Who's Next To Croak?

[picolas]

[size=9]([/size] [size=9])[/size]

he was good in all the little things i saw him in..

[MacGuffin]

1950s pinup model Bettie Page dies in LA at 85

LOS ANGELES – Bettie Page, the 1950s secretary-turned-model whose controversial photographs in skimpy attire or none at all helped set the stage for the 1960s sexual revolution, died Thursday. She was 85.

Page was placed on life support last week after suffering a heart attack in Los Angeles and never regained consciousness, said her agent, Mark Roesler. He said he and Page's family agreed to remove life support. Before the heart attack, Page had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia.

"She captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality," Roesler said. "She is the embodiment of beauty."

Page, who was also known as Betty, attracted national attention with magazine photographs of her sensuous figure in bikinis and see-through lingerie that were quickly tacked up on walls in military barracks, garages and elsewhere, where they remained for years.

Her photos included a centerfold in the January 1955 issue of then-fledgling Playboy magazine, as well as controversial sadomasochistic poses.

"I think that she was a remarkable lady, an iconic figure in pop culture who influenced sexuality, taste in fashion, someone who had a tremendous impact on our society," Playboy founder Hugh Hefner told The Associated Press on Thursday. "She was a very dear person."

Page mysteriously disappeared from the public eye for decades, during which time she battled mental illness and became a born-again Christian.

After resurfacing in the 1990s, she occasionally granted interviews but refused to allow her picture to be taken.

"I don't want to be photographed in my old age," she told an interviewer in 1998. "I feel the same way with old movie stars. ... It makes me sad. We want to remember them when they were young."

The 21st century indeed had people remembering her just as she was. She became the subject of songs, biographies, Web sites, comic books, movies and documentaries. A new generation of fans bought thousands of copies of her photos, and some feminists hailed her as a pioneer of women's liberation.

Gretchen Mol portrayed her in 2005's "The Notorious Bettie Page" and Paige Richards had the role in 2004's "Bettie Page: Dark Angel." Page herself took part in the 1998 documentary "Betty Page: Pinup Queen."

Hefner said he last saw Page when he held a screening of "The Notorious Bettie Page" at the Playboy Mansion. He said she objected to the fact that the film referred to her as "notorious," but "we explained to her that it referred to the troubled times she had and was a good way to sell a movie."

Page's career began one day in October 1950 when she took a respite from her job as a secretary in a New York office for a walk along the beach at Coney Island. An amateur photographer named Jerry Tibbs admired the 27-year-old's firm, curvy body and asked her to pose.

Looking back on the career that followed, she told Playboy in 1998: "I never thought it was shameful. I felt normal. It's just that it was much better than pounding a typewriter eight hours a day, which gets monotonous."

Nudity didn't bother her, she said, explaining: "God approves of nudity. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were naked as jaybirds."

In 1951, Page fell under the influence of a photographer and his sister who specialized in S&M. They cut her hair into the dark bangs that became her signature and posed her in spiked heels and little else. She was photographed with a whip in her hand, and in one session she was spread-eagled between two trees, her feet dangling.

"I thought my arms and legs would come out of their sockets," she said later.

Moralists denounced the photos as perversion, and Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Page's home state, launched a congressional investigation.

Page quickly retreated from public view, later saying she was hounded by federal agents who waved her nude photos in her face. She also said she believed that, at age 34, her days as "the girl with the perfect figure" were nearly over.

She moved to Florida in 1957 and married a much younger man, as an early marriage to her high school sweetheart had ended in divorce.

Her second marriage also failed, as did a third, and she suffered a nervous breakdown.

In 1959, she was lying on a sea wall in Key West when she saw a church with a white neon cross on top. She walked inside and became a born-again Christian.

After attending Bible school, she wanted to serve as a missionary but was turned down because she had been divorced. Instead, she worked full-time for evangelist Billy Graham's ministry.

A move to Southern California in 1979 brought more troubles.

She was arrested after an altercation with her landlady, and doctors who examined her determined she had acute schizophrenia. She spent 20 months in a state mental hospital in San Bernardino.

A fight with another landlord resulted in her arrest, but she was found not guilty because of insanity. She was placed under state supervision for eight years.

"She had a very turbulent life," Todd Mueller, a family friend and autograph seller, told The Associated Press on Thursday. "She had a temper to her."

Mueller said he first met Page after tracking her down in the 1990s and persuaded her to do an autograph signing event.

He said she was a hit and sold about 3,000 autographs, usually for $200 to $300 each.

"Eleanor Roosevelt, we got $40 to $50. ... Bettie Page outsells them all," he told The AP last week.

Born April 22, 1923, in Nashville, Tenn., Page said she grew up in a family so poor "we were lucky to get an orange in our Christmas stockings."

The family included three boys and three girls, and Page said her father molested all of the girls.

After the Pages moved to Houston, her father decided to return to Tennessee and stole a police car for the trip. He was sent to prison, and for a time Betty lived in an orphanage.

In her teens she acted in high school plays, going on to study drama in New York and win a screen test from 20th Century Fox before her modeling career took off.

[Pozer]

'Apocalypse Now' actor Sam Bottoms dies
Dec. 18, 2008, 3:05 PM EST

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Sam Bottoms, who had small but memorable roles in the 1970s classics "Apocalypse Now" and "The Last Picture Show," has died. He was 53.

Bottoms, one of four actor-brothers, died Tuesday of brain cancer at his home in Los Angeles, wife Laura Bickford said.

In "Apocalypse Now," Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic, Bottoms played pro surfer-turned-soldie r Lance B. Johnson, who takes to the waves amid bombs and bullets under the orders of the maniacal, surfing-mad Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore played by Robert Duvall.

"He was a handsome, tall young man and very sweet-natured and seemed to be right for that part," Coppola said Wednesday. "Sam was a good actor. Of course, he comes from a family that had a lot of theatrical activity."

In his 1971 film debut, a 15-year-old Bottoms starred alongside his best-known brother, Timothy, in "The Last Picture Show," playing a mute and mentally handicapped boy forced by friends to lose his virginity to a prostitute.

Sam Bottoms said he was in Texas to visit his brother, who was the film's lead, when director Peter Bogdanovich saw him and cast him in the part.

Brothers Joseph and Ben are also actors.

Sam Bottoms was born in Santa Barbara in 1955, the third of four sons of sculptor James "Bud" Bottoms. He began acting in local theater at age 10.

After his 1970s films, Sam Bottoms went on to appear in the Clint Eastwood westerns "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Bronco Billy," and Coppola's 1987 Vietnam film "Gardens of Stone."

He more recently appeared in the films "Seabiscuit" and "Shopgirl."

He is survived by his three brothers, his parents and his wife.

[MacGuffin]

Mark Felt, Watergate `Deep Throat,' dies at 95

SANTA ROSA, Calif. – W. Mark Felt, the former FBI second-in-command who revealed himself as "Deep Throat" 30 years after he tipped off reporters to the Watergate scandal that toppled a president, has died. He was 95.

Felt died Thursday of congestive heart failure, said John D. O'Connor, a family friend who wrote the 2005 Vanity Fair article uncovering Felt's secret.

The shadowy central figure in the one of the most gripping political dramas of the 20th century, Felt insisted his alter ego be kept secret when he leaked damaging information about President Richard Nixon and his aides to The Washington Post.

While some — including Nixon and his aides — speculated that Felt was the source who connected the White House to the June 1972 break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, he steadfastly denied the accusations until finally coming forward in May 2005.

"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat," Felt told O'Connor, a San Francisco attorney whose story created a whirlwind of media attention.

The man who had kept his secret for decades, now weakened by a stroke, wasn't doing much talking — he merely waved the media from the front door of his daughter's Santa Rosa home.

Critics, including those who went to prison for the Watergate scandal, called him a traitor for betraying the commander in chief. Supporters hailed him as a hero for blowing the whistle on a corrupt administration trying to cover up attempts to sabotage opponents.

Felt grappled with his place in history, arguing with his children over whether to reveal his identity or to take his secret to the grave, O'Connor said. He agonized about what revealing his identity would do to his reputation. Would he be seen as a turncoat or a man of honor?

Ultimately, his daughter Joan persuaded him to go public; after all, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was sure to profit by revealing the secret after Felt died. "We could make at least enough money to pay some bills, like the debt I've run up for the kids' education," she told her father, according to the Vanity Fair article. "Let's do it for the family."

The revelation capped a Washington whodunnit that spanned more than three decades and seven presidents. It was the final mystery of Watergate, the subject of the best-selling book and hit movie "All the President's Men," which inspired a generation of college students to pursue journalism.

[cinemanarchist]

Harold Pinter, Nobel-Winning Playwright, Is Dead at 78

By MEL GUSSOW and BEN BRANTLEY
Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said Thursday.

Mr. Pinter learned he had cancer of the esophagus in 2002. In 2005, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm but delivered an acceptance speech from a wheelchair in a recorded video.

In more than 30 plays — written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like "The Birthday Party," "The Caretaker," "The Homecoming" and "Betrayal" — Mr. Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence.

Along with another Nobel winner, Samuel Beckett, his friend and mentor, Mr. Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace.

An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet and director as well as a dramatist, Mr. Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq, but that it had also "supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship" in the last 50 years.

His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power.

The dynamic in his work is rooted in battles for control, turf wars waged in locations that range from working-class boarding houses (in his first produced play, "The Room," from 1957) to upscale restaurants (the setting for "Celebration," staged in 2000). His plays often take place in a single, increasingly claustrophobic room, where conversation is a minefield and even innocuous-seeming words can wound.

In Mr. Pinter's work "words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other," said Peter Hall, who has staged more of Mr. Pinter's plays than any other director.

But while Mr. Pinter's linguistic agility turned simple, sometimes obscene, words into dark, glittering and often mordantly funny poetry, it is what comes between the words that he is most famous for. And the stage direction "pause" would haunt him throughout his career.

Intended as an instructive note to actors, the Pinter pause was a space for emphasis and breathing room. But it could also be as threatening as a raised fist. Mr. Pinter said that writing the word "pause" into his first play was "a fatal error." It is certainly the aspect of his writing that has been most parodied. But no other playwright has consistently used pauses with such rhythmic assurance and to such fine-tuned manipulative effect.

Early in his career Mr. Pinter said his work was about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet." Though he later regretted the image, it holds up as a metaphor for the undertow of danger that pervades his work. As Martin Esslin wrote in his book "Pinter: The Playwright," "Man's existential fear, not as an abstraction, but as something real, ordinary and acceptable as an everyday occurrence — here we have the core of Pinter's work as a dramatist."

Though often grouped with Beckett and others as a practitioner of Theater of the Absurd, Mr. Pinter considered himself a realist. In 1962 he said the context of his plays was always "concrete and particular." He never found a need to alter that assessment.

Beginning in the late 1950s, John Osborne and Mr. Pinter helped to turn British theater away from the gentility of the drawing room. With "Look Back in Anger," Osborne opened the door for several succeeding generations of angry young men, who railed against the class system and an ineffectual government. Mr. Pinter was to have the more lasting effect as an innovator and a stylist. And his influence on other playwrights, including David Mamet in the United States and Patrick Marber and Jez Butterworth in England, is undeniable.

The playwright Tom Stoppard said that before Mr. Pinter: "One thing plays had in common: you were supposed to believe what people said up there. If somebody comes in and says, 'Tea or coffee?' and the answer is 'Tea,' you are entitled to assume that somebody is offered a choice of two drinks, and the second person has stated a preference." With Mr. Pinter there are alternatives, "such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea," Mr. Stoppard said, "or that he preferred the stuff you make from coffee beans under the impression that it was called tea."

As another British playwright, David Hare, said of Mr. Pinter, "The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play or film he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected."

Though initially regarded as an intuitive rather than an intellectual playwright, Mr. Pinter was in fact both. His plays are dense with references to writers like James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. The annual Pinter Review, in which scholars probe and parse his works for meaning and metaphor, is one of many indications of his secure berth in academia.

While it was not immediately apparent, Mr. Pinter was always a writer with a political sensibility, which became overt in later plays like "One for the Road" (1984) and "Mountain Language" (1988). These works, having to do "not with ambiguities of power, but actual power," he said, were written out of "very cold anger."

He and his wife hosted gatherings in their Holland Park town house for liberal political seminars. Known as the June 20th Society, the participants included Mr. Hare, Ian McEwan, Michael Holroyd, John Mortimer, Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer. In their discussions Mr. Pinter expressed the great struggle of the mid-20th century as one between "primitive rage" and "liberal generosity," Mr. Hare said.

Through the years Mr. Pinter became known, especially to the British news media, for having a prickly personality. "There is a violence in me," Mr. Pinter once said, "but I don't walk around looking for trouble." The director Richard Eyre said in a testimonial book published for Mr. Pinter's 70th birthday that he was "sometimes pugnacious and occasionally splenetic" but "just as often droll and generous — particularly to actors, directors and (a rare quality this) other writers."

Harold Pinter was born in Hackney in the East End of London on Oct. 10, 1930. His father, Jack, was a tailor; his mother, Frances, a homemaker. Mr. Pinter's grandparents had emigrated to England from Eastern Europe. His parents, he said, were "very solid, very respectable, Jewish, lower-middle-class people."

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Harold, an only child, was evacuated from London to a provincial town in Cornwall. His feelings of loneliness and isolation from that time were to surface later in his plays. When he was 13, he returned to London and was there during the Blitz when his house was struck by a bomb. He rushed inside to rescue a few valuable possessions: his cricket bat and a poem — "a paean of love" — he was writing to a girlfriend.

Sports, poetry and his relationships with women were to remain important to him. Vigorously athletic, he was a fierce competitor in cricket and tennis. Ian Smith, an Oxford don and cricket teammate, equated Mr. Pinter's art with his bold style of playing cricket. "Everything is focused," he said. "It's about performance and economy of gesture."

Mr. Pinter grew up on a diet of American gangster movies and British war films. From the first he was a great reader and a hopeful poet, with strong political judgments. When he was called up for military service at 18, as a pacifist he refused to serve.

In diverse ways he remained a conscientious objector in the years to come, echoing a line in "The Birthday Party," in which Stanley, a lodger in a seaside boarding house, is suddenly taken away by two strangers to some ominous future as a friend cries out, "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!" Years later, Mr. Pinter said he had lived that line all his life.

Mr. Pinter's first poem was published in a magazine called Poetry London when he was 20. Soon afterward he completed a novel, "The Dwarfs." After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, he signed on with a repertory company and, performing under the name David Baron, toured Ireland in plays by Shakespeare and others, often in villainous roles like Iago.

In 1955, at a party in London, Mr. Pinter was struck by what he referred to as "an odd image." A little man, who later turned out to be the writer and professional eccentric Quentin Crisp, was making bacon and eggs for a large man who was sitting at a table reading the comics. Mr. Pinter told his friend Henry Woolf about the incident and said he thought he might write a play about it. The next year Mr. Woolf, then a graduate student at the University of Bristol, asked him if he could write that play for a group of drama students.

The resulting work, "The Room," was Mr. Pinter's first play. And with its story of mysterious intruders and its elliptical speech, it showed that Mr. Pinter had already found his voice as a dramatist. It opened in Bristol on May 15, 1957, and was restaged three years later at the Hampstead Theater Club in London.

In 1956 Mr. Pinter married Vivien Merchant, an actress in the company. After their son, Daniel, was born in 1958, they moved to the Chiswick section of London. He wrote "The Birthday Party," his first full-length play, drawing on his memories of touring as an actor in Eastbourne, on Britain's south coast.

The Pinters, who were temporarily unemployed and desperately poor had an offer to act in Birmingham, and Ms. Merchant wanted to accept it. But Mr. Pinter said: "I have this play opening in London. I think I must stay. Something's going to happen." She replied, "What makes you think so?"

They turned down the acting offer. "The Birthday Party" opened in the West End in 1958 and received disastrous reviews. Then, prodded by the theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, Harold Hobson, the eminent critic of The Sunday Times of London, came to see it at a matinee. What he wrote turned out to be a life-changing review.

"It breathes in the air," Hobson wrote. "It cannot be seen but it enters the room every time the door is opened." He continued: "Though you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere." He concluded, "Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London."

Despite that review the play closed that weekend. By contrast Mr. Pinter's next full-length play to be produced, "The Caretaker," which opened in London in 1960, was a dazzling critical success. "Suddenly everything went topsy-turvy," Mr. Pinter said.

In that play two brothers live in a seedy house in London and, for inexplicable reasons, invite a homeless man named Davies to share their quarters and to act as a kind of custodian. Michael Billington, a critic for The Guardian and Mr. Pinter's biographer, has called the play "an austere masterpiece: a universally recognizable play about political maneuvering, fraternal love, spiritual isolation, language as a negotiating weapon or a form of cover-up."

Mr. Pinter's next play, "The Homecoming," opened in London in June 1965, in a Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Mr. Hall. The story of an all-male family headed by a Lear-like father and the woman (Ms. Merchant, who starred in many of his plays) who enters and disrupts their domain scored a major success in London. Though it received a mixed reception in New York, "The Homecoming" won a Tony Award as best play and had a long run on Broadway.

After these first three full-length plays — all stories of raffish characters in shabby environments — Mr. Pinter shifted his focus. His next three dramas were set in the worlds of art and publishing: "Old Times" (1971), "No Man's Land" (1975) and "Betrayal" (1978), all studies of the unreliability of memory and the uncertainty of love. In "Old Times" a husband and wife encounter a woman they may or may not have known in the past.

In "No Man's Land" a faded poet visits a wealthy patron for an evening of recollection and gamesmanship, roles played in the original production by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, who repeated their performances in New York the next year. The elegant "Betrayal" is a play about marriage and duplicity and, despite its use of reverse chronology, is among Mr. Pinter's most accessible works. It was made into a 1982 film starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge.

During the run of "No Man's Land" Mr. Pinter began an affair with Lady Antonia Fraser, the biographer and historian, who was then married to Hugh Fraser, a conservative politician. In 1980 Mr. Pinter and Lady Antonia were married, with Mr. Pinter becoming the substitute paterfamilias of an extended family.

In addition to his wife, his survivors include his son, Daniel, and his stepchildren, Benjamin, Damian, Orlando, Rebecca, Flora and Natasha. Years ago his son changed his last name to Brand, his maternal grandmother's maiden name. He had been estranged from his father, living as a recluse in Cambridgeshire.

After "Betrayal" Mr. Pinter's plays became shorter (like "A Kind of Alaska") and then, for about three years, they stopped. "Something gnaws away," he explained, "the desire to write something and the inability to do so." He added, "I think I was getting more and more imbedded in international issues."

At the same time he continued his involvement in films, highlighted by his close collaboration as screenwriter with the director Joseph Losey, which began in 1963 with "The Servant," a depiction of class relations in Britain. That was followed in 1967 by "Accident," about a professor infatuated with a student (Mr. Pinter and Ms. Merchant each had minor parts), and "The Go-Between" (1971), about a boy's complicity in an adult affair in turn of the century Britain, with Julie Christie and Alan Bates.

His many screenplays for other directors include "The Pumpkin Eater" (1964), about a woman (Anne Bancroft) drifting through multiple marriages, directed by Jack Clayton; "The Last Tycoon," Elia Kazan's 1976 adaptation of the Fitzgerald novel; and "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981), a Karel Reisz film with Meryl Streep and Mr. Irons.

With his plays "Moonlight" (a portrait of family relationships undermined by years of divisiveness) and "Ashes to Ashes" (a story of "torturers and victims" reflected in a typically uncommunicative marriage), Mr. Pinter returned to the longer, somberly meditative form.

His final work, "Celebration" (2000), is a wry look at power-conscious couples dining in a chic restaurant that bears a striking resemblance to the Ivy, a famous theater gathering place in London. "Celebration" was inspired by the playwright's early days as an unemployed actor, when he took a job as a busboy at the National Liberal Club. Because he dared to intrude on a conversation among several diners, he was fired.

He often directed plays by others, especially those by Simon Gray ("Butley," "Otherwise Engaged"), and occasionally his own work. Increasingly and with greater zeal he appeared as an actor — onstage with Paul Eddington in "No Man's Land" and in films like "Mojo," "Mansfield Park" and "The Tailor of Panama." Throughout his life he specialized in playing menacing characters, including several in his own plays ("The Hothouse," "One for the Road").

In July 2001 the highlight of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York was the presentation of nine Pinter plays, including a revival of "The Homecoming," and a pairing of his first and last plays, "The Room" and "Celebration." Mr. Pinter participated as a director and also acted in "One for the Road" in the role of a dapper and sadistic government interrogator.

The Pinter festival was the capstone of a season that, in London, featured the premiere at the National Theater of a stage version of his film script for "Remembrance of Things Past." Late in 2001 he directed an acclaimed revival of "No Man's Land," starring John Wood and Corin Redgrave at the National Theater.

In December 2001, during a routine medical examination, he was found to have cancer of the esophagus. In January 2002, while undergoing treatment, he acted in his brief comic sketch "Press Conference" at the National Theater in a malicious role as a minister of culture who was formerly the head of the secret police. In 2006 he appeared in a weeklong, sold-out production of Beckett's one-man play, "Krapp's Last Tape," at the Royal Court Theater.

"Pinter looks anxiously over his left shoulder into the darkness as if he felt death's presence in the room," Mr. Billington of The Guardian wrote, "It is impossible to dissociate Pinter's own recent encounters with mortality from that of the character."

Revivals of Mr. Pinter's work have become increasingly frequent in recent years. Last December an acclaimed production of his "Homecoming" opened on Broadway.

Mr. Pinter said he thought of theater as essentially exploratory. "Even old Sophocles didn't know what was going to happen next," he said. "He had to find his way through unknown territory. At the same time, theater has always been a critical act, looking in a broad sense at the society in which we live and attempting to reflect and dramatize these findings. We're not talking about the moon."

Speaking about his intuitive sense of writing, he said, "I find at the end of the journey, which of course is never ending, that I have found things out."

"I don't go away and say: 'I have illuminated myself. You see before you a changed person,' " he added. "It's a more surreptitious sense of discovery that happens to the writer himself."

Few writers have been so consistent over so many years in the tone and execution of their work. Just before rehearsals began for the West End production of "The Birthday Party" half a century ago, Mr. Pinter sent a letter to his director, Peter Wood. In it he said, "The play dictated itself, but I confess that I wrote it — with intent, maliciously, purposefully, in command of its growth."

He added: "The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work."

[hedwig]

i've only read Betrayal. i read it in the bookstore while waiting for my ride to arrive and it really shook me up. it's painful and brilliant and it stayed in my thoughts for a long, long time.

RIP

[cinemanarchist]

http://www.theparisreview.org/media/4351_PINTER.pdf

Paris Review Interview with Pinter. Highly recommended.

[MacGuffin]

Bahamas autopsy planned for John Travolta's son

(Reuters) – An autopsy is planned in the Bahamas for actor John Travolta's 16-year-old son, who died suddenly during a vacation at his family's resort home, authorities said.

Police Superintendent Basil Rahming said on Saturday the autopsy, which could determine the cause of death of Jett Travolta, was likely to be performed on Monday.

Rahming did not elaborate on the time or place of the procedure. He said Travolta's eldest child, who had a history of seizures, had been found unconscious in a bathroom at his family's home at the Old Bahama Bay resort on Grand Bahama Island on Friday morning.

The body was discovered by a caretaker, Rahming said. Jett Travolta had last been seen alive on Thursday and was pronounced dead after being taken by ambulance to Rand Memorial Hospital in Freeport.

The Travoltas arrived in Grand Bahama on December 30 for a New Year family get-together at their vacation unit at the Old Bahama Bay hotel resort. They had planned to stay until January 9.

Family lawyer Michael Ossi said Travolta and his wife, actress Kelly Preston, were "distraught" over the loss of their son. Both have said previously that he became very sick when he was a toddler and was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease, which leads to inflammation of the blood vessels in young children.

"This is the worst day in Mr. and Mrs. Travolta's life -- nobody wants to bury their child," Ossi said.

Travolta's publicists declined to comment on autopsy or funeral plans.

But Tampa-based attorney Michael McDermott, a family friend, told the Star-Banner newspaper in Ocala, a city in north-central Florida, that the funeral was being arranged in Ocala.

The couple have maintained a home for more than five years near Ocala in the exclusive Jumbolair community that aviation enthusiasts like Travolta can fly into at the wheel of their own private jets.

[MacGuffin]

Actor Pat Hingle dies at 84
Played Commissioner Gordon in '90s 'Batman'

Pat Hingle, a veteran actor whose career spanned stage, film and TV, including a recurring role as Commissioner Gordon in several Batman movies in the 1990s, died Saturday of cancer. He was 84.

Born Martin Patterson Hingle in 1924, he went to U. of Texas on a tuba scholarship. After a stint in the Navy during World War II, he earned a degree in radio broadcasting.

He later became a member of the Actors Studio, which led to a role in Broadway's "End as a Man."

He earned an acting Tony nom for 1958's "Dark at the Top of the Stairs."

Film roles included "On the Waterfront," "Hang 'Em High" and "Norma Rae."

Hingle was a guest star in many TV series, including roles on dramas "Touched by an Angel," "Homicide: Life on the Street," "Murder She Wrote," "War and Remembrance" and "In the Heat of the Night," as well as comedies "Wings," "Cheers" and "Mash" to name just a few.

Family friend Michele Seidman said Hingle died at his home in Carolina Beach shortly after 10 p.m. Saturday.

Seidman said he decided to settle in the coastal town after shooting the movie "Maximum Overdrive" in the area in 1986. He lived there for more than 15 years.

She said Hingle had battled multiple health problems over the past several years.

Hingle's career in movies and television spanned six decades, and he was also nominated for a Tony Award in 1958. Hingle's last movie was "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," which was released in 2006.

He set up the Pat Hingle Guest Artist Endowment at the U. of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Survivors include his wife, Julia; five children; two sisters; and 11 grandchildren.

[Pozer]

sonuvobituaries.. personalwise too. i think the death around me stuff is why i took to CCBB.

[MacGuffin]

'Fantasy Island' star Ricardo Montalban dies at 88

LOS ANGELES – Ricardo Montalban, the Mexican-born actor who became a star in splashy MGM musicals and later as the wish-fulfilling Mr. Roarke in TV's "Fantasy Island," died Wednesday morning at his home, a city councilman said. He was 88. Montalban's death was announced at a city council meeting by president Eric Garcetti, who represents the district where the actor lived. Garcetti did not give a cause of death.

"What you saw on the screen and on television and on talk shows, this very courtly, modest, dignified individual, that's exactly who he was," said Montalban's longtime friend and publicist David Brokaw.

Montalban had been a star in Mexican movies when MGM brought him to Hollywood in 1946. He was cast in the leading role opposite Esther Williams in "Fiesta," and starred again with the swimming beauty in "On an Island with You" and "Neptune's Daughter."

But Montalban was best known as the faintly mysterious, white-suited Mr. Roarke, who presided over a tropical island resort where visitors were able to fulfill their lifelong dreams — usually at the unexpected expense of a difficult life lesson. Following a floatplane landing and lei ceremony, he greeted each guest with the line: "I am Mr. Roarke, your host. Welcome to Fantasy Island."

The show ran from 1978 to 1984.

More recently, he appeared as villains in two hits of the 1980s: "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan" and the farcical "The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad."

Between movie and TV roles, Montalban was active in the theater. He starred on Broadway in the 1957 musical "Jamaica" opposite Lena Horne, picking up a Tony nomination for best actor in a musical.

He toured in Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell," playing Don Juan, a performance critic John Simon later recalled as "irresistible." In 1965 he appeared on tour in the Yul Brynner role in "The King and I."

"The Ricardo Montalban Theatre in my Council District — where the next generations of performers participate in plays, musicals, and concerts — stands as a fitting tribute to this consummate performer," Garcetti said later in a written statement.

"Fantasy Island" received high ratings for most of its run on ABC, and still appears in reruns. Mr. Roarke and his sidekick, Tattoo, played by the 3-foot, 11-inch Herve Villechaize, reached the state of TV icons. Villechaize died in 1993.

In a 1978 interview, Montalban analyzed the series's success:

"What is appealing is the idea of attaining the unattainable and learning from it. Once you obtain a fantasy, it becomes a reality, and that reality is not as exciting as your fantasy. Through the fantasies you learn to appreciate your own realities."

As for Mr. Roarke: "Was he a magician? A hypnotist? Did he use hallucinogenic drugs? I finally came across a character that works for me. He has the essence of mystery, but I need a point of view so that my performance is consistent. I now play him 95 percent believable and 5 percent mystery. He doesn't have to behave mysteriously; only what he does is mysterious."

In 1970, Montalban organized fellow Latino actors into an organization called Nosotros ("We"), and he became the first president. Their aim: to improve the image of Spanish-speaking Americans on the screen; to assure that Latin-American actors were not discriminated against; to stimulate Latino actors to study their profession.

Montalban commented in a 1970 interview:

"The Spanish-speaking American boy sees Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid wipe out a regiment of Bolivian soldiers. He sees `The Wild Bunch' annihilate the Mexican army. It's only natural for him to say, `Gee, I wish I were an Anglo.'"

Montalban was no stranger to prejudice. He was born Nov. 25, 1920, in Mexico City, the son of parents who had emigrated from Spain. The boy was brought up to speak the Castilian Spanish of his forebears. To Mexican ears that sounded strange and effeminate, and young Ricardo was jeered by his schoolmates.

His mother also dressed him with old-country formality, and he wore lace collars and short pants "long after my legs had grown long and hairy," he wrote in his 1980 autobiography, "Reflections: A Life in Two Worlds."

"It is not easy to grow up in a country that has different customs from your own family's."

While driving through Texas with his brother, Montalban recalled seeing a sign on a diner: "No Dogs or Mexicans Allowed." In Los Angeles, where he attended Fairfax High School, he and a friend were refused entrance to a dance hall because they were Mexicans.

Rather than seek a career in Hollywood, Montalban played summer stock in New York. He returned to Mexico City and played leading roles in movies from 1941 to 1945. That led to an MGM contract.

Besides the Williams spectacles, the handsome actor appeared in "Sombrero" (opposite Pier Angeli), "Two Weeks With Love" (Jane Powell) and "Latin Lovers" (Lana Turner).

He also appeared in dramatic roles in such films as "Border Incident," "Battleground," "Mystery Street" and "Right Cross."

"Movies were never kind to me; I had to fight for every inch of film," he reflected in 1970. "Usually my best scenes would end up on the cutting-room floor."

Montalban had better luck after leaving MGM in 1953, though he was usually cast in ethnic roles. He appeared as a Japanese kabuki actor in "Sayonara" and an Indian in "Cheyenne Autumn." His other films included: "Madame X," "The Singing Nun," "Sweet Charity," "Escape from the Planet of the Apes" and "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes."

Montalban was sometimes said to be the source of Billy Crystal's "you look MAHvelous" character on "Saturday Night Live," though the inspiration was really Argentinian-born actor Fernando Lamas.

In 1944, Montalban married Georgiana Young, actress and model and younger sister of actress Loretta Young. Both Roman Catholics, they remained one of Hollywood's most devoted couples. She died in 2007. They had four children: Laura, Mark, Anita and Victor.

Montalban suffered a spinal injury in a horse fall while making a 1951 Clark Gable Western, "Across the Wide Missouri," and thereafter walked with a limp he managed to mask during his performances.

In 1993, Montalban lost the feeling in his leg, and exhaustive tests showed that he had suffered a small hemorrhage in his neck, similar to the injury decades earlier. He underwent 9 1/2 hours of spinal surgery at UCLA Medical Center.

Despite the constant pain, the actor was able to take a role in an Aaron Spelling TV series, "Heaven Help Us." Twice a month in 1994, he flew to San Antonio for two or three days of filming as an angel who watched over a young couple.

In an interview at the time, Montalban remarked: "I've never given up hope. But I have to be realistic. I gave my tennis rackets to my son, figuring I'll never play again. But my doctor said, `Don't say that. Strange things happen. You never know.'"

[MacGuffin]

X-Files, Supernatural Director Kim Manners Dies
Source: E! Online

Kim Manners, the veteran TV producer-director who helmed dozens of episodes of The X-Files and Supermatural, died Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles from lung cancer. He was 59.

Hailing from a showbiz family, Manners first broke into the TV business in the 1970s as a production manager and director on Charlie's Angels. He went on to work on such series as Star Trek: The Next Generation, 21 Jump Street and Baywatch until he got the call for The X-Files.

It was on Chris Carter's hit sci-fi mystery series where Manners made his mark, scoring four Emmy nominations for his work. All told he directed 52 episodes of The X-Files.

"Kim had a blazing intensity that inspired everyone—writers, producers, actors and crew...as long as he'd been a director, he never lost his passion for his work. Every time he got a script, he gave it his all," X-Files writer-producer Frank Spotnitz writes on his blog.

"Kim was an incredible force of life. It is hard for me to believe or accept that he is gone."

After The X-Files ended, Manners helped launch Supernatural in 2005, directing many of its most memorable episodes, including the season finales.

"Everyone at Supernatural is walking around in a daze, shocked and absolutely devastated," Supernatural mastermind Eric Kripke said in a statement. "Kim was a brilliant director; more than that, he was a mentor and friend."

[hedwig]

damn.. RIP.. 

[Ravi]

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/entertainment/Actor-James-Whitmore-Dead-at-87.html

Actor James Whitmore Dead at 87
Updated 4:54 PM PST, Fri, Feb 6, 2009

MALIBU, Calif. -- Veteran character actor James Whitmore, who appeared in films ranging from "The Asphalt Jungle" to "Planet of the Apes" to "The Shawshank Redemption," died Friday at his Malibu home at age 87.

Whitmore died of lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with a week before Thanksgiving, his son, Steve, said.

"My father was a great man and it gives me great joy to speak about a father that always had my back," Steve Whitmore said. "He always said the most important thing in life was family. He loved his work, but he always saw it as a way to provide for the most important thing, and that's family."

A New York native, James Whitmore earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University, then served with the Marines in World War II. After his military service, Whitmore began appearing in stage productions in New Hampshire in the late 1940s.

He made his Broadway debut in "Command Decision" in 1947, winning a Tony Award.

Two years later, Whitmore was appearing on the big screen opposite Glenn Ford in "The Undercover Man." He earned Oscar and Golden Globe nominations with his follow-up performance in "Battleground."

He made a string of film appearances through the 1950s, then began appearing in television shows such as "The Twilight Zone," "Rawhide," "Dr. Kildare," "The Law and Mr. Jones" and "The Detectives."

He portrayed veteran Chief Inspector Charles Kane in "Madigan" and played the president of the simian assembly in the original "Planet of the Apes."

He returned to the stage in the 1970s, appearing in one-man shows portraying Will Rogers, Harry Truman and Theodore Roosevelt. He moved his Harry Truman role to the silver screen in "Give 'em Hell, Harry!," a role that earned him a second Oscar nomination.

Whitmore tugged on movie-goers' heart-strings when he played inmate Brooks Hatlen in "The Shawshank Redemption."

He won an Emmy Award in 2000 for his recurring role on the drama "The Practice."

"I know my father leaves a large footprint. So many in the motion picture business and the acting business loved and admired him, and we, the family, share in that admiration and love," Steve Whitmore said.

"He was nominated for the Academy Award twice. He's an Emmy Award winner, but that was all a means to an end to him -- to provide for those he loved and cared for," he said. "He was glad to be able to do what he loved and provide.

"We appreciate everybody and thank you all for your thoughts and prayers."

In addition to his son, Whitmore is survived by his wife Noreen, sons James Jr. and Dan, eight grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.

[Gold Trumpet]

Christopher Nolan, Irish Poet, Dead at Age 43
         

Associated Press
Writer Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press Writer
– Sat Feb 21, 5:04 pm ET


LONDON – Christopher Nolan, an Irish poet and novelist who refused to let cerebral palsy get in the way of his writing, has died. He was 43.

Nolan choked on a piece of food Friday at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, according to a statement from his family carried in the Irish media. The hospital confirmed his death Saturday.

"Christopher Nolan was a gifted writer who attained deserved success and acclaim throughout the world for his work," Irish President Mary McAleese said in a statement, adding that his achievements were "all the more remarkable given his daily battle with cerebral palsy."

Nolan's brain was starved of oxygen during birth, leaving him unable to speak or control his arms or legs. He might have remained isolated from the outside world were it not for a drug, Lioresal, which restored some of his muscle function. His parents nurtured their partially paralyzed son's literary talent.

Using a "unicorn stick" strapped to his forehead to tap the keys of a typewriter, Nolan laboriously wrote out messages and, eventually, poems and books as well.

Bernadette Nolan, Christopher's mother, said her son was 11 when his writing first turned lyrical.

"He wrote of a family visit to a cave that was illuminated by electric lights: He said it was 'a lovely, fairy-like effect to the work of nature,'" she told The Associated Press in a 1987 interview. "It was just that turn of phrase," she said. "I thought, that's unusual for a kid of 11."

The next day Nolan wrote a poem packed with metaphors and peppered with alliteration, which his mother said showed a mind "just like a spin dryer at full speed."

His father Joe read his son poetry and passages from James Joyce's "Ulysses." Christopher took to writing early: He published "Dam-Burst of Dreams," a collection of poetry, at the age of 15. Even then critics compared it to Joyce.

His autobiography, "Under the Eye of the Clock: The Life Story of Christopher Nolan," won the prestigious Whitbread Award in 1988. The third-person account describes Nolan's longing for an education and the liberation of finally being able to type out his feelings. The book was a frank but sometimes hilarious account of his disability: he described his arm flying out to grab a woman's skirt and how his mouth sometimes remained stubbornly shut when he wanted to take communion.

As novelist Margaret Drabble noted, the book was "not merely another tale of brave strife against odds," adding that Nolan was "a writer, a real writer who uses words with an idiosyncratic new-minded freshness."

Nolan disliked sentimental stories about his disability. Although the "Under the Eye of the Clock" drew offers to have his book made into a movie, Nolan refused on the grounds that the production would be a sympathy piece, according to the Irish Independent.

"I want to highlight the creativity within the brain of a cripple and, while not attempting to hide his crippledom, I want instead to filter all sob-storied sentiment from his portrait and dwell upon his life, his laughter, his vision, and his nervous normality," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Funeral arrangements were not immediately available.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090221/ap_on_re_eu/eu_ireland_obit_nolan_3