The 2012 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Uncle Sparky]

Peter Lougheed dead.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/09...dead-thursday/

CALGARY — One of Alberta’s most influential and revered former premiers has died in the Calgary hospital that bears his name.

Sources told the Calgary Herald late Thursday night that Peter Lougheed passed away at the age of 84. The patrician Albertan was a lawyer, a former Edmonton Eskimos player, a Harvard graduate and premier of the province for 14 years.

[Uncle Sparky]

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/wor...169127966.html

SYDNEY - Ron Taylor, a beloved Australian marine conservationist who helped film some of the terrifying underwater footage used in the classic shark thriller "Jaws," has died after a long battle with cancer, a close family friend said Monday. He was 78.

Taylor, who had suffered from leukemia for two years, died on Sunday at a hospital in Sydney, said Andrew Fox, who worked with Taylor on shark conservation efforts for decades.

Fox said Taylor had mixed feelings about his work on "Jaws," which terrified beachgoers but ultimately helped draw attention to the intimidating yet often threatened animals.

Taylor and his wife, Valerie, spent years filming great white sharks and trying to persuade a wary public that the much-feared creatures were beautiful animals worthy of respect. Their stunning up-close images of sharks drew the attention of "Jaws" director Steven Spielberg, who asked the couple to capture footage of a great white for his 1975 blockbuster.

The Taylors shot much of the now-classic sequence in which the shark tears apart a cage holding one of the main characters.

They filmed off South Australia, using a miniature shark-proof cage with a very short diver inside in an attempt to make the real sharks look as large as the 25-foot mechanical shark used in the movie. While filming, a great white became tangled in the shark cage's cables and began thrashing violently as it tried to escape.

Fox's father, Rodney Fox, who famously survived a near-fatal great white shark attack in 1963, assisted on the shoot. Andrew Fox said both men were affected by criticism that the movie reinforced the notion that great whites were death machines. ("It is as if God created the devil and gave him — JAWS," the narrator in the film's theatrical trailer warned in an ominous voice.)

[embalmer42]

You mean this?

“This is classic live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-die-sword,” said Miami filmmaker Billy Corben, whose “Cocaine Cowboys” documentaries chronicled her notoriety.

Smartass.


I'm getting old and can't see well anymore and you're making fun of me? You'd probably tell a blind man to cross a busy street on a red light so you could laugh.

You paralegals are all the same

[molly bloom]

I blame advancing age for my forgetting this:

Victor Spinetti, who has died of cancer aged 82, was an outrageously talented Welsh actor and raconteur who made his name with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and found fame and fortune as a friend and colleague of the Beatles, appearing in three of their five films, and with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Franco Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew (1967).

It was while he was giving his brilliantly articulated and hilarious "turn" as the gobbledegook-shouting drill sergeant in Oh, What a Lovely War! in the West End in 1963 – he won a Tony for the performance when the show went to Broadway – that the Beatles visited him backstage and invited him to appear in A Hard Day's Night (1964).

George Harrison later said that his mother would refuse to go and see the group's films unless Spinetti was in them. These, and other tales of the stars, would be recounted by Spinetti himself in his one-man shows, and in the wonderful autobiography he wrote, Up Front (2006), with the help of another Littlewood associate, Peter Rankin.

"The people I miss most are all in the show," Spinetti told me over lunch four years ago, "so I don't miss them at all, really. It's like a seance, and there they all are, Noël and Marlene, Frank, Joan and Tennessee. Tenn came to see me in a play that was a disaster. 'Victor,' he said, 'I'll see you in anything. But don't be in this again.'"

Spinetti was the eldest of six children, born in the mining village of Cwm in the Ebbw Vale. His father, Giuseppe, who ran a fish and chip shop, was interned on the Isle of Man when the second world war broke out. Spinetti was educated at Monmouth school, then became embroiled in amateur dramatics and was discharged from his national service, and a TB ward, in 1948 with a pleural effusion. He then attended the Cardiff School of Music and Drama where he met his partner, the actor Graham Curnow (who died in 1997). They shared a house, and an openly non-monogamous life, thereafter.

Spinetti's grounding in show business was both louche and demanding: a Welsh concert party, revues, variety theatres, US air force bases and hotel functions. He made his London debut in Expresso Bongo (1958) by Wolf Mankowitz and Julian More at the Saville theatre. Paul Scofield was the star in this satire on the entertainment industry, but a multitasking Spinetti made a comic mark as a Fleet Street editor, a parson, a psychiatrist and a head waiter.

He was more than ready for the swinging 60s, living a champagne lifestyle and dressing colourfully, even when he could not pay all the bills. And if that happened, he told me, he "spanked old gentlemen for money" so he could buy Christmas presents. "My dear old mother told me that, if she'd known at the time, she would have come along and given me a hand!"

Littlewood snapped him up at Stratford East, where his association, in a great company including Barbara Windsor, Harry H Corbett, Avis Bunnage, George A Cooper and Murray Melvin, stretched from 1959 to 1965. This was a golden age in British theatre, running in parallel with first stirrings at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National theatre.

He appeared as Brain-Worm in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, as an IRA officer in Brendan Behan's The Hostage (which he also played in New York), and as Tosh in Frank Norman and Lionel Bart's Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be with Windsor before Lovely War took him back into the West End.

After his New York success and the first two Beatles films – Richard Lester's Help! followed A Hard Day's Night in 1965 – he played opposite Jack Klugman in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple at the Queen's in 1966 and then accepted an invitation from the critic Kenneth Tynan to co-write and direct John Lennon's zany, poetic In His Own Write at the National (then based at the Old Vic) in 1968.

His career after this phenomenal start was erratic. He clocked up more than 30 films, including the third Beatles collaboration, Magical Mystery Tour (1967) for television, and Andrew Sinclair's Under Milk Wood (1972) with the Burtons again, as well as Peter O'Toole, Siân Phillips and Vivien Merchant.

Spinetti was always in work but there was not much focus to it. He started directing musicals in the 1970s, taking charge of Hair in Amsterdam and Rome, and Jesus Christ Superstar in Paris. In 1980 he directed The Biograph Girl, a mediocre musical about the silent movie era at the Phoenix theatre, London, and shortly afterwards launched his one-man show of tart and funny reminiscences, A Very Private Diary, at the Edinburgh festival, but only on the fringe.

A season with the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1995 was not a happy experience ("we were called by page numbers and I didn't know the names of the people I was on stage with") but he delivered superb performances as Lord Foppington in John Vanbrugh's The Relapse and as a composite of cardinals opposite David Troughton's four-square Richard III.

Later film work included a nice cameo in Peter Medak's The Krays (1990). On television he played in an early sitcom opposite Sid James, Two in Clover, but became even better known as a Mexican snack thief in adverts for McVitie's Jaffa cakes. In the 1980s he was the voice of Texas Pete in the children's series SuperTed, and 10 years ago played the "man of a thousand faces" in the popular children's show Harry and the Wrinklies.

His last on-screen appearance was in a recent DVD of an independent film, Seth Swirsky's Beatles Stories, issued to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' first recording session at Abbey Road. And on stage he last garnered acclaim as Einstein in Albert's Boy at the Finborough theatre in Earl's Court in 2005. There he was, taking an audience by surprise right to the end.

• Vittorio (Victor) Giorgio Andrea Spinetti, actor, born 2 September 1929; died 18 June 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jun/19/victor-spinetti

Mr. Spinetti is on the right...

[molly bloom]

Yeah right.

It was a bald faced lie.

My face ain't bald, Canucklehead!!!!!

Some days I'm positively wendigoan in appearance. The top of my head, however, is a different matter... The one thing that most irritates me about getting older is how hair seems to spring up with no trouble in the ears and nostrils, on the back of the neck and the small of the back, the scrotum and on the toes- but on the summit of the noggin ?


I've seen hairier billiard balls.

[Wezil]

Yeah right.

It was a bald faced lie.

[molly bloom]

True. Cyril died quite a while ago. I remember him as The Captain in Fahrenheit 451.
Vivian is alive and lives in London.

Mmm- I like the film in spite of its shortcomings. I have Cyril Cusack on an old l.p. reading James Joyce. Sorry to have implied Viv Pickles had snuffed it- I 'mis-wrote' as American politicians might put it.

[Wezil]

Apparently there is a good documentary called Cocaine Cowboys in which she figures somewhat prominently (for obvious reasons).

You mean this?

“This is classic live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-die-sword,” said Miami filmmaker Billy Corben, whose “Cocaine Cowboys” documentaries chronicled her notoriety.

[-Jrabbit]

From the world of sports...

Former Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell died of natural causes early Thursday.

Modell was 87. One of the most controversial and influential owners in league history, Modell will be remembered for taking the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore and rebranding them the Ravens in 1996. But he was also a driving force behind Monday Night Football, served as league president for three years and helped establish the league's first collective bargaining agreement.
Source: Associated Press
Sep 6 - 8:05 AM

[embalmer42]

MIAMI—Griselda Blanco, the drug kingpin known for her blood-soaked style of street vengeance during Miami’s “cocaine cowboys” era of the ‘70s and ‘80s, was shot to death in Medellin by motorcycle-riding assassins Monday, according to Colombian press reports.

Blanco, 69, spent nearly two decades behind bars in the United States for drug trafficking and three murders, including the fatal shooting of a 2-year-old boy in Miami in 1982.

Known as “The Godmother of Cocaine,” she was deported to Colombia in 2004.

According to Radio Caracol and two newspapers, El Espectador and El Tiempo, two gunmen on motorcycles unleashed a fatal hail of gunfire as she walked out of a butcher shop in Medellin, her hometown.

“It’s surprising to all of us that she had not been killed sooner because she made a lot of enemies,” former Miami homicide detective Nelson Andreu, who investigated her, said late Monday. “When you kill so many and hurt so many people like she did, it’s only a matter of time before they find you and try to even the score.”

Blanco was arrested in 1985 in a cocaine trafficking case in New York, and she was released in 1998 to Florida authorities. She pleaded no contest in October 1998 to three counts of second-degree murder.

Police estimated she was involved in at least 40 homicides between Miami and New York. She is credited with importing to Miami the concept of the “motorcycle assassin” — killers on bikes who sprayed their victims with machine-gun bullets.

“This is classic live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-die-sword,” said Miami filmmaker Billy Corben, whose “Cocaine Cowboys” documentaries chronicled her notoriety. “Or in this case, live-by-the-motorcycle-assassin, die-by-the-motorcycle assassin.”

Apparently there is a good documentary called Cocaine Cowboys in which she figures somewhat prominently (for obvious reasons).

[Wezil]

MIAMI—Griselda Blanco, the drug kingpin known for her blood-soaked style of street vengeance during Miami’s “cocaine cowboys” era of the ‘70s and ‘80s, was shot to death in Medellin by motorcycle-riding assassins Monday, according to Colombian press reports.

Blanco, 69, spent nearly two decades behind bars in the United States for drug trafficking and three murders, including the fatal shooting of a 2-year-old boy in Miami in 1982.

Known as “The Godmother of Cocaine,” she was deported to Colombia in 2004.

According to Radio Caracol and two newspapers, El Espectador and El Tiempo, two gunmen on motorcycles unleashed a fatal hail of gunfire as she walked out of a butcher shop in Medellin, her hometown.

“It’s surprising to all of us that she had not been killed sooner because she made a lot of enemies,” former Miami homicide detective Nelson Andreu, who investigated her, said late Monday. “When you kill so many and hurt so many people like she did, it’s only a matter of time before they find you and try to even the score.”

Blanco was arrested in 1985 in a cocaine trafficking case in New York, and she was released in 1998 to Florida authorities. She pleaded no contest in October 1998 to three counts of second-degree murder.

Police estimated she was involved in at least 40 homicides between Miami and New York. She is credited with importing to Miami the concept of the “motorcycle assassin” — killers on bikes who sprayed their victims with machine-gun bullets.

“This is classic live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-die-sword,” said Miami filmmaker Billy Corben, whose “Cocaine Cowboys” documentaries chronicled her notoriety. “Or in this case, live-by-the-motorcycle-assassin, die-by-the-motorcycle assassin.”

[Tuberski]

My Hot Ass Neighbor 5?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

ACK!

[SlowwHand]

Very true.

R.I.P.

[Tuberski]

If ever a role was made for someone, Michael Clarke Duncan was John Coffey.

Rest In Peace, Michael.

[-Jrabbit]

Wow. Only 54. Very sad. RIP.