance.”
Colonel Severance, a captain at the time, commanded Easy Company of the 28th Marine Regiment, Fifth Marine Division — part of the 70,000-man Marine force that sought to seize Iwo Jima, 7.5 square miles of black volcanic sand about 660 miles south of Tokyo. The island, defended by 21,000 Japanese troops, held airstrips that were needed as bases for American fighter planes and as havens for crippled bombers returning to the Mariana Islands from missions over Japan.
Amid heavy casualties, the Marines by the fifth day of combat on Iwo Jima had silenced most opposition from Japanese soldiers dug into caves on Mount Suribachi, an extinct volcano 546 feet high at Iwo Jima’s southern tip.
In midmorning, a group of Marines from Easy Company raised a flag at the summit, a ceremony photographed by Sgt. Louis Lowery of the Marine magazine Leatherneck. When James Forrestal, the secretary of the Navy, who was on the beach below, saw the flag, he requested that it be kept as a memento. After it was returned to the beach, Colonel Severance sent another group of his Marines to bring a larger flag to the mountaintop.
It was the raising of the second flag that was portrayed in Mr. Rosenthal’s dramatic photograph.

…

He was commissioned as a lieutenant and first saw combat as a platoon commander in the 1943 battle for the Pacific island of Bougainville. His platoon was ambushed and cut off by Japanese troops about a mile behind enemy lines, but fought its way out of an encirclement and wiped out the enemy with the loss of only one Marine, according to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.

…

After World War II, Colonel Severance completed flight training and flew fighter aircraft during the Korean War. He completed 69 missions and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. He was promoted to colonel in 1962. At his retirement, in May 1968, he was assistant director of personnel at Marine headquarters.

…

Colonel Severance was portrayed by Neil McDonough as a Marine captain and by Harve Presnell as an older man in “Flags of Our Fathers” (2006), Clint Eastwood’s film about the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Colonel Severance was a consultant for the movie.

…

Asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, “I never thought about it,” then added, “Just that I was a Marine for 30 years and I never ended up in jail.”

Alvin Ing, actor. He was in the original Broadway production of Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” and the revival in 2004. He also appeared in the 2002 revival of “Flower Drum Song”.

He also did some movie and TV work, including “The Final Countdown” and the bad “Hawaii Five-0”.

Posted in Heroism, History, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 26, 2021.

Monday, July 26th, 2021

Supplemental Steven Weinberg obits: NYT. Statesman.

Jackie Mason, comedian.

Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.
“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”
The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”

…

After dozens of appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”
Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.
The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”
“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”

…

A play he starred in and wrote (with Mike Mortman), “A Teaspoon Every Four Hours,” went through a record-breaking 97 preview performances on Broadway before opening on June 14, 1969, to terrible reviews. It closed after one night, taking with it his $100,000 investment.

For the record (and per Wikipedia), “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” went through 182 preview performances.

He also invested in “The Stoolie” (1972), a film in which he played a con man and improbable Romeo. It also failed, taking even more of his money. Roles in sitcoms and films eluded him, although he did make the most of small parts in Mel Brooks’s “History of the World: Part I” (1981) — he was “Jew No. 1” in the Spanish Inquisition sequence — and “The Jerk” (1979), in which he played the gas-station owner who employs Steve Martin.

…

Appearances on the cartoon series “The Simpsons,” as the voice of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, the father of Krusty the Clown, confirmed his newfound status, and earned him a second Emmy. Not even the 1988 bomb “Caddyshack II,” in which he was a last-minute replacement for Rodney Dangerfield, or the ill-fated “Chicken Soup,” a 1989 sitcom co-starring Lynn Redgrave that died quickly, could slow his improbable transformation from borscht belt relic into hot property.

Laura Foreman. She was a prominent and well-regarded reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s: so much so that she got hired by the NYT.

Her focus was Philadelphia’s 1975 mayoral race, in which the brash and cocky incumbent, Frank L. Rizzo, the city’s former police commissioner, was seeking a second term.
One of Mr. Rizzo’s close allies was Mr. Cianfrani, a longtime ward boss who became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of Pennsylvania’s most influential lawmakers. A streetwise power broker, he was a natural source and occasional subject for the new political writer.
Rumors began circulating that the two were involved romantically, but Ms. Foreman denied them, and the editors discounted them.

After she got hired by the NYT, it came out that the rumors were true: “…the politician had given her more than $20,000 worth of gifts, including jewelry, furniture and a fur coat, and helped her buy a 1964 Morgan sports car.”

The Times told her she had to resign, even though the conduct in question had occurred at another paper. The Times, in fact, said initially that her work had comported with the highest ethical standards. But according to an account that Ms. Foreman wrote in The Washington Monthly in 1978, A.M. Rosenthal, The Times’s executive editor, told her that because the paper was writing tough stories at the time about conflicts of interest involving Bert Lance, a close Carter adviser, it couldn’t very well harbor a conflict of its own.
To others, Mr. Rosenthal uttered an unforgettable comment that has been rendered several different ways but in essence said that he didn’t care if his reporters were having sex with elephants — as long as they weren’t covering the circus.
In Philadelphia, Mr. Roberts, the Inquirer editor, appointed the paper’s top investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele to dig into the affair. They produced a 17,000-word article, published on Oct. 16, 1977, that exposed internal rivalries at the paper and found that editors had looked the other way to protect a favored reporter, Ms. Foreman. It was among the first instances of a newspaper turning its investigative artillery on itself.

She married Mr. Cianfrani, but never worked in journalism again. Ms. Foreman actually passed away over a year ago, but her death was only recently reported.

A burning in Hell watch, by way of Lawrence: Rodney Alcala, the “Dating Game” killer.

A longhaired photographer who lured women by offering to take their pictures, Mr. Alcala was convicted of killing a 12-year-old girl and four women in Orange County, Calif., and two women in New York, all between 1971 and 1979, the authorities said.
Investigators had also suspected him of, or had linked him to, other murders in Los Angeles, Seattle, Arizona, New Hampshire and Marin County, Calif., the department said.

…

In 1978, six years after he was convicted of molesting [removed – DB], Mr. Alcala appeared in a brown bell-bottom suit and a shirt with a butterfly collar as “Bachelor No. 1” on an episode of “The Dating Game.”
The host described him as “a successful photographer,” according to a YouTube video. “Between takes, you might find him sky-diving or motorcycling.”
Mr. Alcala won the contest, charming the bachelorette with sexual innuendo. The woman later decided not to go on a date with him because she found him disturbing, according to several news reports.

Posted in 1970s, California Über Alles, Geek, Law, Media, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 8, 2021.

Thursday, July 8th, 2021

Noted for the hysterical record: four of the alleged six assassins of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse have been killed. Two are in custody.

Robert Downey Sr. Variety. THR.

Suzzanne Douglas, actress. She did some theater work:

Douglas starred in such productions as The Threepenny Opera opposite Sting, The Tap Dance Kid and It’s a Grand Night for Singing. Other theater credits included Arthur Laurent’s Hallelujah, Baby! — Douglas was the first African-American to play Dr. Bearing in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play — and Wit and Crowns, which won an Image Award for ensemble performance. She also starred in productions of Henry V, Julius by Design and Regina Taylor’s The Drowning Crow.

She also did some film (“How Stella Got Her Groove Back”, “School of Rock”, among others) and a lot of TV work.

Lawrence sent over a memo from the Burning in Hell Department: Ahmad Jibril. He headed the Palestinian terror group PFLP-GC:

Among the group’s attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians were 1970’s bombing of Swissair Flight 330 that killed 47 people; a 1970 attack on an Israeli school bus that killed 12, most of them children; 1974’s Kiryat Shmona massacre of 16 people; and 1987’s ‘Night of the Gliders,’ in which members of the group flew into an Israeli base and killed six soldiers.

He was 83, and it sounds like he died of “natural causes”. (And not the “He was hit by one of those sword missiles fired from a drone, so naturally he died” sort of “natural causes”.)

Posted in Movies, Obits, Politics, Theatre | Comments Closed

Hey! You kids! Get off my lawn!

Wednesday, June 16th, 2021

I am an old man.

In other news, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” opened (and by “opened”, I mean official opening, as opposed to the endless stream of previews) 10 years ago Monday.

I bow to no one in my admiration for Julie Taymor as a theater artist. But when it comes to a budget, she’s never met one she didn’t blow past.

Posted in Bagatelle, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 7, 2021.

Monday, June 7th, 2021

Clarence Williams III. THR.

Although “The Mod Squad” made Mr. Williams a symbol of the Vietnam War generation, he actually served in the military just before that era. He was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division in the late 1950s.

…

He began his acting career on Broadway, where his grandfather had appeared as early as 1908. The young Mr. Williams appeared in three plays, including “Slow Dance on the Killing Ground” (1964), for which he received a Tony Award nomination and a Theater World Award.

…

After the show ended, Mr. Williams dropped out of sight for a while, expressing disappointment in the kinds of roles available to Black men. He returned to Broadway, appearing as an African head of state, with Maggie Smith, in a Tom Stoppard drama, “Night and Day” (1979).
Beginning in the 1980s, he had a busy film career. He played Prince’s abusive father in “Purple Rain” (1984) and Wesley Snipes’s heroin-addicted father in “Sugar Hill” (1993). He was a crazed blackmailer in John Frankenheimer’s “52 Pick-Up” (1986) and a wild-eyed storytelling mortician in “Tales From the Hood” (1995). He had small roles in the blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” (1988) and in Norman Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” (1987).
Television brought Mr. Williams new opportunities too. He was a leader of the Attica prison riots in HBO’s “Against the Wall” (1994); a segregationist governor’s manservant in the mini-series “George Wallace” (1997); Muhammad Ali’s father in “Ali: An American Hero” (2000); and a retired C.I.A. operative in 10 “Mystery Woman” movies (2003-07). He did guest appearances on close to 40 series, from “Hill Street Blues” to “Empire.”

Posted in 1970s, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 2, 2021.

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021

Arlene Golonka. She did a fair amount of Broadway work, and a lot of TV. She was “Millie Swanson” on “Mayberry R.F.D.”, and did a lot of guest spots on other shows.

Noted:

Golonka played several characters on a 1965 comedy album, You Don’t Have to Be Jewish, which soared to No. 9 on the Billboard charts. When she couldn’t do the follow-up record, she recommended [Valerie] Harper for the job.

Also:

She portrayed another prostitute opposite Clint Eastwood in Hang ‘Em High (1968) and was the wife of a CIA agent (Peter Falk) in The In-Laws (1979).

Robert Hogan. Man, he was in every damn thing: as the headline notes, his career stretched from “Peyton Place” to “The Wire”, with stops along the way at the various “Law and Order” franchises, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Alice”, “Barnaby Jones”, “The Rockford Files”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, the good “Hawaii Five-O” and many other series…

…yes, including “Mannix”. (“The Crime That Wasn’t”, season 4, episode 18)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 30, 2021.

Sunday, May 30th, 2021

Gavin MacLeod. THR. Variety.

As he told the story, one night he was driving, while drunk, on Mulholland Drive in the hills above Los Angeles when he impulsively decided to kill himself by driving off the road. But he stopped himself, jamming on the brakes at the last moment. Shaken, he recalled, he made his way to the nearby house of a friend, the actor Robert Blake, who persuaded him to see a psychiatrist.

…

After his divorce, Mr. MacLeod married Patti Kendig, a dancer, in 1974. They also divorced, in early 1982, but remarried in 1985, by which time they had both become born-again Christians. Mr. MacLeod documented their story, as well as his decades-long struggle with alcoholism, in a 1987 book, “Back on Course: The Remarkable Story of a Divorce That Ended in Remarriage.”

B.J. Thomas.

Mr. Thomas placed 15 singles in the pop Top 40 from 1966 to 1977. “(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” a monument to heartache sung in a bruised, melodic baritone, reached No. 1 on both the country and pop charts in 1975. “Hooked on a Feeling,” an exultant expression of newfound love from 1968, also reached the pop Top 10. (Augmented by an atavistic chant of “Ooga-chaka-ooga-ooga,” the song became a No. 1 pop hit as recorded by the Swedish rock band Blue Swede in 1974.)

Faye Schulman.

The Germans enlisted her to take commemorative photographs of them and, in some cases, their newly acquired mistresses. (“It better be good, or else you’ll be kaput,” she recalled a Gestapo commander warning her before, trembling, she asked him to smile.) They thus spared her from the firing squad because of their vanity and their obsession with bureaucratic record-keeping — two weaknesses that she would ultimately wield against them.
At one point the Germans witlessly gave her film to develop that contained pictures they had taken of the three trenches into which they, their Lithuanian collaborators and the local Polish police had machine-gunned Lenin’s remaining Jews, including her parents, sisters and younger brother.
She kept a copy of the photos as evidence of the atrocity, then later joined a band of Russian guerrilla Resistance fighters. As one of the only known Jewish partisan photographers, Mrs. Schulman, thanks to her own graphic record-keeping, debunked the common narrative that most Eastern European Jews had gone quietly to their deaths.
“I want people to know that there was resistance,” she was quoted as saying by the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. “Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter. I was a photographer. I have pictures. I have proof.”

Rusty Warren.

In the wholesome era of “Our Miss Brooks” and “Father Knows Best” on television, Ms. Warren, who died at 91 on Tuesday in Orange County, Calif., developed a scandalous comedy routine that was full of barely veiled innuendo about sex, outrageous references to breasts and more, much of it delivered in a husky shout.
With that new risqué routine, she began packing larger clubs all over the country. The release in 1960 of her second comedy album, the brazenly titled “Knockers Up!,” only increased her fame.
It was a booming time for live comedy and comedy records — “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” Mr. Newhart’s Grammy-winning breakthrough, was released the same year — and Ms. Warren emerged as a star in an out-of-the-mainstream sort of way.

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She released more than a dozen albums, including “Rusty Warren Bounces Back” (1961), “Banned in Boston” (1963), “Bottoms Up” (1968) and “Sexplosion” (1977), selling hundreds of thousands of copies (“Knockers Up!” was a longtime resident of the Billboard 200 chart) even though for much of her career some retailers wouldn’t display them prominently and television producers wouldn’t give her the bookings that more mainstream comics got.

If it hasn’t already been written, somebody could get a good book out of the history of comedy records roughly mid-century (I’m guessing 1950-1975, maybe slightly later). Especially if they went into the history of “blue” or “party” records: not just Ms. Warren, but Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, Rudy Ray Moore, and lots of other now mostly forgotten folks.

Lawrence sent over two: Shane Briant, British actor. (“Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell”, “Cassandra”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”)

Paul Robert Soles.

Best known today for portraying Hermey the Elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Peter Parker and his crime-fighting alter ego in the 1967 cartoon Spider-Man he worked extensively in every medium, his favourites being radio drama and live theatre.

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Among his many memorable dramatic performances three stand out: the lead in the Canadian premiere in 1987 of ‘I’m Not Rappaport’; the first Jewish Canadian to play Shylock in the 2001 production of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ at the Stratford Festival and the Dora-nominated role in the 2005 two-hander ‘Trying’.

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Beyond work and family he had three life-long passions: sports cars, music and flying. A racing nut he drove the winning foreign entry in the American International Rally (1959) speaking only German and passing himself off as a factory driver from Mercedes in a zero-mileage model W120. A bigtime jazz fan, particularly of the big-bands, he was a fixture at clubs on both sides of the border and he forged friendships with a number of performers. An aviation enthusiast and pilot he owned two RCAF primary trainers, first a Fleet 16-B Finch open cockpit biplane acquired to barnstorm across the continent as part of The Great Belvedere Air Dash of 1973 and later a DeHavilland DHC-1 Chipmunk. He was a performing member of the Great War Flying Museum (Brampton), an air show participant for 20 years and a perennial volunteer for the Canadian International Air Show.

Posted in 1970s, History, Music, Nazis, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

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