Jennifer Jones: Actress, Dead at 90...

Jennifer Jones
(March 2, 1919 – December 17, 2009)




Jennifer Jones was an American actress. A five-time Academy Award nominee, Jones won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Song of Bernadette (1943).

Jones was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the daughter of Phil and Flora Mae Isley, who ran a travelling theatre. She toured with her parents as a child in vaudeville tent shows. Her first stage role, playing a peppermint candy, was at the age of five.

Her father hoped she would become a lawyer, but she persuaded him to let her attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she met and married her first husband, the actor Robert Walker. They travelled to Hollywood.

Hollywood publicised her as an overnight discovery, though this was not strictly true. She had first tried her hand there four years earlier under her real name, Phylis Isley, playing opposite John Wayne in a B picture, New Frontier, and in a small role in the serial Dick Tracy's G-Men (both 1939).

Thanks to her early success, she enjoyed a reputation as a "heavyweight" actress, that got her dramatic roles. There were those who felt that she rarely measured up to them, and that parts in Madame Bovary (1949), Gone to Earth (1950), Carrie (1952) and Tender Is the Night (1962) allegedly exposed her limitations.

She starred in two comedy films, yet they were among her most accomplished work. Cluny Brown (1946), which she made for Ernst Lubitsch and John Huston's Beat the Devil (1954).

It was often stated that Jones was a manufactured star. Two of her three husbands were millionaires. David O Selznick, whom she married in 1949, was a celebrated Hollywood tycoon who had made Gone with the Wind (1950). He took personal charge of her career, casting her in his own pictures and leasing her services to others as a prime attraction. With Selznick's death in 1965, her acting career petered out. She made only three more films, with long intervals between them. The last, The Towering Inferno (1974), offered her only a cameo role as one of those trapped on the upper floors of a burning skyscraper.

In 1971, Jones married her second tycoon – the multi-millionaire industrialist Norton Simon.

With Robert Walker, Jones had two sons – Michael, who predeceased her, and Robert Walker Jr, who also became an actor. Her daughter, Mary Selznick, died aged 21 in 1976.

Jones enjoyed a quiet retirement in Southern California close to her son, Robert. She granted no interviews and rarely appeared in public. She died of natural causes at her home.

RIP

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Ciarán MacMathúna: Irish Broadcaster, Dead at 84...

Ciarán Mac Mathúna
(November 26, 1925 – December 11, 2009)




Ciarán Mac Mathúna was a former Irish broadcaster and music collector. He was a recognised authority on Irish music and lectured extensively on the subject. He travelled around Ireland, England, Scotland and America collecting music.

A native of Co. Limerick, Ciarán Mac Mathúna first joined RTÉ as a radio producer in 1955. One of his first jobs was to travel around the country in the company of a mobile recording unit gathering material for Radio Éireann’s traditional music archive.

Mac Mathúna's long-running Sunday morning radio series Mo Cheol Thú (You are my music) began in 1970 and continued until November 2005, when he retired from broadcasting. Each 45 minute programme offered a miscellany of archive music, poetry and folklore, mainly of Irish origin. It was one of radio's longest running programmes. The last episode was broadcast on 27 November 2005.

For more than 50 years he made an enormous contribution to the preservation and development of Irish traditional music.

Mac Mathúna won two Jacob's Awards, in 1969 and 1990, for his RTÉ Radio programmes promoting Irish traditional music. He received the Freedom of Limerick City in June 2004. He was also awarded honorary doctorates by NUI Galway and the University of Limerick.

In 2007, he was awarded with the Musicians Award at the 10th annual TG4 Traditional Music Awards.

He was married to Dolly MacMahon, who was a singer of traditional songs. She came from Galway an met her husband in 1955. He lived with Dolly, who survives him, in Templeogue, Dublin. He and Dolly had three children and four(?) grandchildren.

RIP

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Liam Clancy: Musician/Singer, Dead at 74...

William 'Liam' Clancy
(September 2, 1935 - December 4, 2009)




Liam Clancy was an Irish folk singer and musician.

He was the last surviving member of the Clancy Brothers, who were credited with bringing Irish traditional music to a world audience in the 1960s. Bob Dylan described Mr. Clancy as the “just the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my whole life”.

Born in Carrick on Suir Ireland, he was the youngest of 11 children. As a young man he dreamed of life on the stage, but there was music in his blood too.

In his late teens he met and travelled Ireland with US song collector Diane Hamilton Guggenheim and eventually travelled to the US with her.

His brothers Paddy and Tom had emigrated before him - and along with renowned Armagh singer Tommy Makem - they began performing in New York.

With their trademark Aran jumpers The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem played legendary venues such as the White Horse Tavern in New York.

They became international stars following a performance on the Ed Sullivan television show.

The band played a key role in the 60s folk revival - reworking traditional ballads for both an international and an Irish audience.

When the Clancy Brothers later went their separate ways, Liam pursued a solo career in Canada before reuniting with Tommy Makem to form the hugely popular duo Makem and Clancy. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem did play together again in the 1980s, and in later years Liam, maintained a successful solo career.

Alan Gilsenan directed a full length biography of Liam Clancy, which was released at the 2009 Dublin Film Festival, The Yellow Bittern: The Life and Times of Liam Clancy and includes appearances by Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie, Bob Dylan, Oscar Brand, Odetta, Josh White, and many others.

Mr. Clancy died in hospital in Cork, Ireland, after a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis - scarring of the lungs. His brother Bobby died of the same disease in 2002.

He is survived by his wife Kim and four children.

RIP

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