Sidney Lumet: Film Director, Dead at 86...

Sidney Lumet
(June 25, 1924 – April 9, 2011)





Sidney Lumet was an American film director, with over 50 films to his name, including 12 Angry Men (1957), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976) and The Verdict (1982), all of which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director. He was also nominated for best screenplay as co-writer of Prince Of The City (1981).

Lumet was one of the leading film directors of the second half of the 20th century. He was prolific, directing more than 40 movies, and versatile, dabbling in many different film genres. Lumet often shot his movies in his native New York.

In 2005, he received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement.

His films, nominated for more than 50 Oscars, typically were unsentimental and extremely well crafted, exploring intelligent and complicated themes.

His stepdaughter, Leslie Gimbel, said Lumet died of lymphoma at his home in Manhattan, the New York Times said.

RIP

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Elizabeth Taylor: Actress, Dead at 79...

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, DBE
(February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011)




Elizabeth Taylor, also known as Liz Taylor, was an English-American actress.

Beginning as a child star, as an adult she came to be known for her acting talent and beauty, and had a much publicised private life, including eight marriages and several near death experiences. Taylor was considered one of the great actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. The American Film Institute named Taylor seventh on its Female Legends list.

The Hollywood legend's career spanned seven decades and she had five Oscar nominations.

Taylor acted in her first film at the age of 10, three years after her American parents had returned to the United States from London, where she was born in Hampstead in 1932.

After just one film, she was hired by MGM, and became a child star with National Velvet, starring opposite Mickey Rooney. One of the longest-surviving stars of the old studio system, she was widely acclaimed for her roles Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Raintree Country and Cleopatra.

Her two best actress Oscars were awarded for Butterfield 8 in 1960, and for her portrayal of a foul-mouthed alcoholic in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1967.

Later in life she became known for charitable work for Aids and other causes, as well as her friendship with Michael Jackson, who asked her to be godmother to two of his three children.

Taylor dealt with various health problems over the years. In February 2011 new symptoms related to congestive heart failure caused her to be admitted into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for treatment.

Taylor died surrounded by her four children at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.

RIP

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Jane Russell: Actress, Dead at 89...

Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell
(June 21, 1921 – February 28, 2011)




Jane Russell was an American film actress and was one of Hollywood's leading sex symbols in the 1940s and 1950s.

She was discovered by the wealthy industrialist Howard Hughes who in 1940 cast her in the movie The Outlaw. In 1947, Russell delved into music before returning to films. She made several films unde her contract with RKO – thrillers such as His Kind of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952), both opposite Robert Mitchum; The Las Vegas Story (1952) with Victor Mature; and Double Dynamite (1951), with Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx. The Western Montana Belle had been made for RKO in 1948, but Howard Hughes bought out the rights and sat on it for four years, releasing it only in 1952, when he felt his protégée was sufficiently established. In that year she also made Son of Paleface for Paramount.

Her best known role came in 1953 when she starred alongside another Hollywood legend, Marilyn Monroe, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

After starring in multiple films in the 1950s, Russell again returned to music while completing several other films in the 1960s. She starred in over 20 films throughout her career.

In 1955, she founded the World Adoption International Fund. For her achievements in film, she received several accolades including having her hand and foot prints immortalized in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theater and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Russell married three times and adopted three children.

She died at her home in Santa Maria, California of a respiratory-related illness. She is survived by her three children: Thomas Waterfield, Tracy Foundas and Robert Waterfield.

RIP

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Gary Moore: Rock Guitarist, Dead at 58...

Robert William Gary Moore

(4 April 1952 – 6 February 2011)

Gary Moore was a renowned rock guitarist and musician from Belfast, Ireland, best recognized as a blues rock guitarist and singer.

Moore was a former member of the legendary Irish group Thin Lizzy.

Moore was originally drafted into Thin Lizzy by its late frontman Phil Lynott. He later gained acclaim for his solo work and was a former member of the Irish group Skid Row.

He was only 16 when he moved from Belfast to Dublin in 1969, to join Skid Row, which featured Lynott as lead vocalist. He was later brought into Thin Lizzy by Lynott to replace the departing Eric Bell, another guitarist from Northern Ireland.

The lead guitarist received critical acclaim for his work on the 1974 Thin Lizzy album, Nightlife, but would never be constrained by the music group format. A year earlier, he had released his first solo album Grinding Stone and his virtuoso playing was to make him a recognised artist in his own right. Although returning to Thin Lizzy briefly in the late 1970s, his solo work continued to garner interest and he also enjoyed UK chart success with Lynott, via singles Parisienne Walkways and Out In The Fields.

Throughout his career, Moore was to embrace a range of genres including blues, metal and hard rock. He performed on stage with a range of major artists and released 20 studio albums.

Despite a tough image that was his legacy from his days with Thin Lizzy, Moore was a gently-spoken character with few rock star traits who generally shied away from publicity, living quietly in Brighton, England.

Moore died in his sleep of a heart attack in his hotel room while on holiday in Estepona, Spain.

Gary is survived by four children; daughters Saoirse and Lily and sons Jack and Gus. He is also survived by by his partner, Jo.

RIP

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John Barry: Film Composer, Dead at 77...

John Barry Prendergast, OBE
(3 November 1933 – 30 January 2011)

John Barry was an Oscar winning English film score composer. He was one of the most successful of all film composers; he won five Oscars for scores that included Born Free, Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves, but wrote his best-known and most enduring music for the James Bond films.

He was born John Barry Prendergast in York, England, the son of an Irish man, was raised in and around cinemas in the north of England. His father was a projectionist in the silent movie era and ended up owning a small chain of cinemas, which Barry Snr and Jnr regularly visited.

In his teens, Barry soaked up the soundtrack work of Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann, spent a couple of national service years in the British army and graduated towards the burgeoning post-war youth pop market with an outfit called the John Barry Seven.

From there, he moved to television, including BBC's Drumbeat and to youth cult movies such as Beat Girl, his music informed as much by soundtrack composers as by Duane Eddy and Dizzy Gillespie.

Barry’s most fertile creative period was the mid-1960s. The success of his scores for the Bond films led to commissions for numerous other spy films, such as The Ipcress File (1965) and The Quiller Memorandum (1966) and later for the television series The Persuaders.  Among Barry’s other scores of this period were those for Zulu (1963), Midnight Cowboy (1969) and the two which brought him his first Oscars: The Lion in Winter (1968), with Peter O’Toole as the ailing King Henry II; and Born Free (1966), the syrupy theme for which also gained him an Oscar for best song.

In 1970 he moved to California and became a tax exile. Although he was still used for Bond films, Barry’s tax problems coincided with a general dip in his fortunes, and his stock did not recover until he was asked to score a Bruce Lee film, Game of Death, in the late 1970s. Thereafter Barry became one of the most sought-after, and richest, film composers in Hollywood. He also won two more Oscars, with the lush yet sophisticated scores for Out of Africa (1985) and Kevin Costner’s revisionist Western, Dances With Wolves (1990).

Beyond the Bond genre he dabbled from time to time with films based on historical events, earning Oscar nominations for the music for both Mary Queen of Scots (1971) and Chaplin (1992).  Barry’s last Bond film was The Living Daylights (1987), creating a Top 10 hit for the pop group A-Ha.

He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1998. He won a Bafta Fellowship Award in 2005 and a Max Steiner Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the city of Vienna, in 2009.

Barry was married four times. He married Barbara Pickard in 1958, with whom he had a daughter. He married secondly, in 1965, the actress Jane Birkin; they had a daughter. He married thirdly, in 1969, Jane Sidey. He is survived by his fourth wife, Laurie, whom he married in 1976, and by his four children.

Barry died of a heart attack at his Oyster Bay home, in New York.

RIP

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Gerry Rafferty: Singer/Songwriter, Dead at 63...

Gerry Rafferty
(April 16, 1947 - January 4, 2010)



Gerry Rafferty was a singer and songwriter, who had a smash hit in 1978 with Baker Street, a world-weary classic based on his experiences busking in the London Underground as a struggling young musician. The song reached number 3 in the UK charts and number 2 in the US.

The song was recognized by musicians rights organization the BMI at an awards ceremony in London (October, 2010) for having been played over 5 million times worldwide.

Rafferty was born on into a working-class family at Paisley near Glasgow, Scotland and grew up in a council house. He was educated at St Mirin’s Academy.

His Irish-born father was a heavy-drinking miner who died when Gerry was 16. Inspired by his Scottish mother, who had taught him Irish and Scottish folk songs as a boy, and heavily influenced by the music of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, the young Gerry started to write his own material.

He began his career busking and formed a band with Billy Connolly, the comedian.

Rafferty’s first chart success had come in 1973, as a member of a folk-rock band called Stealer’s Wheel. A commercially appealing single from their first album, Stuck In The Middle With You, received widespread radio airplay on account of its shuffling catchiness and went to No 8 in the British charts.

Rolling Stone magazine judged it “the best Dylan record since 1966”, and the song was later revived in a blood-curdling scene in the Quentin Tarantino film Reservoir Dogs (1992).

But it was the haunting Baker Street — with its searing saxophone riff — that propelled Rafferty into the pantheon of British rock legends.

After years of touring, Rafferty gave it up in 1983, declaring that he wanted to “watch my family grow”. In the same year he provided a vocal to the soundtrack of the film Local Hero (1983), and from time to time he released new material, including the albums North and South (1988) and, five years later, On A Wing And A Prayer, which featured backing vocals by his brother Jim, who also co-wrote some of the songs. The album also reunited Rafferty with his old partner from Stealer’s Wheel, Joe Egan.

Further albums were Over My Head in 1994 and Another World in 2000.

After the death of his younger brother, Joe, in 1995, a feud developed with his surviving sibling Jim over an insult he claimed his rock star brother applied to him and his friends.

Rafferty’s last original album, Another World, was followed by a collection of his old hits Days Gone Down (2006).

In London in July 2008, Rafferty was treated in hospital for liver problems. Rafferty, who battled alcoholism for many years, was admitted to hospital in Bournemouth in November with suspected liver failure.

Rafferty married, in 1970, Carla Ventilla. The marriage was dissolved. He is survived by daughter Martha, granddaughter Celia, and his brother Jim.

RIP

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Pete Postlethwaite: Actor, Dead at 64...

Peter William "Pete" Postlethwaite, OBE
(7 February 1946 – 2 January 2011)




Pete Postlethwaite was an English stage, film and television actor.

After minor television appearances including in The Professionals, Postlethwaite's first success came with the film Distant Voices, Still Lives in 1988. He played a mysterious lawyer, "Kobayashi", in The Usual Suspects, and he appeared in Alien 3, In the Name of the Father, Amistad, Brassed Off, The Shipping News, The Constant Gardener, Inception, and in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.

Postlethwaite was born in Warrington, England in 1946. He trained as a teacher and taught drama before training as an actor. Steven Spielberg called Postlethwaite "the best actor in the world" after working with him on the The Lost World: Jurassic Park. He received an Academy Award nomination for his role in In the Name of the Father in 1993, and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2004 New Year's Honours List.

Postlethwaite married his wife Jacqueline (Jackie) Morrish, a former BBC producer, in 2003. They have two children, both of whom were born in Shropshire: son William John, a drama student at LAMDA, and daughter Lily Kathleen.

Postlethwaite died after a long battle with cancer. The British actor died at a hospital in Shropshire, England.

RIP

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Blake Edwards: Film Director, Dead at 88...

Blake Edwards
(July 26, 1922 – December 15, 2010)




Blake Edwards was an American film director, screenwriter and producer.

Edwards' career began in the 1940s as an actor but he soon turned to writing radio scripts at Columbia Pictures. He used his writing skills to begin producing and directing, with some of his best films including: Experiment in Terror, The Great Race, and the hugely successful Pink Panther film series with the British comedian Peter Sellers. Often thought of as primarily a director of comedies, he was also renowned for his dramatic work, Breakfast at Tiffany's and Days of Wine and Roses. His greatest successes, however, were his comedies, and most of his films were either musicals, melodramas, slapstick comedies, and thrillers.

In 2004, he received an Honorary Academy Award in recognition of his writing, directing and producing an extraordinary body of work for the screen.

Edwards married his first wife actress Patricia Walker in 1953 and they divorced in 1967. Edwards' second marriage from 1969 until his death was to actress Julie Andrews.

Edwards died of complications of pneumonia at the Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California. His wife and children were at his side.

RIP

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Leslie Nielsen: Actor, Dead at 84...

Leslie William Nielsen,OC
(11 February 1926 – 28 November 2010)





Leslie Nielsen was a Canadian and naturalized American actor and comedian. Nielsen appeared in over one hundred films and 1,500 television programs over the span of his career, portraying over 220 characters. Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Nielsen enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and worked as a disc jockey before receiving a scholarship to Neighborhood Playhouse. Making his television debut in 1948, he quickly expanded to over 50 television appearances two years later. Nielsen made his film debut in 1956, and began collecting roles in dramas, westerns, and romance films. Nielsen's lead roles in the films Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972) received positive reviews as a serious actor, though he is primarily known for his comedic roles.

Although Nielsen's acting career crossed a variety of genres in both television and films, his deadpan delivery in Airplane! (1980) marked a turning point in his career. Nielsen enjoyed further success with The Naked Gun film series (1988 – 1994), based on a short-lived television series Police Squad! in which he starred earlier. His portrayal of serious characters seemingly oblivious to (and complicit in) their absurd surroundings gave him a reputation as a comedian. In the final two decades of his career, Nielsen appeared in multiple spoof and parody films, many of which were met poorly by critics, but performed well in box office and home media releases. Nielsen married four times and had two daughters from his second marriage. He was recognized with a variety of awards throughout his career, and was inducted into both the Canada and Hollywood Walk of Fame.


Nielsen married four times: Monica Boyer (1950–1956), Alisande Ullman (1958–1973), Brooks Oliver (1981–1983) and Barbaree Earl (2001–2010; his death). Nielsen had two daughters from his second marriage, Maura and Thea Nielsen.

In November 2010, Nielsen was admitted to a Fort Lauderdale, Florida hospital for pneumonia. On 28 November, Nielsen had died in his sleep, due to complications from pneumonia, surrounded by family and friends.

RIP

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Barbara Billingsley: Actress, Dead at 94...

Barbara Billingsley
(December 22, 1915 – October 16, 2010)




Barbara Billingsley was an American film, television, voice and stage actress. She gained prominence in the 1950s movie The Careless Years, acting opposite Natalie Trundy, followed by her best–known role, that of June Cleaver on the television series Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963) and its sequel Still the Beaver (1985–1988, retitled in season two as The New Leave It to Beaver).

Billingsley was married three times. Her first husband was Glenn Billingsley, Sr., a restaurateur who was a nephew of Sherman Billingsley, the owner of the Stork Club. They had two sons, Drew and Glenn, Jr., who now own and operate Billingsley's Steak House in West Los Angeles, California. Her second marriage was to Roy Kellino, a British-born movie director who had previously been married to British actress Pamela Mason. He and Billingsley were married from 1953 until his death. Her third husband was Dr. William S. Mortensen (1907–1981), whom she married in 1959. By this marriage, she had stepchildren.

Billingsley died of polymyalgia at her home in Santa Monica, California. She is interred at Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.

RIP

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