Samuel Goldwyn Jr.,
an urbane, soft-spoken scion of a Hollywood dynasty who became an
influential movie executive in his own right, supporting promising young
directors and advancing the independent film movement, died here on
Friday. He was 88. A ravenous book reader, possessing intellectual curiosity in a business
not known for it, Mr. Goldwyn was an early champion of stylized,
cerebral films that most major studios thought would never sell a
ticket. His indie operation, the Samuel Goldwyn Company, founded in
1979, helped create a business model — low production costs, guerrilla
marketing — that allowed art-house movies to grow into a powerful
cultural and economic force.
The AP obit takes a slightly different track than the Times's obit.
William Greaves, the
Emmy-award winning co-host and executive producer of a groundbreaking
television news program and a prolific filmmaker whose subjects ranged
from Muhammad Ali to the Harlem Renaissance to the black middle class,
has died at age 87.
Greaves died Monday at his Manhattan home after a prolonged illness, according to his granddaughter, Liani Greaves.
A
minister's son born in New York City, Greaves had a diverse background
that included drawing, acting, dance and engineering. He leaves behind a
vast film archive of black art and culture
William Greaves making his experimental and long-neglected 1968 film, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.”Credit
John D. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive — Getty ImagesMr. Greaves was well known for his work as a documentarian focusing on
racial issues and black historical figures. In his later years he was
equally known for his most uncharacteristic film, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.”
Made in 1968, it mixed fact and fiction in a complex film-within-a-film
structure that made it a tough sell commercially, and it waited almost
four decades for theatrical release. When it finally had one, in 2005,
it was warmly praised as ahead of its time.
Mr.
Greaves (rhymes with “leaves”) gained national recognition as a co-host
and later executive producer of “Black Journal,” a monthly hourlong
National Educational Television newsmagazine that made its debut in 1968
in response to a call by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to expand coverage of black affairs. It was the only nationally telecast series devoted to black issues in the 1960s.
William Greaves, 2nd right, Don Fellows and Patricia Ree Gilbert filming "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One."Credit
Jerry Pantzer
“By
the acid test of professional and perceptive journalism, ‘Black
Journal’ has earned its rightful niche as a continuing and absorbing
feature of television’s output,” the television critic Jack Gould wrote
in The New York Times in 1969. “Mr. Greaves is simply covering a story
that should be covered and covering it with distinction.”
In 1970, “Black Journal” won an Emmy in the “magazine-type programming” category.
Later
that year, Mr. Greaves left the program to pursue projects developed by
his own production company. (He was replaced by Tony Brown, and the
program was later renamed “Tony Brown’s Journal.”)
Tony Brown's Journal I know.
In his later years, when asked about his achievements as a chronicler of
black history and black life, Mr. Greaves was proud but modest. “I
thought I was going to be a hurricane, but I ended up a becoming merely a
single raindrop,” he once said. “Hopefully there are other raindrops of
similar mind.”
Until the early 1960s, Mr. Attenborough was a familiar actor in Britain but little known in the United States. In London he was the original detective in Agatha Christie’s play “The Mousetrap.” On the British screen, he made an early mark as the sociopath Pinkie Brown in an adaptation of Graham Greene’s “Brighton Rock” (1947). But it was not until he appeared with his friend Steve McQueen and a sterling ensemble cast in the 1963 war film “The Great Escape,” his first Hollywood feature, that he found a trans-Atlantic audience. His role, as a British officer masterminding an escape plan from a German prisoner-of-war camp, was integral to one of the most revered and enjoyable of all World War II films. Just watched recently, after James garner passed.
James
Shigeta, an actor who challenged social boundaries when he emerged in
the late 1950s as one of the first Asian-Americans to play leading roles
in Hollywood, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 85.
The cause was pulmonary failure, his brother Clarence said.
Mr.
Shigeta traveled a distinctive path to stardom. He was born in the
American territory Hawaii to a family of Japanese descent. His native
language was English, but he first became an acting and singing star in
Japan, where he took language lessons while performing in the 1950s. He
served in the American military during the Korean War.
James Shigeta and Nancy Kwan in the 1961 film “Flower Drum Song,” based on the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.Credit
Universal Studios, via Everett Collection
His
fame in Japan led to performances in Las Vegas, an appearance on “The
Dinah Shore Show” and, in 1959, his first role in Hollywood, in “The Crimson Kimono.” He starred as a detective who falls for a key witness in a case, played by Victoria Shaw.
“YES,
this is a beautiful American girl in the arms of a handsome Japanese
boy!” read a promotional poster for the film that showed the lovers
kissing.
In 1960 he shared a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer. The next year he seemed to be fulfilling the prophecy, with leading roles in two films, “Bridge to the Sun,” about an interracial couple, and “Flower Drum Song,”
an adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about arranged
marriages — and resistance toward them — among some Chinese-Americans.
Herb Jeffries, who sang with Duke Ellington
and starred in early black westerns as a singing cowboy known as “the
Bronze Buckaroo” — a nickname that evoked his malleable racial identity —
died on Sunday in West Hills, Calif. He was believed to be 100.
The cause was heart failure, said Raymond Strait, a writer who had worked on Mr. Jeffries’s autobiography with him.
Mr. Jeffries used to say: “I’m a chameleon.” The label applied on many levels.
Over
the course of his century, he changed his name, altered his age,
married five women and stretched his vocal range from near falsetto to
something closer to a Bing Crosby baritone. He shifted from jazz to
country and back again, and from concert stages to movie theaters to
television sets and back again.
He sang with Earl Hines and his orchestra in the early 1930s. He starred in “Harlem on the Prairie,”
a black western released in 1937, and its several sequels. By 1940, he
was singing with the Ellington orchestra and soon had a hit single, “Flamingo,”
released in 1941, which sold more than 14 million copies. (His name had
been Herbert Jeffrey, but the credits on the record mistakenly called
him Jeffries, so he renamed himself to match the typo.)
Mr.
Jeffries’s racial and ethnic identity was itself something of a
performance — and a moving target. His mother was white, his father more
of a mystery. He told some people that his father was African-American,
others that he was mixed race and still others that he was Ethiopian or
Sicilian.
In
the crude social math of his era, many people told Mr. Jeffries he
could have “passed” for white. He told people he chose to be black — to
the extent that a mixed-race person had a choice at the time.
Gordon Willis, a master cinematographer whose work on “The Godfather,”“Manhattan,”“Annie Hall,”“Klute,”“All the President’s Men”
and other seminal movies of the 1970s made his name synonymous with
that pathbreaking decade in American moviemaking, died on Sunday at his
home in North Falmouth, Mass.
Mr.
Willis created some of the most indelible cinematic imagery of the ‘70s
— or of any decade, for that matter — giving narrative propulsion to
adventurous screenplays while expressing the moral ambiguities at the
heart of so many of that decade’s films and of the society they
mirrored.
Three
films that he shot — Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” (1972) and
“The Godfather Part II” (1974) and Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” (1977) —
won the Academy Award for best picture.
Yet
Mr. Willis, a native New Yorker who chose to live on the East Coast,
harbored an antipathy toward Hollywood that may have been mutual. From
1971 to 1977, seven films he photographed earned a total of 39 Oscar
nominations, 19 of which won the award. He received not one of those
nominations, to the astonishment of many of the peers he influenced.
The
cinematographer Conrad Hall called Mr. Willis “the prince of darkness”
for his daring use of minimalist light and embrace of shadows. It was
fully on display in “The Godfather,” in the haunted look of Marlon
Brando’s Don Corleone and in the gothic composition of Don Corleone’s
study, and in the lush, romanticized images of Mr. Allen’s beloved
Manhattan in the bittersweet 1979 comedy of the same name.
Shot
in convention-defying wide-screen, 35-millimeter black and white,
“Manhattan,” as much as any Willis film, showed the emotional impact
that a cinematographer can have.
He stood only a few inches taller than five feet, but Mr. Rooney was
larger and louder than life. From the moment he toddled onto a burlesque
stage at 17 months to his movie debut at 6 to his career-crowning
Broadway debut in “Sugar Babies” at 59, he did it all. He could act,
sing, dance, play piano and drums, and before he was out of short pants
he could cry on cue.
Mr. Rooney’s personal life was as dynamic as his screen presence. He
married eight times. He earned $12 million before he was 40 and spent
more. Impulsive, recklessly extravagant, mercurial and addicted to
playing the ponies and shooting craps, he attacked life as though it
were a six-course dinner.
Along with Deanna Durbin, Mr. Rooney was given a special Academy Award
in 1939 “for bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of
youth.” The next year he received his Oscar nomination for “Babes in
Arms.” His second nomination was for his performance in the film version
of William Saroyan’s “Human Comedy” (1943) as the messenger boy who
delivers telegrams from the War Department telling families in a small
California town that their sons have died. That movie seems saccharine
and preachy more than 70 years later, but time has not tarnished the
desolation on Mr. Rooney’s face when he reads those telegrams.
Nobody ever doubted his talent. Of his “all but unimprovable”
performance in “National Velvet,” James Agee wrote, “He is an extremely
wise and moving actor, and if I am ever again tempted to speak
disrespectfully of him, that will be in anger over the unforgivable
waste of a forceful yet subtle talent, proved capable of self-discipline
and of the hardest roles that could be thrown it.”
Remaking Film Comedy With a Straight Face After his early years working with the improv troupe the Second City and
on “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” Mr. Ramis helped write the
paradigm-shifting, 1978 blockbuster “Animal House.” What followed was a
string of deliriously funny Bill Murray movies (including “Meatballs,”“Caddyshack,”“Stripes” and “Ghostbusters”)
that have become touchstones in comedy today. While Mr. Murray
understandably is seen as a kind of auteur of these comedies, it takes
nothing away from him to say that Mr. Ramis built their foundation.
Christopher
Jones, an actor who seemed poised for stardom before abruptly
abandoning his movie career in the late 1960s, died on Jan. 31 in Los
Alamitos, Calif. He was 72.
The cause was gallbladder cancer, said Paula McKenna, his longtime companion.
Mr.
Jones made only a few films, but his talent and star power drew
comparisons with James Dean, whose brief career his own mimicked in some
ways. Like Dean, Mr. Jones studied at the Actors Studio, worked on
Broadway and in television, and projected an aura of wild yearning and
raw energy, which he showed in films like “Wild in the Streets,” (1968) and “Ryan’s Daughter” (1970).
No
one seemed to know why Mr. Jones dropped out of the movie-star
business. Speculation ranged across several possible explanations: a
troubled personal history, a rebel’s rejection of the strict regimen of
filmmaking, his shock when a loved one was murdered because of her fame.
Mr.
Jones told an interviewer in 2007 that he had been having an affair
with the actress Sharon Tate when she and four others were viciously
killed on Aug. 9, 1969, by members of the Charles Manson cult in the
California home of Ms. Tate’s husband, the director Roman Polanski, who
was away. Mr. Jones was filming “Ryan’s Daughter” in Ireland at the
time.
His
year there was one of the worst of his life, he told The Chicago
Tribune. He was traumatized and depressed over Ms. Tate’s death and at
odds with his co-star, Sarah Miles. “I had absolutely no desire to do
anything for a long time,” he said.
Fairly sure I remember him, and it might be from the film Chubasco.
Sheila Guyse, center, performing in "Lost in the Stars."George Karger/Pix Incorporated
Sheila Guyse, a popular actress and singer who appeared on Broadway and in so-called race movies in the 1940s and ’50s, and who for a time, despite limited opportunities in the entertainment industry, appeared headed for broader fame, died on Dec. 28 in Honolulu. She was 88.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter Sheila Crystal Devin said.
For several years, Ms. Guyse (rhymes with “nice”) was compared to stars like Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne and Ruby Dee, black actresses who broke through racial barriers. But by the late 1950s she was out of show business, a result of some combination of health problems, a religious conversion and family obligations.
Ms. Guyse’s husband did not want her to have a career, Ms. Devin said.
Ms.
Guyse’s first two marriages had ended in divorce, and she was a
struggling single mother when she met Joseph Jackson, a New York
sanitation worker so enthralled by her that he would sometimes follow
her in his garbage truck. After they married, in the late 1950s, Ms.
Guyse stopped performing and became increasingly involved with a
Jehovah’s Witness hall in Queens.
“It
wasn’t easy to be a glamorous movie star with people following you for
your autograph and now you’re home making pancakes,” Ms. Devin said.
“She did it, but I don’t think it was easy.”
Etta
Drucille Guyse was born on July 14, 1925, in Forest, Miss. She took
Sheila as a stage name. She followed her father, Wilbert, to New York
when she was a teenager and, her daughter said, lived for a time in a
Harlem rooming house with Billie Holiday.
Her
first marriage, to Ms. Devin’s father, a tailor named Shelby Irving
Miller, was very brief. Her second, to Kenneth Davis, whom she had met
while both performed in “Finian’s Rainbow,” lasted eight years. Mr.
Davis, who was white, became a dancer with American Ballet Theater. In
1952, a photograph of the couple appeared on a cover of Jet with the
headline “Negro Women With White Husbands.”
“I
don’t go about looking for difficulties,” Ms. Guyse said in the
article. “It took me a long time to decide to marry Ken, but I’m glad I
did. We’ve been very happy. Intelligence and understanding are needed to
make a marriage like ours succeed. It takes more than love. You have to
have a mind of your own and be able to ignore what the world is saying
and thinking about you.”
An AP story: Jean Stapleton, the stage-trained character actress who played Archie
Bunker's far better half, the sweetly naive Edith, in TV's
groundbreaking 1970s comedy "All in the Family," has died. She was 90.
David F. Smith/Associated Press - Jean Stapleton, left, and Carroll O'Connor held their Emmy awards in 1972 in Hollywood, CA
Jean Stapleton, the character actress whose portrayal of a slow-witted,
big-hearted and submissive — up to a point — housewife on the
groundbreaking series “All in the Family” made her, along with Mary
Tyler Moore and Bea Arthur, not only one of the foremost women in
television comedy in the 1970s but a symbol of emergent feminism in
American popular culture, died on Friday at her home in New York City.
She was 90.
Film critic. Ms. Crist came to prominence at a time when film was breaking with the
conventions of the Hollywood studio era while experiencing a resurgence
in popularity, much of it fueled by baby boomers. She championed a new
generation of American directors like Steven Spielberg, Sydney Pollack
and Woody Allen and new actors like Robert De Niro and Faye Dunaway.
Ms. Crist’s acidity provoked the director Billy Wilder to say, “Inviting
her to review one of your pictures is like inviting the Boston
Strangler to massage your neck.”
She saw her first “blue” movie as the only woman covering Senate hearings on pornography in New York in 1945. Her male colleagues insisted that she leave the room during their private screening of the film in question, “Breaking In Blondie.” The unbuttoning scene was just beginning when she had to leave.
Her pocketbook gave her an advantage, however, while covering a news conference for a new Marilyn Monroe film. When Monroe broke a shoulder strap, Ms. Crist supplied her with a safety pin and was granted an exclusive interview.
She began writing theater reviews in 1957 while continuing to cover news. Three years later she became arts editor. During a newspaper strike in 1963 she reviewed theater and movies for WABC. Her aptitude for the medium was noticed by the Today show producers who later hired her. After the strike’s end, and after meeting with The Tribune’s editor, James Bellows, and publisher, John Hay Whitney (known as Jock), she became The Tribune’s movie critic on April 1, 1963. She wrote that she was immediately “famous” six weeks later for her “Spencer’s Mountain” review, which described the film as “sheer prurience and perverted morality disguised as piety.”
Ms. Crist said a critic must be an egomaniac. But she went on to say a
larger job requirement was passion, perhaps even love, for what movies
are, do and can be. “Amid all the easily loved darlings of Charlie Brown’s circle,
obstreperous Lucy holds a special place in my heart,” she said. “She
fusses and fumes and she carps and complains. That’s because Lucy cares.
And it’s the caring that counts.”
From a NY Times Arts article: In a career that spanned film, television, theater and recorded music, Marvin Hamlisch won seemingly every award available in each medium. He died on Monday in Los Angeles. An obituary is here. He was only 68.
(A video gallery of trailers and excerpts from some of the films and musicals featuring Mr. Hamlisch’s music is here.)
Mr. Hamlisch, bespectacled and somewhat gawky, could often appear as the
stereotypical music school nerd — in fact, at 7, he was the youngest
student to be accepted at the Juilliard School — but his appearance
belied his intelligence and easy banter with the likes of Johnny Carson
and Merv Griffin. And his melodies were sure-footed and sometimes
swashbuckling. “One,” from “A Chorus Line,” with its punchy, brassy
lines, distills the essence of the Broadway showstopper. The show
started as a series of taped workshops with Broadway dancers, then
evolved into a show that opened at the Public Theater in 1975 and moved
to Broadway later that year. It ran for 6,137 performances, the most of
any Broadway musical until it was surpassed by “Cats."
In more recent years, Mr. Hamlisch also became an ambassador for music,
traveling around the country and performing and giving talks at schools.
He often criticized the cuts in arts education.
“I don’t think the American government gets it,” he said during an
interview at the Orange County High School of the Arts in Santa Ana,
Calif. “I don’t think they understand it’s as important as math and
science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of
certain things. You don’t have to become the next great composer. It’s
just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things.
It’s part of being a human being.”
Despite all the awards he received over the years, Ms. Blair said Mr.
Hamlisch was always most focused, and most excited about, whatever
current project he had going. And, she said, he was always appreciative
of his gift: “He used to say, ‘It’s easy to write things that are so
self-conscious that they become pretentious, that have a lot of noise.
It’s very hard to write a simple melody.’ ”
Actor Jacob Vargas who was by her side Thursday night confirmed Ontiveros passed away on Twitter around midnight Friday.
“My friend Lupe Ontiveros just passed away. May you rest in peace.
Thank you for your great contribution to film and TV. You will be
missed,” wrote Vargas. Onitveros was reportedly suffering from liver cancer, according to TMZ. One of Ontiveros’ first roles was playing a maid on the television
series “Charlie’s Angels.” And since that role she estimated she played a
maid at least 150 times on screen, or 300 if you count her stage performances too. For many young Latinos who were sons and daughters of domestic
workers Ontiveros was a familiar name long before she became a household
name for playing Selena Quintanilla’s murderer Yolanda Saldivar in
“Selena.” For me, seeing Ontiveros on screen was meaningful because it was a
sign that our parents’ work was recognized by Hollywood. Even when
Ontiveros played roles in which her character was talked down to or
humiliated it was still meaningful because she played the human
part—those were real stories many of us had heard before from our moms,
aunts and neighbors. “At first my only lines were ‘Si, señor, no, señor,’ you know, that kind of shit,” Ontiveros told the LA Weekly.
Mr. Borgnine made his first memorable impression in films at the age of 37, appearing in “From Here to Eternity” (1953) as Fatso Judson, the
sadistic stockade sergeant who beats Frank Sinatra’s character, Private
Maggio, to death. But Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote “Marty” as a television
play, and Delbert Mann, who directed it (Rod Steiger was the star of
that version), saw something beyond brutality in Mr. Borgnine and
offered him the title role when it was made into a feature film.
He was so good as Judson that he was hateful.
Ermes Effron Borgnino was born on Jan. 24, 1917, in Hamden, Conn., near
New Haven. His father was a railroad brakeman. His mother was said to be
the daughter of a count, Paolo Boselli, an adviser to King Victor
Emmanuel of Italy.
Never much cared for Mayberry RFD, though I recognize its place in American culture (such as it is).
Mr. Griffith was already a star, with rave reviews on Broadway in “No
Time for Sergeants” and in Elia Kazan’s film “A Face in the Crowd,” when
“The Andy Griffith Show”
made its debut in the fall of 1960. And he delighted a later generation
of television viewers in the 1980s and ’90s in the title role of the
courtroom drama “Matlock.”
Andy Griffith was considerably more complex than Andy Taylor and his
fellow denizens of Mayberry, although the show was based on his
hometown, Mount Airy, N.C. Beginning with the lead in Elia Kazan’s film “A Face in the Crowd” in
1957, the story of a rough-hewn television personality who becomes a
power-crazed megalomaniac, Mr. Griffith brought a canny authenticity to
dark roles.
In the 2009 movie “Play the Game,” he played an 80-something widowed
grandfather who lives in a nursing home and awkwardly jumps back into
the singles game. He tries Viagra and experiences oral sex, and says the
words “horny” and “erection.”
If that weren’t enough to dumbfound the
old Mayberry fans, he made a commercial in 2010 extolling President
Obama’s health care legislation. Republican politicians and conservative
talk show hosts leapt on him mercilessly, while satirists like Jon
Stewart of “The Daily Show” made boisterous fun of the brouhaha. (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-september-14-2010/mayberry-wtf)
Courtly, incisive and acerbic in equal measure, Mr. Sarris came of
critical age in the 1960s as the first great wave of foreign films
washed ashore in the United States. From his perch at The Village Voice,
and later at The New York Observer,
he wrote searchingly of that glorious deluge and the directors behind
it — François Truffaut, Max Ophuls, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa.
Colonel Potter’s office had several personal touches. The picture on his desk was of Mr. Morgan’s wife, Eileen Detchon. To relax, the colonel liked to paint and look after his horse, Sophie — a sort of inside joke, since the real Harry Morgan raised quarter horses on a ranch in Santa Rosa. Sophie, to whom Colonel Potter says goodbye in the final episode, was Mr. Morgan’s own horse. In 1980 his Colonel Potter earned him an Emmy Award as best supporting actor in a comedy series. During the shooting of the final episode, he was asked about his feelings. “Sadness and an aching heart,” he replied.
"Life With Groucho"/Simon & Schuster - Arthur Marx , at 11, with Groucho Marx, on the set of “Duck Soup” in 1932.
As a child Mr. Marx spent several years on the road with Groucho Marx and the rest of the Marx Brothers’ vaudeville act — Chico, Harpo, Gummo and later Zeppo — before enjoying a celebrity-filled youth in Los Angeles as the brothers rose to stardom. His own show-business career was varied and long, writing Hollywood screenplays and scripts for some of television’s most popular sitcoms.
Taken together, Arthur Marx’s two books about his father offered a bittersweet picture of life in the Marx home. He described himself as desperate both to escape from his father’s shadow and to please him, an impossible task. The comic genius who kept millions in stitches was, in his private life, miserly and emotionally distant.
Elizabeth Taylor may have died Wednesday morning, but the writer of the obituary the New York Times published celebrating the film star died six years ago
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