The 2012 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Wezil]

You must be in advertising.

[molly bloom]

For everyone who was (and like me still is) a fan of Vincent Price and some of his camper/darker horror films more sad news:

Robert Fuest:

Director who blended sophistication and sickness in the horror film The Abominable Dr Phibes

With its mix of pop art, sophisticated humour, pulp science fiction and English eccentricity, the television series The Avengers was among the most influential and significant products of "swinging London" in the 1960s. Robert Fuest, who has died aged 84, cut his teeth on the series under the aegis of the writer-producer Brian Clemens, initially as a production designer when the show was produced "as live" in the studio in black and white and co-starred Honor Blackman with Patrick MacNee, then as director when the series had moved on to colour, film and Linda Thorson.

As designer and director, Fuest learned how to achieve style on a budget – making a great deal of the show's famously minimalist aesthetic – and he carried this over into his best-known works as a film director, the two Dr Phibes horror movies of the early 1970s, starring Vincent Price, and the Michael Moorcock adaptation The Final Programme (1973). In 1970, he made a commercially successful literary adaptation of Wuthering Heights, with Timothy Dalton as a pin-up Heathcliff, and the highly regarded, recently remade suspense picture And Soon the Darkness.

Fuest was born in Croydon, south London. He graduated from Wimbledon School of Art with a national diploma in design, then went on to Hornsey College of Art to study for his art teacher diploma. He did his national service in the RAF and was involved, in a tiny way, in the Berlin airlift of 1948.

After a decade teaching illustration and lithography at Southampton School of Art, he entered the TV industry as a production designer in 1961, first working at Thames Television on The Avengers. He worked for ITV and the BBC throughout the 1960s, mostly as an art director/production designer on prestige shows including Out of This World, Armchair Theatre and the BBC Sunday Night Play. He also contributed material to the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore sketch show Not Only … But Also, as a comedy writer, and seemed drawn towards the pop art/satire world epitomised in the British cinema by the films of Richard Lester.

In 1967, Fuest wrote, directed and provided songs for his first feature, the marriage-in-crisis comedy Just Like a Woman, starring Wendy Craig and Francis Matthews. The film ventures into freewheeling, surreal territory thanks to a Peter Sellers-esque performance from Clive Dunn as a modern architect who creates a stylish but hideous new home for the heroine. Seldom revived yet fresh and memorable, Just Like a Woman might well have been Fuest's most personal film, though his subsequent work found him gravitating towards mainstream success and a lasting cult reputation.

Fuest then directed eight episodes of The Avengers and continued his collaboration with Clemens on And Soon the Darkness, a sunstruck thriller about two girls (Pamela Franklin and Michele Dotrice) stalked by a murderer while on a cycling holiday in France. Wuthering Heights, one of several literary classics reimagined as 1960s-style youth romances in the wake of Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, and John Schlesinger's Far from the Madding Crowd – was made for American International Pictures, which was at that time best known for beach-party musicals and Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Price.

Wuthering Heights was AIP's biggest success to that date – rather to the surprise of studio chief Samuel Z Arkoff, who tried in vain to persuade Fuest to deliver a sequel – and Fuest was then teamed with Price, who had at that time grown weary of his horror stardom and become prickly to work with. Rewriting without credit a simple parade-of-deaths film initially called The Curse of Dr Pibe, Fuest delivered The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971), in which a disfigured vaudeville organist-theologist kills off, in gruesome manners derived from the Plagues of Egypt ("Aaargh, locusts!"), the doctors who failed to save his wife's life.

Aside from the relentless black humour of the premise, Fuest and Price worked hard on an unusual blend of sophistication and sickness, playing up the art deco sets and befuddled succession of mostly doomed British character actors. The film was a big enough hit to re-enthuse Price and AIP and led to an even more stylish and acid-dipped follow-up, Dr Phibes Rises Again (1972), which did well, but not well enough to ensure further instalments.

The Final Programme, with Jon Finch as Moorcock's futuristic dandy Jerry Cornelius and an absurdist take on the end of the world, is a remarkable achievement, though the author did not care for it and audiences did not initially take to its odd qualities. After directing an entertaining American horror movie, The Devil's Rain (1975) – with Ernest Borgnine and William Shatner – Fuest mostly worked in television in the US and UK, inevitably directing episodes of The New Avengers but also odd projects such as Revenge of the Stepford Wives; an hour-long version of Poe's The Gold-Bug; and children's programs in the US and the UK.

From the mid-80s, he returned to teaching, as senior professor at the London International Film School, and then became a full-time painter, specialising in seascapes and maritime subjects. He was also a well-liked guest at film festivals and cult movie events.

He is survived by his wife, Jane, and their daughter Rebecca, and his former wife, Gillian, and their sons Adam, Ben and Aaron.

• Robert Fuest, director, production designer and artist, born 30 September 1927; died 21 March 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/mar/26/robert-fuest

I recommend quite highly both 'Dr. Phibes' films and the France-set thriller 'And Soon The Darkness'- which shows just how unsettling beautiful countryside and bright sunshine can be. 'The Devil's Rain' is great fun- I used to own a copy on video. It has Ernest Borgnine & William Shatner, so it's an American ham and Canadian bacon double treat (no, I really do like it).

Gettin' the Phibes vibes:

[molly bloom]

Ex- angry young playwright dies:

John Arden, who has died aged 81, was among the first of the so-called Angry Young Men to be drawn to the Royal Court theatre as a dramatist in the 1950s.

Arden first came to public attention in 1957 when George Devine chose his The Waters of Babylon — a tragicomedy of London low-life starring Robert Stephens and Phyllida Law — for one of his Sunday night “productions without decor”. The play is punctuated with songs and abrupt changes of theatrical tone.

He was best-known, though, for Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959), written in the wake of an atrocity committed by British troops serving in Cyprus. Set in the 19th century, it concerns four Army deserters, sickened by the colonial war in which they have been fighting, who descend on a northern English town with the intention of somehow “bringing home” the brutality they have witnessed overseas.

Though the work won praise in some quarters for its theatrical power and its use of verse and incidental ballad (Sean O’Casey called it “far and away the finest play of the present day”), it left audiences baffled about the playwright’s intentions and unsure whether the underlying message, if there was one, was about pacifism. The Sunday Times’s critic Harold Hobson described it as a “frightful ordeal”. It ran for only 28 performances and was a financial disaster.

However, the play was soon reassessed: Hobson publicly changed his mind; it won the Evening Standard award for best play in 1960; and it became a standard on the school English curriculum. When, during the Iraq war in 2003, the Oxford Theatre Company staged a revival, audiences were reminded of a neglected talent.

The initial mixed reaction to the piece owed much to the fact that Arden sought to bypass the convention of heroes and villains, believing that audiences with their wits about them should enjoy the absence of moral nudging from the playwright.

In this, he not only stood apart from conventional West End plays, but also from other members of the “Angry Young Men” brigade, who rose to fame at the Royal Court under George Devine with plays clearly designed to make the audience question the state of British society.

In his autobiography, John Osborne wrote that “Arden became an in-house joke for box office disaster”. Between 1956 and 1961 the Royal Court made about £50,000 from Osborne’s plays, but lost nearly £15,000 on Arden’s.

Arden sought to reinstate poetic tradition, not in the elegant and self-consciously literary style of Christopher Fry but with heightened, theatrical prose and ballads, and making extensive use of song, dance, masks and puppetry. He tried for a stronger, grittier, more muscular style which mixed the formal with the natural, the concrete with fantasy. But audiences tended to find his earnestness off-putting. His writing sometimes struck a portentous note, and his refusal to make it clear where the playwright stood could be a challenge too far.

Although he never won a wide following, Arden’s influence on other writers eventually became obvious; and the faith shown in him by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in the 1950s helped to put him, for a short time, in the front rank of British dramatists, alongside Osborne, Wesker, Simpson and Pinter.

The son of a glass factory manager, John Arden was born at Barnsley on October 26 1930. After Sedbergh School, where he played Hamlet, and National Service in the Intelligence Corps, he read Architecture at King’s College, Cambridge. He qualified as an architect at Edinburgh College of Art, where his first play, All Fall Down, was performed by a student group.

He continued to write while working in an architects’ office until George Devine accepted The Waters of Babylon. Live Like Pigs, which premiered at the Court in 1958 and was directed by George Devine himself, was a welfare state comedy about a gipsy family being forced into council accommodation.

If Arden’s writing was never “commercial”, it was sufficiently interesting artistically to attract the attention of the subsidised companies. Plays such as The Workhouse Donkey, about town hall corruption and the appointment of a fanatical chief constable, and Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (with Albert Finney as a 16th-century Scottish chieftain) were staged at Chichester in the 1960s. Both were epic in style, mixing verse and prose with ballads and enough political and moral ambiguity to keep audiences confused.

Left-Handed Liberty (1965) was the result of a commission to celebrate the 750th anniversary of Magna Carta, and was staged at Bernard Miles’s Mermaid Theatre. In 1968 Arden’s The Hero Rises Up, a musical about Admiral Lord Nelson, earned polite reviews.

From the mid-Sixties, Arden’s wife, the Irish actress, writer and political activist Margaretta D’Arcy, collaborated with him on his plays, and it was probably their quarrel with the Royal Shakespeare Company about the staging of The Island of the Mighty in 1972, at the Aldwych, which ended his links with the London theatre.

A four-hour verse saga about King Arthur, derived from a television series, The Island of the Mighty was received with derision by the critics. The Ardens, who felt that the production had been slanted in favour of imperialism, ended up picketing the audience at their own play.

Thereafter the Ardens, who lived in Galway, devoted themselves to Irish theatre and (largely) Irish themes, founding the Corrandulla Arts Centre in Co Galway and contributing frequently to community drama.

In later life, Arden turned to writing novels and short stories. His first novel, Silence Among the Weapons, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1982. His Books of Bale (1988), about the English Protestant writer and churchman John Bale, appointed to the Irish see of Ossory in 1552, was seen by some as a metaphor for Arden’s own life.

John Arden, who was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is survived by his wife and four sons. Another son predeceased him.

John Arden, born October 26 1930, died March 28 2012

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/theatre-obituaries/9177000/John-Arden.html

Should you ever have the chance to see a production of 'Serjeant Musgrave's Dance' don't miss it.

[Wezil]

It has Ernest Borgnine & William Shatner...

Borgnine we have. Shatner somehow escaped our attention.

[Uncle Sparky]

Borgnine we have. Shatner somehow escaped our attention.

I saw Shatner in person a couple of months ago. He definately has a few more years in him.

[molly bloom]

I saw Shatner in person a couple of months ago. He definately has a few more years in him.

But let us hope no more albums.

[-Jrabbit]

Actually, his concept album, Seeking Major Tom, came out last year. Themed to the Bowie hit and replete with guest appearances from real musicians. He's also got a one-man show he's taking to Broadway.

Not bad for an 81-year old Canuck, eh.

[Uncle Sparky]

I almost posted that ^ . I saw a preview of his one man show - very little singing...

[-Jrabbit]

He hosted the Juno Awards last night. Gotta give him credit: he keeps working.

[Wezil]

Not one single Star Trek reference.

[-Jrabbit]

Nothing? Not even a "where no artist has gone before"?

[Wezil]

The opening medley also sucked. Worse air guitar ever (4:00 min mark). No, the video isn't out of sync with the audio.... Capt. Kirk is.




On topic, I have to agree with the earlier comments - He does appear to be in pretty good health so probably not a good pick.

[Wezil]

With only 3 hits we're falling behind the pros.

Derby leader now has 6/20 hits
Lee Atwater leader has 5/10 hits

We're beating the DeathList (as usual) with 2/50

[-Jrabbit]

Speaking of electric guitar, Jim Marshall, creator of the Mashall Amp and known as the "Lord of Loud," has passed away at age 88.

RIP, and thanks for all the tone...

http://entertainment.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/05/11035310-guitar-amp-pioneer-jim-marshall-dies-at-88?fb_ref=.T32xntYqNcc.like&fb_source=home_multiline

[regexcellent]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-05/ferdinand-porsche-creator-of-911-sportscar-dies-aged-76.html

Ferdinand Porsche, Creator of 911 Sportscar Icon, Dies at 76

“As creator of the Porsche 911, he established a design culture that molds our sportscars still today,” Matthias Mueller, chief executive officer of Porsche AG, said in an e- mailed statement. “His philosophy of good design is for us a legacy that we will also honor in the future.”
Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, the inventor of the 911 sportscar, has died, at 76, Porsche AG said in an e-mailed statement today. Source: Porsche Design via Bloomberg
A Porsche 911 Turbo sits on display at the Frankfurt Motor Show on Sept. 16, 2009. Photographer: Adam Berry/Bloomberg
Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, who created the original Volkswagen (VOW3) Beetle, designed the first 911 in 1962. He went on to develop racecars for the German automaker until leaving the Stuttgart-based company in 1972 with other family members when Porsche was transformed into a joint stock company.
The 911 remains the epitome of the Porsche brand, even as the carmaker, which is jointly owned by the Porsche SE holding company and Volkswagen AG (VOW3), expands beyond sports cars. The Cayenne sport-utility vehicle was the brand’s top seller last year, with triple the deliveries of the 911. The Macan, a compact SUV, is scheduled to start production next year.
Porsche unveiled the seventh generation of the $82,100 911 in September. The 350-horsepower sportscar has a top speed of 289 kilometers per hour (179 miles per hour) and surges to 100 kilometers in 4.6 seconds.
“He was a very special man, and the company Porsche was his life and what he stood for,” said Guenther Molter, who co- authored his father’s Ferry Porsche autobiography. “He carried on the work of his father in his own way. He realized the Porsche 911, which was his idea.”
After leaving Porsche, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche founded the Porsche Design Studio, where he devoted himself to developing watches, eyeglasses, writing utensils and other design projects. He was a proponent of clear, austere lines.
His credo was “design must be functional and the functionality must be visually implemented without gags that need to be explained,” according to the Porsche statement.
Ferdinand Alexander Porsche will be interred among close family members at a ceremony at Zell am See in Austria. A public ceremony will take place at a later date, Porsche said.

RIP