The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Uncle Sparky]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/mo...t-70.html?_r=0

Annette Funicello, 70, Dies; Beloved as a Mouseketeer and a Star of Beach Movies
Annette Funicello, who won America’s heart as a 12-year-old in Mickey Mouse ears, captivated adolescent baby boomers in slightly spicy beach movies and later championed people with multiple sclerosis, a disease she had for more than 25 years, died on Monday in Bakersfield, Calif. She was 70...

R.I.P.

[Uncle Sparky]

I could have sworn someone picked her...

[Wezil]

Paul Anka did.

[regexcellent]

Maybe 2013 is the year when all the celebrities die.

Well, except for Zsa Zsa. "Of course, dahling!"

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that she is still alive. It took her a year to realize she was missing a leg.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

It took her an entire career to realise she was missing the ability to act.

[The Mad Monk]

I don't think we can blame her for that, the entertainment industry failed to realize it too.

[Uncle Sparky]

Reveen is dead.

LAS VEGAS, Nev. - Peter Reveen, a popular stage illusionist and hypnotist who toured extensively in Canada, died Monday. He was 77.
Reveen died at his home in Las Vegas of complications from diabetes and dementia, said his daughter-in-law Cathy Reveen.
"He was a classic performer," she said in an interview from her home in Kelowna, B.C.
"The grandeur of the old shows are something his memory retained and he would emulate."
After immigrating to Canada from Australia in 1961, he began his career knocking on the doors of businesses in small towns in British Columbia, offering free tickets to shop owners if they put up his poster in their windows, she said.
As a youth he was a stage magician, but he later studied hypnosis and developed a show that emphasized audience engagement.
He performed in front of packed theatres and campus audiences around the world. But Cathy Reveen said he was particularly fond of entertaining audiences in small communities in Atlantic Canada, where he made his final tour in 2008.
While he hypnotized audience members, he was careful not to make fun of participants in his stage show, she added.
"Family was very important to him," she said. "It was very important to him that he had a clean show and that he was able to present it to multiple generations."
After shows, he would sign autographs and talk with audience members, often staying until midnight to talk to fans, she said.
He was attentive to the details of each performance, often sequestering himself for practices that lasted for hours, she added.
"Every detail of every show and performance was well thought out and justified in his mind."
She said Reveen didn't use the word hypnosis in his performances, as he felt it suggested someone who is sedated.
"His shows were nothing of the sort," she said. "They were more aware and more creative."
He studied the history of magic and wrote books on hypnosis, including one called, "The Superconscious World."
He worked as a manager to Las Vegas illusionist Lance Burton in the latter stages of his career before retiring.
Reveen is survived by four sons and his wife, Coral. His son, Tyrone, performs magic in Canada.

— By Michael Tutton in Halifax

[Wezil]

Don't believe it.

[Krill]

And he died on the 8th as well? **** me, we almost had a hat trick on a single day.

This season is retarded. It's like Death has been doing mandatory overtime.

[molly bloom]

In vitro fertilization pioneer Sir Robert Edwards has died:

Sir Robert Edwards, who has died aged 87 after a long illness, brought about the most significant advance in the history of infertility treatment. This was achieved through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), with the human egg being fertilised by sperm outside the body. His research partner in this work was Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988, and so could not join him in 2010 in being awarded the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine.

A modest, affable, argumentative and generous Yorkshireman, known to friends and colleagues as Bob, he demonstrated energy, determination and rigour in the study of human reproduction. Questions of human egg maturation and its anomalies, and achieving human fertilisation in vitro, came to dominate his interests during his early days in Cambridge. He arrived there in 1963 from the biochemistry department of Glasgow University, and two years later published a remarkable paper in the Lancet that laid out the course of IVF studies for the next 20 to 30 years.

In 1968, he established the viability of preimplantation genetic diagnosis – checking embryos for genetic defects before they are implanted – in an animal model, an approach that was not applied to early human embryos until more than two decades later. During his time at Glasgow, Bob had isolated stem cells from early rabbit embryos, work which similarly displayed the farsightedness that pervaded his research.

Also in 1968, Bob forged a key partnership with Patrick, a gynaecologist from Oldham, in Lancashire, and a pioneer of keyhole surgery. Together with Jean Purdy, their nurse-technician, and their patients, the two pioneers proceeded to achieve IVF, resulting in the birth of Louise Brown, the first "test-tube baby", on 25 July 1978.

They faced obstacles that would have deterred a less determined pair, for not only was the work demanding clinically and scientifically, but they were given no financial support from UK funding bodies, and were regularly attacked not just by religious leaders and the press but also by most of their scientific and clinical colleagues. As a graduate student of Bob's, I well remember being ostracised at meetings and in the departmental tearoom for my association with him.

Louise Brown's arrival marked the beginning of a positive change, albeit a slow one, in attitudes to Bob and Patrick's work. Nowadays, IVF and related forms of assisted conception are so commonplace as to hardly raise comment in most quarters. By the time of the Nobel prize, more than 4.5 million babies had been born as a result of their pioneering initiative.

Bob was born one of three sons into a working-class home in the Yorkshire mill town of Batley. His father laboured on the Settle to Carlisle railway, while his mother was a machinist in a local mill. She had come from Manchester, and after the family relocated there the boys all obtained scholarships to attend Manchester Central High School for Boys.

In 1943, Bob had his education interrupted by conscription and second world war service, mostly in Palestine. On demob in 1948, he was already a mature student when he read agricultural science at the University College of North Wales at Bangor. Disillusioned with the course, which he found was devoid of scientific rigour, he switched to zoology after two years, but was devastated in 1951 to obtain only a pass degree.

This scarring experience might have blighted his academic prospects had it not been for the passion that was noticed by Prof Conrad Waddington, who accepted him for a diploma and then a PhD in genetics at Edinburgh University. Bob's initial work in this field focused on the possibility that birth defects might arise through errors in chromosomal segregation during egg maturation or fertilisation, and he worked with Ruth Fowler, whom he married in 1954, to demonstrate that eggs could be induced to mature chromosomally according to a predictable schedule by hormone treatment.

After spells working on contraceptive development at the California Institute of Technology (1957-58) and the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, north London (1958-62), Bob spent a year at Glasgow and then moved to Cambridge, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.

As well as being an experimentalist and keeping abreast of the scientific literature in such diverse fields as immunology, embryology, genetics and endocrinology, Bob was also a prolific writer and a groundbreaking promoter of the public awareness of science and of its role in overcoming infertility and genetic disease. Early and continuing ethical challenges to his work also prompted Bob to think and publish widely about reproductive bioethics – a subject of which he was truly a father figure.

He also drove the foundation of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology and its journals. These he edited for many years, and then in 2000 set up a new e-journal, Reproductive BioMedicine Online, with emphasis on rapid publication and the airing of controversies.

His almost inexhaustible vitality, combined with a passionate belief in humanity, socialism and people's inherent common sense, enabled him time to engage in local politics: for a five-year period he was a Labour councillor. Elected FRS in 1984 and made professor of human reproduction in 1985, he was knighted in 2011.

Bob was sad that Patrick was not able to share the Nobel prize with him. Since he was not in good enough health to collect it personally in Stockholm, I took his place in opening the Nobel symposium in his honour. It was a privilege and a pleasure to know him for almost half a century, and he will be sorely missed.

He is survived by Ruth; by his five daughters, Caroline, Jenny, Sarah, Meg and Anna; and by 12 grandchildren.


• Robert Geoffrey Edwards, physiologist, born 27 September 1925; died 10 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/apr/10/robert-edwards

[molly bloom]

Fear no more the heat and the dust... novelist and screenplay writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala:

The writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who has died aged 85, achieved her greatest fame late in life, and for work she had once dismissed as a hobby – listing "writing film scripts" as a recreation in Who's Who. Her original screenplays and adaptations of literary classics for the film producer Ismail Merchant and the director James Ivory were met with box-office and critical success. The trio met in 1961, and almost immediately became collaborators, as well as close and lifelong friends.

Soon after Merchant and Ivory themselves met (in New York), Merchant proposed that they make a film of Jhabvala's early novel The Householder (1960). The pair then went to Delhi and asked her to sell them the book and write a screenplay of it in eight days flat. Over the next five decades, she wrote 23 screenplays. The collaborations included adaptations of EM Forster's A Room with a View (1985) and Howards End (1992), for both of which Jhabvala won Academy Awards; and Henry James's The Bostonians (1984) and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1993). Jhabvala's two Oscars put her in the incongruous company of Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor – journalists reported how odd the gilt statuettes looked in her plain New York flat.

She did not care. Her own fiction was what mattered to her, whether or not it did to anyone else. This was how it had been since she began writing novels in India in the 1950s, feeling: "I was at the bottom of a deep abyss. No one read them. But I enjoyed it." The films were fun, but: "I live so much more in and for the books," she wrote to a friend.

She was a brilliant storyteller. Her work darkened towards the end of her life: she wrote of deception and self-deception and of time's revenges, the twists and turns of an implacable fate that her worst charlatans could manipulate to their advantage. Her vision was bleak; her tone austere. But her supply of complex characters and subtle, vivid scenes was inexhaustible and she caught the ambiguities of human behaviour and the pleasures of the senses in precise, perfect words.

Her dozen novels and eight collections of short stories (and other stories published in the New Yorker and elsewhere) won Jhabvala the admiration of the sternest critics of her time. Raymond Mortimer thought she beat all other western novelists in her understanding of modern India. To CP Snow, no other living writer better afforded readers that "definition of the highest art", the feeling "that life is this and not otherwise". Her literary awards included the 1975 Booker prize for her eighth novel, Heat and Dust. Merchant Ivory's 1983 film of it marked their breakthrough from art-house exclusivity to popular success.

Jhabvala spoke with an unclassifiable accent in an idiosyncratic drawl. The wit, economy and detachment that she achieved in her fiction also played in her personality, and there, too, they masked contradictory qualities. Her characters surge with violent emotions (which they often suppress) and pursue voracious appetites (for food, sex, love) with a relish their creator seems to share. Her second novel was entitled The Nature of Passion (1956); there was a passion at her own core, too, though it was hard to tell for what.

For writing, certainly. "The only three hours in the day I'm really alive," she said of her unfailing morning's work. She continued to write and publish until the end: a new short story of hers appeared in the New Yorker last month. She did not choose to become a writer, she said: "One is just born that way." When she began school and wrote her first composition, she was "flooded with my destiny", and – as the words poured – with delight. It was 1933; she was six.

She had been born in Cologne into a patriotic German family of assimilated Jews. Her maternal grandfather was the cantor in Cologne's biggest synagogue.

One day in 1934 they sat on their balcony overlooking Cologne's main avenue and watched the Nazis parade pass. That night, Ruth's parents were arrested, then released. Her father, Marcus, a solicitor of Polish parentage, could not get her mother, Eleonora (nee Cohn), to leave Germany until April 1939. Then, they came to Britain with their son, Siegbert, who later became professor of German at Oxford, and Ruth. All Marcus's family – more than 40 people – perished during the Holocaust. In 1948, when he discovered how they had been killed, he took his own life.

Jhabvala never wrote of her early life. She never spoke of it in public, until 1979, when she received the Neil Gunn international fellowship and gave a public lecture in Edinburgh. Her chosen subject was disinheritance. Great writing such as Gunn's, she said, seems to come from the writer's "ground of being", an inheritance rooted in "tradition, landscape and that inexplicable region where childhood and ancestral memories merge". She herself had "only disinheritance" of this. "I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel – till I am – nothing." She spoke without self-pity: "As it happens, I like it that way."

The refugee found her home in the limitless world of literature. She wrote "furiously" through her childhood; within days of arriving in Britain, she was writing in English, and graduated in English literature from Queen Mary College, London University. Asked later if she had happy memories of England, she said: "If it weren't for England, I wouldn't have any memories at all."

In 1951, she married Cyrus Jhabvala ("Jhab"), a Parsee architect whom she had met in London, and went to live with him in Delhi. She plunged in "total immersion" into India – the jasmine, the starlit nights, the temple bells, the holy men, the heat. She bore three daughters, wore the sari and wrote of India and the Indians as if she were Indian herself. But her passionate love for India changed into its opposite. By 1975, she found she could no longer write of it nor in it.

"There need never be a dull moment," she admitted in a rare autobiographical piece describing her difficult feelings about India by the time she left it. "Yet all my moments are dull. It is my own fault, I know." In this place where her beloved family flourished – "my husband is Indian and so are my children" – her complicated makeup asserted itself with increasing intensity. "I am a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis. I am irritable and have weak nerves," she admitted in her introduction to her story collection How I Became a Holy Mother (1976).

She went to the US. By then she had collaborated with Merchant and Ivory on several films with Indian subjects including Shakespeare Wallah (1963) and Autobiography of a Princess (1975), her favourite. But now her attention, her fiction and their joint projects returned to the west, and she took an apartment in New York in the block where Merchant and Ivory lived.

So she changed continents three times in her life – and entitled her 10th novel Three Continents in 1987. It amused her to liken this to sexual infidelity. "Perhaps I'm just fickle by nature and get tired of countries the way other women do of husbands or lovers." In New York she found a sense of homecoming. Here were the overheated high-ceilinged, furniture-stuffed apartments of her European childhood, with corner delis selling the same pickled cucumbers and potato salads she had loved then.

In the latter part of her life, her daughters' marriages (to Indian, American and English husbands) meant that they, too, settled in three different continents, while Ruth and Jhab established a modus vivendi of dividing their time between two. In one of her last collections, East into Upper East (1998), her stories travelled between India and Manhattan, as she and Jhab did in these years. They were among the best she ever wrote. In the year of its publication, she was appointed CBE.

Her husband and daughters – Renana, Ava and Firoza-Bibi (known as Poji) – survive her. Her brother died last year. Shortly before her own death, she accepted a visit from a rabbi. After performing a blessing, he asked her for the best thing she could recall in her life. "Without any hesitation," Ava wrote afterwards, "she pointed to papa."

• Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, novelist and screenwriter, born 7 May 1927; died 3 April 2013

• This article was amended on 4 April 2013. Jhabvala won the Neil, rather than Nell, Gunn international fellowship.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/03/ruth-prawer-jhabvala

[molly bloom]

Spanish film director Bigas Luna's last reel :

For 39 years, under General Francisco Franco's repressive regime, it was almost impossible for Spain to create a vibrant film industry and for talented film-makers to express themselves freely. However, after the death of the Generalissimo in 1975, there was a burst of creativity, with Pedro Almodóvar paving the way for directors such as Bigas Luna, who has died of cancer aged 67.

After some years as a conceptual artist who experimented with new audio-visual media, Luna became known internationally for his "Iberian passion" feature film trilogy: Jamon Jamon (1992), Golden Balls (1993) and The Tit and the Moon (1994), which explored the darkest depths of eroticism and stereotypical Spanish machismo. The first film introduced Penélope Cruz to audiences and launched Javier Bardem as the embodiment of the Spanish stud. "I owe my career to Bigas Luna," Bardem said in 2001.

Bigas Luna on the set of Jamon Jamon in 1992. Photograph: Photos 12/Alamy In the trilogy, Luna, like Almodóvar, mined the subversive potential of melodramatic excess, a tradition that can be traced back to Luis Buñuel's surrealist classics. However, Luna's films are more extreme than Almodóvar's, mainly because they are populated not by emancipated lovers but by emotionally stunted characters whose sexuality turns pathological. Luna also seems to question whether Spain's shift to democracy and consumerism was really as liberating as presumed.

Luna was born in Barcelona and became interested in painting and design at an early age. After the 1977 law ending censorship in Spain, he made several erotic low-budget films, which demonstrated a fascination with the manipulation of images and sexual symbolism. In Bilbao (1978), a lonely man living with a domineering wife whom he does not love becomes obsessed with the eponymous stripper and prostitute.

Reborn (1981), Luna's first and last film in English, was a religious cult thriller shot in Italy, with an international cast headed by Dennis Hopper playing a fake TV evangelist who joins up with a woman (Antonella Murgia) with real healing powers. Another kind of cult has since grown up around Anguish (1987), a bizarre horror-film-within-a-horror-film.

The Ages of Lulu (1990) refers to the education of a young girl, which includes a blindfolded threesome with her brother and frolicking with a male gay couple (one of them Bardem). "Men enjoy looking at lesbians, so why can't I enjoy gay men?" she wonders. As the film bordered at times on hardcore, it was not widely seen outside Spain, unlike Jamon, Jamon, which won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1992, and was released in most European countries and the US.

To prove that the film has cojones, the opening shot is of a billboard of a gigantic black bull with huge testicles. In this parodic fast-paced melodrama, Bardem plays a would-be bullfighter who models underwear. As in several Luna films, it counters the criticisms of misogyny with a narrative driven by female desire. Roger Ebert noted that "it is frankly outrageous, it has the courage to offend, it is not afraid of sex, and it goes over the top in almost every scene. Of course it's in bad taste, of course it's vulgar, of course it flies in the face of all that is seemly, and, of course, that is the idea."

The title of Golden Balls, the second in the trilogy, reflects the fact that Bardem, as a horny young man, who dreams of building a skyscraper (an unsubtle phallic symbol) as a monument to himself, sleeps his way to the top. Luna's bawdy pastiche of soap opera holds up the macho male to ridicule, while paying homage to Salvador Dalí, one of the director's idols. The Tit and The Moon is a surreal fantasy about a pre-pubescent boy's (and/or the director's) obsession with breasts and the milk therein. By shooting it as a rites-of-passage drama, Luna somehow distances it from the "nudie-cutie" movies of Russ Meyer.

Luna continued his trips into erotica with Bambola (1996) which concentrated on the physical charms of the voluptuous Valeria Marini, once described by the director as "exuberant, obsessive and excessive, just like bologna sausage". Here again is a swapping of gender roles, exemplified by the characters' swapping of underwear. With The Chambermaid on the Titanic (1997), a restrained, multilayered tale of a man who has, or has not, had sex with the woman of the title, but uses his imagination to embellish the tryst in a hotel room on the eve of the launch of the doomed liner, Luna proved that one does not have to shock to get attention.

Cruz returned to the Luna fold in Volavérunt (1999), an uncharacteristic epic biopic that revolves around Goya's womanising and the mysterious death of the Duchess of Alba. Sound of the Sea (2001) and My Name Is Juani (2006) continued Luna's explorations of the over-sexed male matched with a carnal woman. His final film was Di Di Hollywood (2010), about a barmaid rising to Hollywood stardom, helped by a sham marriage to a secretly gay star.

Luna, a bon vivant, and his wife, Celia, lived for many years in the Catalan province of Tarragona, where they produced wine, ham and organic products. He is survived by his wife and three daughters.

• Juan José Bigas Luna, film director, born 19 March 1946; died 6 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/07/bigas-luna

A man who could make me laugh with very little effort- Irish actor Milo O'Shea

For a performer of such fame and versatility, the distinguished Irish character actor Milo O'Shea, who has died aged 86, is not associated with any role in particular, or indeed any clutch of them. He was chiefly associated with his own expressive dark eyes, bushy eyebrows, outstanding mimetic talents and distinctive Dublin brogue.

His impish presence irradiated countless fine movies – including Joseph Strick's Ulysses (1967), Roger Vadim's Barbarella (1968) and Sidney Lumet's The Verdict (1982) – and many top-drawer American television series, from Cheers, The Golden Girls and Frasier, right through to The West Wing (2003-04), in which he played the chief justice Roy Ashland.

He had settled in New York in 1976 with his second wife, Kitty Sullivan, in order to be equidistant from his own main bases of operation, Hollywood and London. The couple maintained a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park by the Dakota building, and formed a spontaneous welcoming committee for any Irish actors or plays turning up on Broadway.

Although he had worked for Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir at the Gate theatre in Dublin, and returned there in 1996 to appear in a revival of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys opposite his great friend David Kelly, his Irish theatre connections belonged to the city of his youth, and he preferred it that way.

His father was a singer and his mother a ballet teacher, so it was inevitable, perhaps, that Milo gravitated towards the stage. He was just 12 when he appeared in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra at the Gate. He completed his education with the Christian Brothers at the Synge Street school (where the actor Donal Donnelly was a classmate) and took a degree in music and drama at the Guildhall School in London; he remained a superb pianist all his life and could – and usually did – sit down at the keyboard and play more or less anything.

He made a London debut in 1949 as a pantry boy in Molly Farrell and John Perry's Treasure Hunt at the Apollo, appearing in John Gielgud's production of the jewellery-theft potboiler alongside Sybil Thorndike, Marie Lohr and Alan Webb. When Queen Mary came backstage, she asked O'Shea where the gems had gone. "Don't tell her," whispered Thorndike, "or she won't come back after the interval."

Back in Dublin, he appeared in revues at the 37 Theatre Club on Lower O'Connell Street and was part of a group including Maureen Toal, whom he married in 1952, Norman Rodway and Godfrey Quigley at the Globe, as well as appearing at the Pike. He toured America with Louis D'Alton's company and played a season at Lucille Lortel's White Barn theatre in Westport, Connecticut.

The 1960s started inauspiciously with a brief run at the Adelphi in London in Mary Rodgers's Once Upon a Mattress, which lasted just 38 performances. But Brendan Behan had seen and loved Fergus Linehan's musical Glory Be! and recommended it to Joan Littlewood, who presented it for a season at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in 1961. O'Shea was a hit, leading a cast of young Dublin actors including Kelly and Rosaleen Linehan. Some critics mistook youthful buoyancy for amateurism and likened the show to Salad Days, suggesting it be renamed "Mayonnaise".

By the end of the decade, O'Shea was fully established on Broadway, winning a 1968 Tony nomination as one of Charles Dyer's two gay hairdressers in Staircase (the other one was Eli Wallach) and appearing opposite Angela Lansbury as the sewerman in Jerry Herman's Dear World in the following season.

Around the same time, two major movie performances, following Strick's admirable but unsatisfactory Ulysses (O'Shea was Leopold Bloom), confirmed his status: as the mad scientist Durand Durand (inspirational name for Simon Le Bon's pop group Duran Duran), he was seen gibbering ecstatically as he tried to destroy Jane Fonda's Barbarella with simulated lust waves in his Excessive Machine; and as Friar Laurence in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968) he brought brief hope and humour to the carnally doomed coupling of Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey.

And in 1969 he struck sitcom gold in the BBC's Me Mammy, scripted by Hugh Leonard, in which he played bachelor Bunjy Kennefick, a West End executive with a luxury flat in Regent's Park and a mountainous mum, played by Anna Manahan, with her apron strings tied round his neck. The show ran for three series to 1971, and O'Shea was now a household face on both sides of the Atlantic.

After the move to Manhattan, he appeared on Broadway as Eddie Waters, the failed old comedian, in Mike Nichols's production of Trevor Griffiths's Comedians; as James Cregan in Eugene O'Neill's extraordinary A Touch of the Poet, with Jason Robards and Geraldine Fitzgerald; and as Alfred Doolittle in a 1981 revival of My Fair Lady, once again starring Rex Harrison.

But he won his second Tony nomination for his luxury-lifestyle-loving Catholic priest, Father Tim Farley, in Bill C Davis's debut Broadway play, Mass Appeal in 1982. The critic Frank Rich applauded his comic mischievousness and timing, and noted how the mask slipped on the sham of a life of this lost alcoholic soul who was inducting a rebellious young seminarian; the play was finally about secular and religious love, not the Catholic church at all.

Unfortunately, O'Shea did not return to London with Mass Appeal, but with Gerald Moon's Corpse! at the Apollo in 1984. He played an Irish war veteran trapped in a basement with Keith Baxter; Baxter was playing a pair of effete twins who each wanted to kill the other (without success, alas). The play was as moribund as its title.

O'Shea will survive, though, whenever we catch a glimpse of him in Silvio Narizzano's odd version of Joe Orton's Loot (1970), or as yet another priest in Neil Jordan's weird and wonderful The Butcher Boy (1997), or as an incredulous inspector in Douglas Hickox's critic-baiting Theatre of Blood (1973), or holding the ring between Paul Newman and James Mason, his hair slightly longer than usual, as the trial judge in The Verdict (1982).

His last stage appearance was a homecoming of sorts as Fluther Good in Sean O'Casey's tremendous tenement tragedy The Plough and the Stars 12 years ago at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, directed by Joe Dowling, with Linehan as Bessie Burgess.

He is survived by Kitty and by his two sons, Colm and Steven, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1974.

• Milo O'Shea, actor, born 2 June 1926; died 2 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/apr/03/milo-o-shea

In an adaptation of 'Ulysses' :




The horror, the horror- film director Jesus Franco is dead:

According to the Internet Movie Database, the Spanish film-maker Jesús Franco, who has died aged 82, directed 199 films, from El árbol de España in 1957 to Al Pereira vs the Alligator Ladies in 2012, a record few can match in the era of talking pictures. Given that many Franco films exist in three or four variant versions, sometimes so radically different that alternative cuts qualify as separate movies, his overall tally might be considerably higher.

Born Jesús Franco Manera, he was most often credited – at least on international release prints – as Jess Frank or Jess Franco, though he used a host of pseudonyms, writing scripts as David Khune, composing music as Pablo Villa and co-directing pornographic films (with his long-term muse Lina Romay) as Rosa Almirall. He was a true man of the cinema, whose CV ranged from directing the second unit for Orson Welles's Shakespeare project Chimes at Midnight (1965) to shooting hardcore pornography.

Franco began and ended his career in Spain, but spent much of the 1970s as an exile from General Francisco Franco's film industry, making international co-productions in a bewildering number of countries (including France, Brazil, Turkey and Germany) and gaining a reputation as a master of a distinctive brand of psychedelic gothic horror.

Of Cuban and Mexican parentage, Franco was born in Madrid and studied at the city's Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas, from which he was expelled, and the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris. In the 1950s, he worked as an assistant director on Spanish films (including Juan Antonio Bardem's Cómicos, 1954) and Hollywood productions shot in Spain (King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba, 1958). After short films, his first feature – which, beginning his habit of assuming auteurist authority over projects, he wrote, directed and scored – was a teenage comedy, Tenemos 18 Años (1959).

He did not establish his own identity until the horror film Gritos en la Noche (1962), released internationally as The Awful Dr Orloff. With a style derivative of British and Italian gothics of the period and a plot lifted from Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960), not to mention a soon-to-be-recurring mad scientist villain (played by Howard Vernon, a Franco regular) named after the Bela Lugosi character in The Dark Eyes of London, Franco instituted his practice of collaging influences into his own distinctive forms.

He would remake Gritos in disguise several times (including Faceless, 1987), and delivered sequels resurrecting Orloff, but he also found other touchstones in Cornell Woolrich's novels (especially The Bride Wore Black, inspiration for Miss Muerte, aka The Diabolical Dr Z, 1966); pulp serials (he made a brace of Fu Manchu films); gothic horrors (he made both Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein); the Marquis de Sade (he made multiple versions of Justine and Eugenie); and private-eye fiction (with his two-fisted Al Pereira and the Red Lips, a detective agency staffed by two daffy blondes).

Cartes sur Table ( also known as Attack of the Robots, 1966), starring Eddie Constantine, is a companion piece to Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965). Though they gravitated to different areas of cinema, Franco and Godard both borrowed from and subverted high and low art in a manner that resonates still in the postmodern genre cinema of Quentin Tarantino.

With the German-made Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (aka Succubus, 1968) Franco added a quirky, pop art eroticism to his genre cocktail, often expressed through bizarre nightclub acts. In the late 1960s, he teamed up with the British producer Harry Allan Towers on comparatively well-funded, widely distributed exploitation pictures, including Count Dracula (1970), a rare sober adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, and the pioneering women-in-prison picture 99 Women (1969). These films took advantage of relaxed international censorship, and had casts including Christopher Lee, Jack Palance, Herbert Lom and Klaus Kinski alongside Euro-starlets such as the short-lived Soledad Miranda, around whom Franco built several films including the memorable Vampyros Lesbos (1971), whose "sexadelic" soundtrack became a dance-club favourite in the 1990s.

In 1972, Franco began working with Romay, his star in Female Vampire (1973) and an indispensable part of his film universe thereafter. His filmography became more hectic and fractured as the demands of exploitation required more explicit sex and violence. Female Vampire was made in varying degrees of excess, with cuts that could serve a horror, sex, underground or art audience. On low budgets, Franco kept filming obsessively, switching to video in the 1990s, scaling down his crews when his budgets shrank but still keeping the spirits of Orloff, the Red Lips and Al Pereira alive. In later years, perceptive critics such as Lucas Balbo, Tim Lucas and Stephen Thrower highlighted his distinctive vision and made tentative attempts at nailing down a filmography Franco had been too busy making movies to keep track of.

Romay died last year.

• Jesús Franco Manera, film director, born 12 May 1930; died 2 April

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/05/jesus-franco

[molly bloom]

Spanish film director Bigas Luna's last reel :

For 39 years, under General Francisco Franco's repressive regime, it was almost impossible for Spain to create a vibrant film industry and for talented film-makers to express themselves freely. However, after the death of the Generalissimo in 1975, there was a burst of creativity, with Pedro Almodóvar paving the way for directors such as Bigas Luna, who has died of cancer aged 67.

After some years as a conceptual artist who experimented with new audio-visual media, Luna became known internationally for his "Iberian passion" feature film trilogy: Jamon Jamon (1992), Golden Balls (1993) and The Tit and the Moon (1994), which explored the darkest depths of eroticism and stereotypical Spanish machismo. The first film introduced Penélope Cruz to audiences and launched Javier Bardem as the embodiment of the Spanish stud. "I owe my career to Bigas Luna," Bardem said in 2001.

Bigas Luna on the set of Jamon Jamon in 1992. Photograph: Photos 12/Alamy In the trilogy, Luna, like Almodóvar, mined the subversive potential of melodramatic excess, a tradition that can be traced back to Luis Buñuel's surrealist classics. However, Luna's films are more extreme than Almodóvar's, mainly because they are populated not by emancipated lovers but by emotionally stunted characters whose sexuality turns pathological. Luna also seems to question whether Spain's shift to democracy and consumerism was really as liberating as presumed.

Luna was born in Barcelona and became interested in painting and design at an early age. After the 1977 law ending censorship in Spain, he made several erotic low-budget films, which demonstrated a fascination with the manipulation of images and sexual symbolism. In Bilbao (1978), a lonely man living with a domineering wife whom he does not love becomes obsessed with the eponymous stripper and prostitute.

Reborn (1981), Luna's first and last film in English, was a religious cult thriller shot in Italy, with an international cast headed by Dennis Hopper playing a fake TV evangelist who joins up with a woman (Antonella Murgia) with real healing powers. Another kind of cult has since grown up around Anguish (1987), a bizarre horror-film-within-a-horror-film.

The Ages of Lulu (1990) refers to the education of a young girl, which includes a blindfolded threesome with her brother and frolicking with a male gay couple (one of them Bardem). "Men enjoy looking at lesbians, so why can't I enjoy gay men?" she wonders. As the film bordered at times on hardcore, it was not widely seen outside Spain, unlike Jamon, Jamon, which won the Silver Lion at Venice in 1992, and was released in most European countries and the US.

To prove that the film has cojones, the opening shot is of a billboard of a gigantic black bull with huge testicles. In this parodic fast-paced melodrama, Bardem plays a would-be bullfighter who models underwear. As in several Luna films, it counters the criticisms of misogyny with a narrative driven by female desire. Roger Ebert noted that "it is frankly outrageous, it has the courage to offend, it is not afraid of sex, and it goes over the top in almost every scene. Of course it's in bad taste, of course it's vulgar, of course it flies in the face of all that is seemly, and, of course, that is the idea."

The title of Golden Balls, the second in the trilogy, reflects the fact that Bardem, as a horny young man, who dreams of building a skyscraper (an unsubtle phallic symbol) as a monument to himself, sleeps his way to the top. Luna's bawdy pastiche of soap opera holds up the macho male to ridicule, while paying homage to Salvador Dalí, one of the director's idols. The Tit and The Moon is a surreal fantasy about a pre-pubescent boy's (and/or the director's) obsession with breasts and the milk therein. By shooting it as a rites-of-passage drama, Luna somehow distances it from the "nudie-cutie" movies of Russ Meyer.

Luna continued his trips into erotica with Bambola (1996) which concentrated on the physical charms of the voluptuous Valeria Marini, once described by the director as "exuberant, obsessive and excessive, just like bologna sausage". Here again is a swapping of gender roles, exemplified by the characters' swapping of underwear. With The Chambermaid on the Titanic (1997), a restrained, multilayered tale of a man who has, or has not, had sex with the woman of the title, but uses his imagination to embellish the tryst in a hotel room on the eve of the launch of the doomed liner, Luna proved that one does not have to shock to get attention.

Cruz returned to the Luna fold in Volavérunt (1999), an uncharacteristic epic biopic that revolves around Goya's womanising and the mysterious death of the Duchess of Alba. Sound of the Sea (2001) and My Name Is Juani (2006) continued Luna's explorations of the over-sexed male matched with a carnal woman. His final film was Di Di Hollywood (2010), about a barmaid rising to Hollywood stardom, helped by a sham marriage to a secretly gay star.

Luna, a bon vivant, and his wife, Celia, lived for many years in the Catalan province of Tarragona, where they produced wine, ham and organic products. He is survived by his wife and three daughters.

• Juan José Bigas Luna, film director, born 19 March 1946; died 6 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/07/bigas-luna

A man who could make me laugh with very little effort- Irish actor Milo O'Shea

For a performer of such fame and versatility, the distinguished Irish character actor Milo O'Shea, who has died aged 86, is not associated with any role in particular, or indeed any clutch of them. He was chiefly associated with his own expressive dark eyes, bushy eyebrows, outstanding mimetic talents and distinctive Dublin brogue.

His impish presence irradiated countless fine movies – including Joseph Strick's Ulysses (1967), Roger Vadim's Barbarella (1968) and Sidney Lumet's The Verdict (1982) – and many top-drawer American television series, from Cheers, The Golden Girls and Frasier, right through to The West Wing (2003-04), in which he played the chief justice Roy Ashland.

He had settled in New York in 1976 with his second wife, Kitty Sullivan, in order to be equidistant from his own main bases of operation, Hollywood and London. The couple maintained a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park by the Dakota building, and formed a spontaneous welcoming committee for any Irish actors or plays turning up on Broadway.

Although he had worked for Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir at the Gate theatre in Dublin, and returned there in 1996 to appear in a revival of Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys opposite his great friend David Kelly, his Irish theatre connections belonged to the city of his youth, and he preferred it that way.

His father was a singer and his mother a ballet teacher, so it was inevitable, perhaps, that Milo gravitated towards the stage. He was just 12 when he appeared in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra at the Gate. He completed his education with the Christian Brothers at the Synge Street school (where the actor Donal Donnelly was a classmate) and took a degree in music and drama at the Guildhall School in London; he remained a superb pianist all his life and could – and usually did – sit down at the keyboard and play more or less anything.

He made a London debut in 1949 as a pantry boy in Molly Farrell and John Perry's Treasure Hunt at the Apollo, appearing in John Gielgud's production of the jewellery-theft potboiler alongside Sybil Thorndike, Marie Lohr and Alan Webb. When Queen Mary came backstage, she asked O'Shea where the gems had gone. "Don't tell her," whispered Thorndike, "or she won't come back after the interval."

Back in Dublin, he appeared in revues at the 37 Theatre Club on Lower O'Connell Street and was part of a group including Maureen Toal, whom he married in 1952, Norman Rodway and Godfrey Quigley at the Globe, as well as appearing at the Pike. He toured America with Louis D'Alton's company and played a season at Lucille Lortel's White Barn theatre in Westport, Connecticut.

The 1960s started inauspiciously with a brief run at the Adelphi in London in Mary Rodgers's Once Upon a Mattress, which lasted just 38 performances. But Brendan Behan had seen and loved Fergus Linehan's musical Glory Be! and recommended it to Joan Littlewood, who presented it for a season at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in 1961. O'Shea was a hit, leading a cast of young Dublin actors including Kelly and Rosaleen Linehan. Some critics mistook youthful buoyancy for amateurism and likened the show to Salad Days, suggesting it be renamed "Mayonnaise".

By the end of the decade, O'Shea was fully established on Broadway, winning a 1968 Tony nomination as one of Charles Dyer's two gay hairdressers in Staircase (the other one was Eli Wallach) and appearing opposite Angela Lansbury as the sewerman in Jerry Herman's Dear World in the following season.

Around the same time, two major movie performances, following Strick's admirable but unsatisfactory Ulysses (O'Shea was Leopold Bloom), confirmed his status: as the mad scientist Durand Durand (inspirational name for Simon Le Bon's pop group Duran Duran), he was seen gibbering ecstatically as he tried to destroy Jane Fonda's Barbarella with simulated lust waves in his Excessive Machine; and as Friar Laurence in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968) he brought brief hope and humour to the carnally doomed coupling of Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey.

And in 1969 he struck sitcom gold in the BBC's Me Mammy, scripted by Hugh Leonard, in which he played bachelor Bunjy Kennefick, a West End executive with a luxury flat in Regent's Park and a mountainous mum, played by Anna Manahan, with her apron strings tied round his neck. The show ran for three series to 1971, and O'Shea was now a household face on both sides of the Atlantic.

After the move to Manhattan, he appeared on Broadway as Eddie Waters, the failed old comedian, in Mike Nichols's production of Trevor Griffiths's Comedians; as James Cregan in Eugene O'Neill's extraordinary A Touch of the Poet, with Jason Robards and Geraldine Fitzgerald; and as Alfred Doolittle in a 1981 revival of My Fair Lady, once again starring Rex Harrison.

But he won his second Tony nomination for his luxury-lifestyle-loving Catholic priest, Father Tim Farley, in Bill C Davis's debut Broadway play, Mass Appeal in 1982. The critic Frank Rich applauded his comic mischievousness and timing, and noted how the mask slipped on the sham of a life of this lost alcoholic soul who was inducting a rebellious young seminarian; the play was finally about secular and religious love, not the Catholic church at all.

Unfortunately, O'Shea did not return to London with Mass Appeal, but with Gerald Moon's Corpse! at the Apollo in 1984. He played an Irish war veteran trapped in a basement with Keith Baxter; Baxter was playing a pair of effete twins who each wanted to kill the other (without success, alas). The play was as moribund as its title.

O'Shea will survive, though, whenever we catch a glimpse of him in Silvio Narizzano's odd version of Joe Orton's Loot (1970), or as yet another priest in Neil Jordan's weird and wonderful The Butcher Boy (1997), or as an incredulous inspector in Douglas Hickox's critic-baiting Theatre of Blood (1973), or holding the ring between Paul Newman and James Mason, his hair slightly longer than usual, as the trial judge in The Verdict (1982).

His last stage appearance was a homecoming of sorts as Fluther Good in Sean O'Casey's tremendous tenement tragedy The Plough and the Stars 12 years ago at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, directed by Joe Dowling, with Linehan as Bessie Burgess.

He is survived by Kitty and by his two sons, Colm and Steven, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1974.

• Milo O'Shea, actor, born 2 June 1926; died 2 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/apr/03/milo-o-shea

In an adaptation of 'Ulysses' :




The horror, the horror- film director Jesus Franco is dead:

According to the Internet Movie Database, the Spanish film-maker Jesús Franco, who has died aged 82, directed 199 films, from El árbol de España in 1957 to Al Pereira vs the Alligator Ladies in 2012, a record few can match in the era of talking pictures. Given that many Franco films exist in three or four variant versions, sometimes so radically different that alternative cuts qualify as separate movies, his overall tally might be considerably higher.

Born Jesús Franco Manera, he was most often credited – at least on international release prints – as Jess Frank or Jess Franco, though he used a host of pseudonyms, writing scripts as David Khune, composing music as Pablo Villa and co-directing pornographic films (with his long-term muse Lina Romay) as Rosa Almirall. He was a true man of the cinema, whose CV ranged from directing the second unit for Orson Welles's Shakespeare project Chimes at Midnight (1965) to shooting hardcore pornography.

Franco began and ended his career in Spain, but spent much of the 1970s as an exile from General Francisco Franco's film industry, making international co-productions in a bewildering number of countries (including France, Brazil, Turkey and Germany) and gaining a reputation as a master of a distinctive brand of psychedelic gothic horror.

Of Cuban and Mexican parentage, Franco was born in Madrid and studied at the city's Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas, from which he was expelled, and the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris. In the 1950s, he worked as an assistant director on Spanish films (including Juan Antonio Bardem's Cómicos, 1954) and Hollywood productions shot in Spain (King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba, 1958). After short films, his first feature – which, beginning his habit of assuming auteurist authority over projects, he wrote, directed and scored – was a teenage comedy, Tenemos 18 Años (1959).

He did not establish his own identity until the horror film Gritos en la Noche (1962), released internationally as The Awful Dr Orloff. With a style derivative of British and Italian gothics of the period and a plot lifted from Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960), not to mention a soon-to-be-recurring mad scientist villain (played by Howard Vernon, a Franco regular) named after the Bela Lugosi character in The Dark Eyes of London, Franco instituted his practice of collaging influences into his own distinctive forms.

He would remake Gritos in disguise several times (including Faceless, 1987), and delivered sequels resurrecting Orloff, but he also found other touchstones in Cornell Woolrich's novels (especially The Bride Wore Black, inspiration for Miss Muerte, aka The Diabolical Dr Z, 1966); pulp serials (he made a brace of Fu Manchu films); gothic horrors (he made both Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein); the Marquis de Sade (he made multiple versions of Justine and Eugenie); and private-eye fiction (with his two-fisted Al Pereira and the Red Lips, a detective agency staffed by two daffy blondes).

Cartes sur Table ( also known as Attack of the Robots, 1966), starring Eddie Constantine, is a companion piece to Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965). Though they gravitated to different areas of cinema, Franco and Godard both borrowed from and subverted high and low art in a manner that resonates still in the postmodern genre cinema of Quentin Tarantino.

With the German-made Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (aka Succubus, 1968) Franco added a quirky, pop art eroticism to his genre cocktail, often expressed through bizarre nightclub acts. In the late 1960s, he teamed up with the British producer Harry Allan Towers on comparatively well-funded, widely distributed exploitation pictures, including Count Dracula (1970), a rare sober adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, and the pioneering women-in-prison picture 99 Women (1969). These films took advantage of relaxed international censorship, and had casts including Christopher Lee, Jack Palance, Herbert Lom and Klaus Kinski alongside Euro-starlets such as the short-lived Soledad Miranda, around whom Franco built several films including the memorable Vampyros Lesbos (1971), whose "sexadelic" soundtrack became a dance-club favourite in the 1990s.

In 1972, Franco began working with Romay, his star in Female Vampire (1973) and an indispensable part of his film universe thereafter. His filmography became more hectic and fractured as the demands of exploitation required more explicit sex and violence. Female Vampire was made in varying degrees of excess, with cuts that could serve a horror, sex, underground or art audience. On low budgets, Franco kept filming obsessively, switching to video in the 1990s, scaling down his crews when his budgets shrank but still keeping the spirits of Orloff, the Red Lips and Al Pereira alive. In later years, perceptive critics such as Lucas Balbo, Tim Lucas and Stephen Thrower highlighted his distinctive vision and made tentative attempts at nailing down a filmography Franco had been too busy making movies to keep track of.

Romay died last year.

• Jesús Franco Manera, film director, born 12 May 1930; died 2 April

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/05/jesus-franco

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

That's a real shame about Bigas Luna. He did some of my favourite films.

The passing of Jess Franco is rather less regrettable. He directed some of the most god-awful tripe I've ever seen.

[Wezil]

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/12/showbiz/jonthan-winters-death/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

He was one of PLATO's reserve picks.