Gone With or Without fanfare

[CharlieT]

Just caught this on another website:

Al Martino (82) singer who played the Frank Sinatra-type role of Johnny Fontane in The Godfather (1972) and recorded hits including “Spanish Eyes” and the Italian ballad “Volare” in a 50-year musical career. Martino died at his childhood home in the Philadelphia suburb of Springfield, Pennsylvania on October 13, 2009.

[mrsl]

.
Al Martino was a favorite of my parents. They saw him often when he played in the Chicago area, and one time when they were in Vegas, they were able to see him at one of the smaller casino lounges.
.

[MichiganJ]

Vic Mizzy, the composer of arguably the two greatest TV sit-com theme songs, The Addams Family and Green Acres, died on the 17th at the age of 93.

"They're all together ooky", indeed.

[movieman1957]

Ah, the memories. Theme songs with lyrics.

[moira finnie]

Joseph Wiseman, an actor of considerable power, has died at 91. Perhaps best remembered as an acid-tongued burglar-junkie in Detective Story, an intellectual provocateur in Viva Zapata, and the first of many villains to bedevil James Bond when he appeared as his icy nemesis in Dr. No, this actor also brightened The Garment Jungle (1957); The Unforgiven (1960); and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974). Of his role in the precedent setting Dr. No, Wiseman said: "I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. I had no idea it would achieve the success it did. I know nothing about mysteries. I don't take to them. As far as I was concerned, I thought it might be just another grade-B Charlie Chan mystery."


Standing out in a crowd: Wiseman (in striped suit) nibbles the scenery in one of his first film roles surrounded by experts in that art in Detective Story (1951-William Wyler).

While many will remember him for these iconic movies and his many appearances on Broadway in everything from Shakespeare to Arthur Miller, for me, he will always be the elegantly malevolent sorcerer in a long ago television adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Wild Swans, and the fascinating "Manny Weisbord" in the underrated series of the 1980s, Crime Story. He moved like a dancer, and achieved that impossible to describe yet recognizable trait in all his roles: isolation in a crowd of actors. Though I know people who think he was far too theatrical in his film work, that aspect of his work simply enlarges the implications of his character's presence in a story, giving it flair and dimension that is often sadly lacking in many modern performances. Maybe it's just me. Here are links to obits in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Guardian:

The New York Times Obit for Wiseman

Los Angeles Times Obit for Wiseman

The Guardian Obit for Wiseman

[Lzcutter]

The actress that played Mayella Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird has passed on:

Collin Wilcox, a ubiquitous actress whose face was familiar to television viewers in the 1960s and afterward for her guest appearances on shows like “The Untouchables,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Defenders” and “Gunsmoke,” died on Oct. 14 at her home in Highlands, N.C. She was 74.

The cause was brain cancer, her husband, Scott Paxton, said.

A fresh-faced Southerner, Ms. Wilcox was also billed over the years as Collin Wilcox-Horne and Collin Wilcox-Paxton. Besides working actively in television, she appeared in Hollywood films and several Broadway plays.

Her best-known film role was as Mayella Ewell, the young white woman who falsely accuses a black man (played by Brock Peters) of rape in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the 1962 adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel. Ms. Wilcox’s tearful testimony on the witness stand as Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch cross-examines her is widely considered one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.

Ms. Wilcox made her Broadway debut in 1958 in “The Day the Money Stopped,” a drama by Maxwell Anderson and Brendan Gill. Though the play closed after four performances, she won the Clarence Derwent Award from the Actors’ Equity Association as the year’s most promising female performer.

Collin Wilcox was born on Feb. 4, 1935, in Cincinnati and moved with her family to Highlands as a baby. In the late 1930s her parents helped found a local theater company, the Highlands Community Theater, where she got her first stage experience.

Ms. Wilcox studied at the University of Tennessee, what was then the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago and the Actors Studio in New York. In Chicago she performed with the Compass Players, an improvisational group that was a forerunner of the Second City theater troupe.

On television Ms. Wilcox came to wide attention in 1958, when she starred in a live television production of “The Member of the Wedding.” (An adaptation of Carson McCullers’s novel, it was directed by Robert Mulligan, who later directed “To Kill a Mockingbird.”) To land the role of Frankie, the story’s preadolescent heroine, Ms. Wilcox, then in her early 20s, appeared at the audition with her hair shorn, her breasts bound with dishtowels and her face dotted with “freckles” of iodine.

Ms. Wilcox’s first marriage, to Walter Beakel, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Geoffrey Horne. She is survived by her third husband, Mr. Paxton, whom she married in 1979; three children, Kimberly Horne, Michael G. Paxton and William Horne; and three grandchildren.

Her other television appearances include guest roles on “Dr. Kildare,” “The Fugitive,” “Ironside,” “The Waltons” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

Among Ms. Wilcox’s other films are “Catch-22” (1970), “Jaws 2” (1978), “Marie” (1985) and the TV movie “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” broadcast on CBS in 1974.

[moira finnie]

What a year!

Now Soupy Sales, along with White Fang, Black Tooth, Private Eye Philo Kvetch and numerous other creations of his comic mind, has passed away at 83. Trying to explain the anarchic humor that delighted many of us as children (as well as older people) during his reign of silliness on television in the '60s, he once explained “Our shows were not actually written, but they were precisely thought out. But the greatest thing about the show, and I think the reason for its success, was that it seemed undisciplined. The more you can make a performance seem spontaneous, the better an entertainer you are.”

The humorlessness of an increasingly heavy hearted world intruded on his manic universe significantly on January 1, 1965, when he asked his kid audience to rifle their parents pockets and " send him little green pieces of paper with pictures of men with beards". Funny how the FCC didn't seem to think it was too amusing, even if he donated any bills received in the mail to charity. Below are Soupy's obituaries, followed by a visit to Fang's Talent Agency. If you're an adult, it may not strike you as funny. Maybe ya hadda be there in 1965 as a little kid.

Looking over some of the numerous videos of Soupy on youtube, I realize now how many jazz musicians he introduced me to so long ago. So my parents were wrong. He was educational and not, as they asserted, "an insult to my intelligence." O, to be insulted once again. I like to hope that there is a new jester in the kingdom of heaven today.

Los Angeles Times Soupy Sales Appreciation

New York Times Obituary of Soupy Sales

[youtube][/youtube]

[moira finnie]

"You cut the toorkey You cut the tour-key without me? Vy didja cud da TOIKEY?"

I have to pardon my approximation of character actor Lou Jacobi's way with a line. He could make the simplest of lines, such as "Aha!" and "You cut the turkey?" from Avalon (1990-Barry Levinson) into the briefest of arias; telling of a lifetime of frustration or the scales falling from a character's eyes, as he sees the world around him anew. Well, sadly, 95 year old Lou joined the cast of the dead this week. From The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) to Irma La Douce (1963) to Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972) he blended the touching and the funny in his characterizations. His obituary is below from the New York Times:

Lou Jacobi, the mustachioed, scene-stealing Canadian-born actor and comedian who made a film and stage career playing comic ethnic characters but was lauded for serious dramatic roles as well, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.

The death was confirmed by Leonie Nowitz, a social worker who had been overseeing his care for several years.

Mr. Jacobi made his Broadway debut in 1955 in “The Diary of Anne Frank,” playing a less-than-noble occupant of the Amsterdam attic where the Franks were hiding, and reprised the role in the 1959 film version. When Bosley Crowther, reviewing the movie in The New York Times, described Mr. Jacobi as “irksomely sluggish and pathetically lax as the weakling Van Daan,” it was high praise.

As his career continued in New York and Hollywood, spanning five decades, Mr. Jacobi became accustomed to favorable reviews, mostly in comic roles and often when the film or play itself was less than warmly received.

When he starred in the short-lived Broadway comedy “Norman, Is That You?” in 1970, Clive Barnes of The Times did not care for the play, but took time to wax rhapsodic about Mr. Jacobi and his character. “Mr. Jacobi is a very funny actor who hardly needs lines to make his point,” Mr. Barnes wrote. He added: “He has a face of sublime weariness and the manner of a man who has seen everything, done nothing and is now only worried about his heartburn.”

The 10 Broadway plays Mr. Jacobi appeared in also included Paddy Chayefsky’s “Tenth Man” (1959); Woody Allen’s “Don’t Drink the Water” (1966); and Neil Simon’s “Come Blow Your Horn” (1961), in which he portrayed the playboy protagonist’s disappointed father. His reading of the line “Aha!” stuck with the Times columnist William Safire so vividly that he cited it when writing about the meaning of the word 36 years later.

Mr. Jacobi also made two dozen feature films. His supporting roles included the philosophical bartender in “Irma la Douce” (1963), the young hero’s unsophisticated uncle in “My Favorite Year” (1982), a lucky florist in the Dudley Moore comedy “Arthur” (1981) and a middle-aged transvestite who gets caught with his hostess’s clothes on in “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex” (1972). In Barry Levinson’s “Avalon” (1990), he played a dramatic role, one of four Russian brothers trying to build a future in Baltimore in the early 20th century.

Louis Harold Jacobovitch was born on Dec. 28, 1913, in Toronto. He began acting as a boy, making his stage debut in 1924 at a Toronto theater, playing a violin prodigy in “The Rabbi and the Priest.” He did play the violin, then and for most of his life.

After working as the drama director of a Toronto Y.M.H.A., the social director at a summer resort, a stand-up comic in Canada’s equivalent of the Borscht Belt, and the entertainment at various weddings and bachelor parties, Mr. Jacobi tried his luck in London. There he appeared in shows including the American musicals “Guys and Dolls” and “Pal Joey,” and was part of a command performance at the London Palladium in 1952.

He made his film debut in “Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary?” (1953), a British comedy with the country’s blond sex symbol of the moment, Diana Dors. In the United States, he began making guest appearances on a variety of television series, ranging from “Playhouse 90” to “’The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”’ to “That Girl,” and appeared on series and in television movies until he was in his late 70s.

In the summer of 1976, he was the star of a CBS comedy series, “Ivan the Terrible,” in which he played a Russian headwaiter living with nine other people in a small Moscow apartment. He was a regular on “The Dean Martin Show” on NBC for two seasons in the early 1970s.

Mr. Jacobi made successful comedy recordings with titles like “Al Tijuana and His Jewish Brass” and “The Yiddish Are Coming! The Yiddish Are Coming!”

In his last film, “I.Q.” (1994), he played the logician Kurt Gödel, one of Albert Einstein’s professor friends at Princeton. His last Broadway play was “Cheaters,” a 1978 comedy about two adulterous middle-aged couples.

But he continued to do theater elsewhere. When he appeared in a 1988 Connecticut production of Clifford Odets’s “Rocket to the Moon,” at the age of 74, his reviews were as positive as ever.

Mr. Jacobi married Ruth Ludwin in 1957. She died in 2004. He is survived by a brother, Avrom Jacobovitch, and a sister, Rae Gold, both of Toronto.

“As you make your way through life, sometimes you happen upon people who know how to be happy,” the film critic Roger Ebert wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times in 1999. He was interviewing Mr. Jacobi on the occasion of the dedication of his star on Canada’s Walk of Fame. “I look at Lou, and I’m not afraid to be 85, if I can get there in Lou’s style.”

[JackFavell]

Ohhhhh. Man.

That makes me very sad. It's taking a minute to sink in.

I am just broken up over Lou Jacobi for some reason. Maybe because he has always been around.... ? Another of those faces from my childhood is gone, like an old uncle I never really appreciated until he wasn't there anymore.

SPOILER

That scene in Avalon is so ridiculous that it could be real. In my family anyway. Ultimately it is heartbreaking, because it marks the beginning of the end of the extended family. And the brothers never actually reconcile....

over something as silly as a turkey. Excuse me, Toi-key!

So long, Lou. I'm gonna miss you.

[JackFavell]

The One and Only.....World's Greatest Magician

Actor Carl Ballantine dies at 92
McHale's' star got start as a magician

By VARIETY STAFF

Actor and magician Carl Ballantine died Nov. 3 in Hollywood of natural causes Nov. 3. He was 92.

Born Meyer Kessler in Chicago, he started performing magic tricks as a teenager. He added comedy to the routine, and the Amazing Ballantine was born.

Ballantine's act was seen in the later days of vaudeville in New York and Baltimore. On TV, his comedy magic act was booked on shows from Gary Moore, Steve Allen, Milton Berle, Dinah Shore, Andy Williams, Dean Martin and Ed Sullivan.

He was the first magician to play Las Vegas on a bill with Harry James, Betty Grable and Sammy Davis, Jr.

Moving into television, he played Lester Gruber on "McHale's Navy" and appeared in films including "The Shakiest Gun in the West," "The World's Greatest Lover," "Mr. Saturday Night" and "Speedway" with Elvis Presley.

He also appeared on Broadway in the 1971 revival of "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum" with Phil Silvers.

He is survived by a sister, daughter Saratoga, an actress, and daughter.

Donations may be made to Used Pets, 517 W. Buckthorn, Inglewood, CA 90301.

Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118010893.html

[youtube][/youtube]

[klondike]

AFRAID WE'VE LOST A GOOD ONE THIS TIME !


Actor Edward Woodward dies at 79
Nov. 16, 2009, 7:38 AM EST
LONDON (AP) -- The agent for English actor Edward Woodward says that he has died after suffering from illnesses including pneumonia.

Woodward, known for roles including the American TV series "The Equalizer" and the 1973 horror film "The Wicker Man," was 79.

His agent, Janet Glass, said Woodward died Monday morning in a hospital in Cornwall, a county in southwestern England.

[jdb1]

A good one, not seen enough in this country. The thing I remember most about Edward Woodward was that at the time of The Equalizer he was often on American late-night talk shows, and he was so freakin' funny. I knew nothing about him at the time -- it was a very pleasant surprise.

[Lzcutter]

God, what a year for losses. I loved Edward Woodward as The Equalizer and especially loved his sidekick,
Mickey, played by Keith Szarabajka (now a bad cop on Cold Case.

But here's another for those of us of a certain age. I liked him in Bracken's World which if nothing else is a great time capsule of the lot at 20th Century Fox where the series was filmed. And I liked Bearcats the show he did with Rod Taylor. Well, I really liked the car.

'Felony Squad' actor Dennis Cole dies
Ex-stuntman also appeared in 'Love Boat,' 'Charlie's Angels'

By Gregg Kilday

Nov 16, 2009, 06:51 PM ET
Dennis Cole, a stuntman who rose to TV stardom in the 1966 series "Felony Squad" and went on to dozens of guest-starring appearances throughout the 1970s and '80s, died Sunday at Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 69.

The cause of death was not released.

Although born in Detroit, Cole had the blond, athletic look of a quintessential California surfer, which earned him the attention of physique magazines and led to his casting as rookie detective Jim Briggs on "Felony." After that show's 2 1/2 year-run, Cole followed with the series "Bracken's World" and "Bearcats!" and a stint on the daytime soap "The Young and the Restless" that began in 1981.

Cole guest-starred on such series as "Medical Center," "Police Story," "The Love Boat" and "Charlie's Angels," where he met his second wife, Jaclyn Smith, to whom he was married from 1978-81.

He encountered tragedy in 1991 when his son Joe, from his first marriage to Sally Ann Bergeron, was murdered during a home invasion robbery. The case was never solved.

In recent years, Cole became a real estate broker in Fort Lauderdale with his wife, Ree Cole, whom he recently divorced amicably. He is survived by his brother Richard.

[MikeBSG]

Edward Woodward was terrific in "The Wicker Man" and "Breaker Morant."

[JackFavell]

I know it sounds ridiculous with all the films and shows he was in, but I actually liked Woodward best of all as the ghost of Christmas present in the 1984 version of A Christmas Carol - I've never forgotten it - he made that part huge to me, and played it better than all the other ghosts in all the other films put together. When he pulls those children out from under his robes, well, his voice is enough to make you cry.

Breaker Morant is also a fantastic heartbreaking performance. "We poets do crave immortality, you know."

He had a marvelous singing voice as well.

[youtube][/youtube]