The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[regexcellent]

Anyone up for running this next year? I don't know if I have time, it actually sounds like a lot of work.

[-Jrabbit]

The initial organization is the only high-maintenance part - gathering entries, confirm eligibility of all the entries, posting lists, making sure the rules are up to date. For most of the year, you're just confirming deaths and posting scoring updates when they happen.

I did it one year and it wasn't bad. Can't take the reins at this point -- just don't have the bandwidth to do it again right now.

[Uncle Sparky]

Peter O'Toole has died. He was one of my reserve team picks this year.

God speed, you magnificent bastard.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

... and 'Rebecca', Joan Fontaine, just died...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/joan-fon...t-96-1.2465420

Wrong de Havilland sister for points...

[-Jrabbit]

Completing the threesome, country music legend Ray Price, dead at 87. He recorded "Heartaches By The Number" and a whole lot more.
May he rest in peace.

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/the-615/5819946/country-legend-ray-price-dead-at-87?mobile_redirection=false

[regexcellent]

Zsa Zsa is gonna die on January 1st of next year.

[SlowwHand]

No doubt.

[molly bloom]

Junior Murvin best known for 'Police And Thieves' :

The Jamaican singer Junior Murvin, who has died aged 67 after suffering from diabetes and hypertension, was celebrated for his mastery of falsetto and for writing unusual lyrics that made good use of folk wisdom. His anthem-like Police and Thieves, recorded in 1976, promptly inspired noteworthy cover versions by, among others, the Clash.

Murvin's single was a hit in Jamaica and was released in the UK by Island Records. In London it became a soundtrack to the violent disturbances of that year's Notting Hill Carnival. The Clash's popular version, and the use of Murvin's original in the Jamaican film Rockers (1978), led to belated UK chart success for Murvin. Police and Thieves reached No 23 in 1980, bringing him an appearance on Top of the Pops.

Born Murvin Junior Smith – most likely in 1946, although some sources say 1949 – he was raised by his great-grandmother in the bustling coastal market town of Port Antonio. His father died when Murvin was young, and his mother subsequently emigrated. At the local Methodist church, Murvin operated the pump for the pipe organ but he was too shy to join the choir.

Junior Murvin's Police and Thieves became a hit after it was used in the film Rockers and was covered by the Clash. Photograph: David Corio/Redferns Instead, rhythm and blues emboldened him: by the age of six, he was delighting neighbours with renditions of songs by Billy Eckstine, Louis Armstrong, Sam Cooke and Nat King Cole, though Curtis Mayfield ultimately became his most obvious influence.

Murvin attended Port Antonio junior and senior schools and, after the death of his great-grandmother, went to live with his grandmother in Glendevon, near Montego Bay. He studied car mechanics at Montego Bay technical high school, and was encouraged to pursue singing after making an impact at concerts staged at the Palladium theatre by the local singer Errol "ET" Webster.

After an aunt sent him a guitar from the US, Murvin began writing songs such as Solomon, a warning to an unruly girlfriend that drew on biblical tales. After singing for the veteran saxophonist Roland Alphonso at a Rastafarian encampment, Murvin travelled to Kingston to audition for the Beverley's Records label, but he was summoned back to Montego Bay before he could make a recording. Another audition, with Lee "Scratch" Perry at Studio One, was similarly fruitless.

Murvin moved to Kingston at the height of the rock-steady era to stay with an aunt in Trench Town, the west Kingston slum that was home to many impressive singers. Bob Marley and the Wailers, Toots and the Maytals, Ken Boothe and the Heptones were all making a dramatic impact then, and Murvin gained valuable pointers from them.

Taking the stage name Junior Soul, he passed through the Hippy Boys, and then approached the singer turned producer Derrick Harriott, who gambled on Murvin's Solomon by voicing the record himself, yielding a sizeable hit. Murvin soon recorded some excellent rock steady of his own, including Glendevon Special (aka Chatty Chatty) for Harriott, which again castigated an unruly girlfriend, plus the lewd Miss Cushie for the producer Sonia Pottinger. As the new reggae sound came storming in, equally strong singles followed, with the spirited ballads Magic Touch and The Hustler handled by Harriott, and the bouncing Slipping and Jennifer by Pottinger.

Murvin then enjoyed a long residence with the Falcons, but returned to Port Antonio in 1975 fronting Young Experience, led by the trumpeter Bobby Ellis. The group was close to the socialist-leaning prime minister Michael Manley, who arranged for them to tour Cuba, and to perform at a birthday party for his wife, Beverley. Their single Wise Rasta Man expressed Murvin's belief in Rastafarianism, but the band soon floundered, leading Murvin to concentrate on songwriting.

Armed with some of his strongest material, addressing the political and social upheavals that were having such adverse effects on Jamaica, Murvin travelled to Perry's Black Ark studio in May 1976. Police and Thieves immediately captured Perry's attention and, after adding lyrics of his own, Perry arranged for Murvin to record it with the drummer Sly Dunbar, the bassist Boris Gardiner and the guitarist Ernest Ranglin. Murvin's debut album, also named Police and Thieves, was highly acclaimed, but a planned follow-up was scuppered by Perry's breakdown in the late 1970s.

Cool Out Son was an impressive effort cut for the producer Joe Gibbs in 1980, but following a series of robberies at Gibbs' studio, Murvin retreated to Port Antonio. His subsequent albums were strong, but did not receive their due: Bad Man Posse (1982) was produced by the DJ turned producer Mikey Dread; Muggers in the Street (1984) was issued by the top-ranking dancehall producer Henry "Junjo" Lawes and sought to update the Police and Thieves theme; Apartheid (1986) was a digital dancehall effort produced by King Jammy. The 1988 album Signs and Wonders, with the New York-based producer Delroy Wright, barely registered. Underground interest was re-ignited when Murvin recorded Wise Man for Dubwise Productions in 1998, and Makasound released a likeable acoustic retrospective in 2007 as part of their Inna De Yard series.

Murvin is survived by five children and eight grandchildren.


• Junior Murvin (Murvin Junior Smith), singer and songwriter, born 1946; died 2 December 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/03/junior-murvin

[molly bloom]

Peter O'Toole is unwell :

Katharine Hepburn, his consort in The Lion in Winter (1968), once told Peter O'Toole that he was profligate with his talent as an actor. But perhaps O'Toole's metier was always risk. Even in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), when he was not quite 30, he looked like an elegant wreck, dipped in suntan, his eyes full of fever. O'Toole, who has died aged 81, made his height, his giddy conviction and his theatricality hold that epic together. He was a freed bird in white robes, yet he shuddered like a schoolboy at the thought of torture.

Was O'Toole a great actor? Some said so – not least those who watched him grow up at the Bristol Old Vic in the 1950s. Did he sometimes stray into misguidedness or grotesquerie? Did he occasionally seem "unwell"? He is remembered for the disaster that was his Macbeth at the London Old Vic in 1980 – a performance that sold more steadily the more furiously it was debunked. But that was half the point to being O'Toole. He was a phenomenon and, night to night, moment to moment, you might shift your opinion as he zigzagged in the crosswinds of his own turbulent imagination. He coincided with the method, or realism in acting, but he ignored it.

O'Toole was plainly fascinated by ham acting and theatrical travesty – in one of his most entertaining films, My Favourite Year (1982), he played an actor, Alan Swann, a swashbuckler in the tradition of Errol Flynn. It earned him his seventh Oscar nomination but he lost to Ben Kingsley for Gandhi. Seven Oscar failures was a rueful glory he shared for a while with his old pal, Richard Burton. In 2003, he was awarded an honorary Oscar. He accepted but did not agree to be finished, There would be an eighth "failure" – his resplendent record.

O'Toole was born, he said, in Connemara, western Ireland (others say Leeds, where he grew up), the son of a wandering bookmaker. They were apparently following the horses at the time, but the family moved about a lot. He went to a Catholic school in Leeds and learned to read at an early stage. He was a teenage boozer, getting into scrapes and fights; wrapped parcels for a living for a while; and tried journalism on the Yorkshire Evening Post. He was told his writing was too colourful. After he and a friend hitchhiked to Stratford-upon-Avon, where they saw Michael Redgrave in King Lear, he knew acting was what he wanted to do.

Having undertaken two years' national service in the navy, in 1954 he entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where his fellow students included Alan Bates and Albert Finney. He was a rebel at the acting school, often at odds with his teachers, but he stood out at a time when a new provincial realism was creeping into British acting. Somehow, he could make Connemara and Leeds sound Athenian. After graduating, he got the job at Bristol. In three years there, he played more than 50 roles. These included Vladimir in Waiting for Godot (his favourite play), Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion, Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, the dame in pantomime, and a Hamlet that drew Peter Hall and Kenneth Tynan down to Bristol. He often played men older than he was, and his model at Bristol was Eric Porter – "because of his great looseness and power".

He left Bristol in 1958, and did Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall in London in 1959 (directed by Lindsay Anderson, with Terence Stamp as his understudy). From there, he went to Stratford for a season, where he played Shylock in a 1960 production of The Merchant of Venice. His Portia, Dorothy Tutin, graciously stepped aside at the final curtain to signal the debut of a new star. He was also Petruchio, opposite Peggy Ashcroft, in The Taming of the Shrew.

By then he was married to the actor Siân Phillips and they had the first of two daughters. It was a marriage full of fights and reconciliations, but all his friends testified to O'Toole's deep devotion and need for a wife who was his equal in most dramatic flights.

The theatre was poised for its great new talent, even if a few critics noted his tendency to "bark" out the words, but the movies already had their hooks in him. In 1960 he had a small part in Kidnapped, an odd one in Nicholas Ray's The Savage Innocents and a much better one in The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. He was being talked about. Elizabeth Taylor even interviewed him for Mark Antony in her forthcoming Cleopatra (1963). They met, he whipped her at backgammon, and they agreed to disagree.

It was in 1962 that he was cast by David Lean as a far too tall, much too florid, yet riveting TE Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. Sam Spiegel, the producer, had wanted Finney (and Marlon Brando before him), and they never got on well. But Spiegel did say O'Toole had "probably the most heady blend of sensitivity and vitality I have known in an actor". It was a big picture, of course, and O'Toole was often rebellious and difficult. In hindsight, the character and the film are not always clear, but the faults are more in the screenplay than in the acting. He was nominated for an Oscar, and lost to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird.

He went straight into another movie, Becket (directed by Peter Glenville, 1964), with Burton, and he elected to do Brecht's Baal on the London stage as it was the kind of rogue play no one else would touch. O'Toole was seldom in the mainstream. But since that flopped, Laurence Olivier honoured him by asking him to play Hamlet in the National Theatre's London debut at the Old Vic – with Olivier directing. Everyone who had seen O'Toole's Bristol Hamlet believed that it was more urgent than the London show.

But O'Toole was now an international celebrity – there was another nomination for Becket (he and Burton were edged out by Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady). And so his movie career took over, producing dismay: Lord Jim (1965), a failure; What's New, Pussycat? (1965), an interesting comedy that never lived up to all its starry contributors; How to Steal a Million (1966), a dud with Audrey Hepburn – viewers asked which star was thinner and more wide-eyed; The Bible: In the Beginning (1966) – as several angels – for John Huston; The Night of the Generals (1967); Great Catherine (1968); Murphy's War (1971); Under Milk Wood (1972) – with Burton and Taylor; Man of La Mancha (1972); Rosebud (1975); Man Friday (1975).

It was an utterly unpredictable course for the actor whose Lawrence and Hamlet had seemed to command the world. There were silly, big-salary choices, to be sure, and the press was full of merry stories about O'Toole's wildness, his drinking and his carefree attitude. But he had loved Donald Wolfit's example; he was most excited by melodrama and going to the brink. He was already aware of another role, himself – O'Toole, in interviews, sitting at a bar, melodious and completely drunk. It was a grand part for which he did not have to learn lines.

The Lion in Winter was different – though, in truth, not quite as good as it is supposed to be. But O'Toole and Hepburn relished the union in which she was old enough to be his mother. That was another nomination – bowing to Cliff Robertson in Charly. O'Toole's schoolteacher in Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969), far too sentimental, then lost to John Wayne in True Grit. The film roles that stand out are his deranged lord in The Ruling Class (1972) and the monstrous movie director Eli Cross in The Stunt Man (1980), two pictures that deliberately court extremism, and which might have been written for O'Toole. He was outstanding in both, but his bravura left vague the question of just how good the films were. He was nominated for both – and he lost to Brando in The Godfather and Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. That was a mark of cult work, true to his private spirit, but not close to the public pulse.

For several years he was away from the London stage, yet he worked in Dublin and in 1973 returned to Bristol for a season – working for next to nothing and playing a fine Uncle Vanya. In 1975, he was found to be suffering from pancreatitis. He underwent surgery, lost much of his stomach, then came back from it all to appear in a good adaptation of Geoffrey Household's novel Rogue Male for British television in 1977.

In 1979, his marriage ended. That year he appeared as Tiberius in the Bob Guccione-sponsored version of Caligula, a fairly sordid movie – and unfortunately compared with the BBC's version of I, Claudius (in which his wife had been a shining player). Far more controversial was his Macbeth, at the London Old Vic in 1980, directed by the film-maker Bryan Forbes, with Frances Tomelty as Lady Macbeth. It was not just that critics deplored the concept, the stagecraft and O'Toole's own playing (monotony was frequently mentioned). Rather, it was the sense that O'Toole had set himself up against the world – that he even fed on the rebukes.

He married the actor Karen Brown in 1983; they had a son, Lorcan, but the marriage did not last long. The work, meanwhile, was often reckless and indifferent. Far from a versatile actor, he had become someone who could play only versions of himself. In which case, in 1989, he was blessed by providence. It came in the form of Keith Waterhouse's play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. O'Toole took the part of the alcoholic, fatalistic and self-destructive Spectator columnist with laconic restraint. It played every night to standing ovations and may have been the triumph of O'Toole's life. Yet there was also his tactful, delicate portrayal of the English tutor in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987).

In 1982, he did George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman in London, and sometimes wavered as he strolled across the stage. On screen, he did almost anything – Svengali (1983), Supergirl (1984), Club Paradise (1986). Much was awful, nothing was dull. And then, in the 1990s, he found another self, the literary autobiographer, and published two volumes about his early life, under the title Loitering With Intent. More atmospheric than factually helpful, they were the works of a real writer and helped alter his public reputation.

With his honorary Oscar, did he think of retiring? Out of the question. He did Bright Young Things (2003), directed by Stephen Fry; he played President Paul von Hindenburg in Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003); he was an incredulous Priam in Troy (2004) and Casanova as an old man in the 2005 mini-series starring David Tennant. Then grace fell upon him, like a fine rain. Hanif Kureishi wrote, and Roger Michell directed, Venus (2006), a small story about a small-time, dying actor and a young woman. It was as touching as anything O'Toole had ever done. He got an eighth nomination, and smiled as the prize went to Forest Whitaker for his Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. Still he worked on, and it was characteristic that his Pope in the TV series The Tudors (2008) was as lowdown as his derelict in Venus had seemed aristocratic. In Michael Redwood's film Katherine of Alexandria, due for release next year, he plays the Emperor Constantine's orator, Cornelius Gallus.

What can one say, in summary, of so many astonishing performances by a man who had become a warning figure for young actors? He was one of those who make us ponder the terrible stress of the job and its art, its curse and its inspiration.

He is survived by his daughters, Kate and Pat, and Lorcan.

• Peter Seamus O'Toole, actor, born 2 August 1932; died 14 December 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/15/peter-o-toole-dies-81

From 'The Lion In Winter' :

and his utterly bonkers renditon of 'Dem Bones' from 'The Ruling Class' :

[molly bloom]

Stan Tracey jazz pianist, composer and arranger :

Born in Denmark Hill, south-east London, and raised in Tooting, Tracey learned the accordion as a child. His father, working late and sleeping late as a general factotum in a West End club, was a distant figure who did not much like music. But Tracey, an only child, had fond memories of spending time with his devoted mother, who would not let him be evacuated from London when the blitz began.

He left school at the age of 12 and taught himself the accordion and the piano. At 14 he began taking odd jobs and factory work before joining the forces entertainment organisation Ensa. Sporting bandanas and bellbottom trousers, the teenage Tracey and his partners worked in a fake Gypsy band before he joined the RAF Gang Show. There he met Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers and Bob Monkhouse. "I knew he was a musical genius in 1947," recalled Monkhouse. "He could hear any melody once, and instantly play a dozen brilliant improvisations on it."

Tracey joined Vic Ash's dance band, toured the country supporting the swing star Cab Calloway and graduated from the accordion to the piano through a new devotion to boogie-woogie. He also discovered Ellington and Monk, his two primary jazz influences. Tracey found a kindred spirit in Monk's crunching harmonies, chord voicings and wayward humour – and what seemed like an understanding of some of the percussively dramatic potential unique to the piano.

Guided by an infallible musical ear, Tracey learned fast enough to be playing on the transatlantic liners to New York in the early 1950s, hearing the American jazz idols at first hand. He worked as an accordionist with the pianist Eddie Thompson and as a pianist in the trumpeter Kenny Baker's octet, in the Caribbean-influenced bands of Carl Barriteau and Kenny Graham, and with the drummers Ivor and Basil Kirchin.

Tracey then joined the jazzy dance-bands of Roy Fox and Ted Heath, working for the latter from 1957 to 1959, and performing on the Heath band's successful trips to the US. Tracey's talents expanded in the Heath years, and he worked as an arranger and occasional vibraphonist as well as a pianist.

Tracey had been married twice (in 1946 and 1954) by the time he met his third wife, Jackie, a jazz lover who was working at Decca Records. They married in 1960. With Jackie's encouragement, Tracey had by then begun recording as a leader, his debut being the trio and quartet album Showcase (1958).

In 1960 he began the job that changed his life. The British modern jazz scene at that time was a very different world to the one it became after the ascendancy of the Beatles and the British rock boom. In his early career, Tracey was often working six nights a week, frequently in the company of such powerful British jazz performers as the saxophonist Ronnie Scott and the drummer bandleaders Laurie Morgan and Tony Crombie. When the relaxation of musicians' union rules allowed a flood of American jazz stars to work London club seasons for the first time, Tracey became the new club-owner Scott's first-call accompanist for the illustrious guests.

Stan Getz, Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Rollins and dozens more changed from distant idols to up-close jazz legends whom London fans and players could now meet and hear. Accompanying those originals night after night was, said Tracey, "like Christmas every day". On the night bus home, he would scribble snatches of melody he had heard on the bandstand, receiving an informal version of the education he had never had. He began to write tunes he never suspected he had the imagination to conceive, then orchestrations, suites and extended pieces.

During these years, Tracey had also evolved a sublime playing partnership with the lyrical, Getzian Scottish tenor saxophonist Bobby Wellins. In 1965 Tracey and Wellins made the album Under Milk Wood, inspired by Dylan Thomas's radio play. It was to be Tracey's most famous recording, an evocative collection of variously dancing and sidelong jazz themes, and featuring one unquestioned masterpiece. In the brooding Starless and Bible Black – a piece of rippling tone-poetry for the piano and Wellins's softly hooting sax – the pair conjured up one of the alltime great jazz performances.

The success of Under Milk Wood brought a burst of new recording opportunities for Tracey big bands and small groups in the 1960s. He became a regular member of the New Departures Quartet, mingling jazz with the poetry of Michael Horowitz and Cream lyricist Pete Brown. He wrote and performed the big band suite Alice in Jazzland (1966), composed all the music except the Burt Bacharach title track for the film Alfie (1966), in collaboration with Rollins; arranged for the Ellington tribute We Love You Madly (1968); and wrote another extended big-band feature, Seven Ages of Man (1969). Tracey also worked as a sideman with the gifted Jamaican saxophonist Joe Harriott, and with a classically influenced Ellington disciple, the composer Neil Ardley.

But then came the downturn, both for jazz and for Tracey personally. The bottom fell out of the straight-jazz record market with the coming of jazz-rock fusion, and Tracey – exhausted by the Scott years, and recovering from the destructive recreational habits so widespread on the Soho jazz scene of the time – hit his lowest point.

But a new generation of British jazz musicians remembered who Tracey was, and why he mattered. The young saxophonists John Surman, Mike Osborne and Alan Skidmore, and the pianist Keith Tippett, were among those who encouraged him to get back into the saddle. Tracey's wife and her friend Hazel Miller helped found the Grass Roots co-operative in south London, using the first trickles of public money for jazz to help reinvigorate the ailing scene.

Tracey felt challenged and stretched by working with musicians of the post-John Coltrane generation who had very different ideas to his own. He even enjoyed forays into free-improvisation, even if he did later confess to playing God Save the Queen all through a squalling collective blast one night with nobody else noticing.

From the mid-1970s on, Tracey's musical horizons expanded. He discovered outlets for his unique mixture of musical bolshieness and romanticism in a remarkable variety of settings, and formed his own record label, Steam Records, with Jackie in 1975. Later that decade he taught at Goldsmiths, University of London, and formed a punchy and infectiously entertaining octet, a sextet, a quartet and an orchestra. His son Clark was now his regular drummer, and before long would become a powerful bandleader in his own right.

In the following decades Tracey played in the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts's big band, worked with Clark and with John and Alec Dankworth in the quartet Fathers and Sons, and in December 1996 celebrated his 70th birthday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with a concert that featured everything from unaccompanied piano to full orchestra. Five years later, on a 75th birthday British tour, Tracey even tried collaborative composition for the first time, working with Clark on the suite Continental Drift – a celebration of their globetrotting as musicians, together and separately, over the years.

Tracey continued to perform and record prolifically into the 21st century – releasing a stream of small-band recordings with Clark and the bassist Andy Cleyndert that were among the most vigorously creative of his life, and demonstrating his enduring openness and spontaneous creativity in free-jazz encounters with the improv saxophonist Evan Parker and the South African drummer Louis Moholo.

Monk's saxophone partner Charlie Rouse had said back in the 1980s that recording with Tracey was the nearest thing he had experienced to working with Monk himself. However, Tracey's expansion of the Ellington and Monk traditions bore no resemblance to the respectful neo-classical homages that came to dominate so much jazz marketing.

Tracey was heading for his mid-70s when the 21st century arrived, and the Rollins question about his stature – not just in Britain, but worldwide – now had its conclusive answer. Tracey's orchestra was the first jazz band to perform at the new Tate Modern in 2001, and the following year he received a lifetime achievement prize at the BBC Jazz awards. Channel 4 broadcast an informed documentary of his life (The Godfather of British Jazz) in 2003, and the quartet revisited the Under Milk Wood music for the Jazz Britannia TV series two years later.

A raft of new recordings emerged (including Live at the Appleby Jazz Festival and Tracey/Wellins - Play Monk) and there were reissued archive classics including the pianist's 1960s dialogues with Webster, and his 1970s free-improvising exchanges with Tippett.

Jackie died suddenly in 2009, shortly before the release of the new quartet session Senior Moment, which Tracey had dedicated to her. He made a memorable appearance on Later … With Jools Holland, toured in Britain and the US, reworked the Dylan Thomas short story A Child's Christmas for narration by Tracey's grandson Ben, and performed Ellington's sacred music at York Minster in 2012. In 2013 he received a parliamentary jazz award for services to jazz and reaffirmed his productivity as a player and composer with the typically taut and pungent quintet set The Flying Pig, inspired by a trip in his father's footsteps to the first world war battlefields.

Tracey was awarded an honorary DLitt from the University of Hertfordshire, which tickled him, as he had only the barest bones of a formal education; an honorary membership of the Royal Academy of Music; and a fellowship of Leeds College of Music, for his immense contribution to the self-confidence of British jazz.

But then Tracey had been his own man since his career as a leader began, and the independence and character of his playing made him widely respected by musicians and fans – and loved too, though such a sentimental possibility would undoubtedly have elicited from him the characteristic shrug and an offhand one-liner. It was the quality of spontaneity and surprise in jazz that "keeps me interested after all this time", as he once put it to me. "After all," he continued with his almost silent laugh, "I wouldn't have been in it for the money, would I?"

Tracey is survived by Clark. His daughter, Sarah, died last year.

• Stanley William Tracey, pianist, composer and arranger, born 30 December 1926; died 6 December 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/06/stan-tracey

Tracey meets Dylan Thomas Under Milk Wood :

[molly bloom]

Eleanor Parker, actor:

In the Hollywood of the 1940s and 50s, when typecasting was an essential constituent of stardom, Eleanor Parker, who has died aged 91, never gained the recognition she deserved, because she refused to be pigeonholed. "It means I've been successful in creating the characters that I've portrayed – that I'm not just a personality who is seen in a variety of roles." Dana Andrews, her co-star in Madison Avenue (1962), called her "the least heralded great actress".

The 1957 film Lizzie is almost a reflection of her career. Parker plays three separate and distinct characters harboured inside one woman – the shy, self-effacing Elizabeth; the wanton, raunchy Lizzie; and the "normal" Beth – and switches brilliantly from one to the other. Parker was always able to be convincing in these three sorts of characters. She was naive as the girl in love with Ronald Reagan in The Voice of the Turtle (1947). In it, Reagan whispers to her: "You're very sweet. I don't know what goes on in that funny little head of yours, but you're very sweet."

In contrast, she was the cockney waitress Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage (1946), who obsesses Paul Henreid as the tormented medical student in the first remake of the Somerset Maugham story. "I can't help it," he cries. "Even though I've despised her, I yearned for her madly. How can there be a greater torture in this world to love and at the time condemn? She's in my blood."

In her third persona, Parker was the sophisticate, as in the role for which she is best known by a later generation, the wealthy and glamorous baroness, love rival of Maria (Julie Andrews), in The Sound of Music (1965). "I'm sure you'll make a very fine nun," she tells Andrews, tartly. Almost two decades before, Errol Flynn said to her in Escape Me Never (1947): "I hate to repeat the obvious, but you are beautiful. There's something so cool and lovely about you; you're like edelweiss."

Parker was born in Cedarville, Ohio, the youngest of three children. Her father was a teacher of mathematics, and her family had no theatrical background. Yet, at a young age, she started performing in plays at school. Already a beauty in her teens, she studied at the Rice Summer theatre in Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. While she was there, an agent from 20th Century-Fox offered her a screen test, which she declined in favour of continuing her education. After she graduated from high school, she studied at the Pasadena Playhouse, where a Warner Bros scout spotted her, and she was again asked to do a screen test. She refused. Finally, in 1941, aged 19, she was ready, and called Warners, who signed her to a contract.

Her film debut was in a small part in the Flynn epic They Died With Their Boots On (1941), but she was cut from the final release print. However, she soon had a few ingenue roles. On the set of Mission to Moscow (1943), she met Lieutenant Fred Losse, a navy dentist, and they were married soon afterwards. The marriage lasted for two years.

Parker was kept busy at Warners throughout the 1940s, her first major starring part being in Between Two Worlds (1944), based on the 1924 play Outward Bound. It involves a group of passengers on a mysterious boat who find they are dead and must now face the after-life. Parker gave a sensitive portrayal of a woman who, refusing to be separated from the man she loves (Henreid), has joined him in suicide.

Parker gave another touching performance in Pride of the Marines (1945) as the girlfriend of a war hero (John Garfield) who is blinded fighting on Guadalcanal. But her greatest challenge to date was as the ruthless Mildred in Of Human Bondage (1946), not only because Bette Davis in the same role 12 years previously was still in some people's minds but because Parker had to reveal a nasty side, which she did with relish, especially in the scene where she smashes up a room with a poker. She tried to perfect her cockney accent for the role. "I got a book dealing with the dialect … and I pretty well wore it out."

Parker made another reasonably successful attempt at an English accent (this time a posh one) in The Woman in White (1948), a respectable Hollywood adaptation from the Wilkie Collins mystery.

Both Eleanor Parker as the wrongly convicted prisoner and Hope Emerson as the prison matron gained Oscar nominations for their performances in Caged (1950) Her stardom assured, Parker married Bert Friedlob, a would-be film producer, in 1946. Although she took some time off to have two daughters and a son, she was still fairly active on screen. She received the first of her three Oscar nominations for the wrongly convicted prisoner in Caged (1950), in which she clearly defines the gradual changes in the pregnant prisoner's character, from innocence to corruption. By the time she leaves prison, we see by her walk, her attitude, and even her voice, how life inside has affected her.

In 1950, Parker decided not to renew her contract with Warners and went freelance. Among her best roles in the 1950s was as loving wife to detective James McLeod (Kirk Douglas) in Detective Story (1951), revealing to him that she had an abortion when she was young, before they met. Variety commented that she "plays the wife with a dignity and emotional depth". For this comparatively short part, Parker was again nominated for an Oscar.

At MGM, she came into her own in a number of their finest productions. In Scaramouche (1952), she is Lenore, the fiery travelling performer of whom Stewart Granger's character says: "When you are placid, you are beautiful. When you're angry, you are superb!" Parker was then paired with Robert Taylor in three movies, one of which was a comedy western, Many Rivers to Cross (1955). She co-starred with William Holden in John Sturges's superior western Escape From Fort Bravo (1953). Holden introduced her to her third husband, Paul Clemens, an artist, with whom she would have a son.

One of Parker's greatest roles was as the polio-afflicted Australian dramatic soprano Marjorie Lawrence in Interrupted Melody (1955). With her voice dubbed by Eileen Farrell in the opera sequences, Parker brought superb emotional power to the part. Again, she was nominated for an Oscar. There followed another string of challenging and contrasting roles: Frank Sinatra's possessive wife in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955); the unhappy wife in The Seventh Sin (1957), based on Maugham's The Painted Veil; the handsome widow angling for Sinatra in Frank Capra's A Hole in the Head (1959) and the long- suffering wife of a wealthy Texas land baron (Robert Mitchum) in Vincente Minnelli's Home from the Hill (1960).

Apart from The Sound of Music, many of Parker's films in the 1960s were inconsequential. She kept being referred to as an "old lady" as the agent of an over-ambitious actor (Stephen Boyd) in The Oscar (1966), which gives some indication of how Hollywood treated stars moving into middle age.

As films dried up, Parker turned to television. She appeared in a wide variety of shows, including the series Bracken's World (1969-70). One of her last appearances was in a TV movie called Dead on the Money (1991), a performance of which the New York Post wrote: "Parker as a matriarch flashes so much style with just a cold calculating smile that it's a shame the veteran actress hasn't found more regular work."

Her marriage to Clemens ended in divorce in 1965; and her fourth husband, Raymond Hirsch, whom she married the following year, died in 2001. She is survived by her four children, Susan, Sharon, Richard and Paul.

• Eleanor Jean Parker, actor, born 26 June 1922; died 9 December 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/dec/10/eleanor-parker

[Robert]

Harold Camping died:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/17/harold-camping-dead-dies_n_4459716.html

Ming and me had him listed! (Ming is on fire! The list of life is doomed!)

[Robert]

Rochus Misch died September 5th at the age of 96 years

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10291325/Rochus-Misch.html

He was my unique pick.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Harold Camping died:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/17/harold-camping-dead-dies_n_4459716.html

Ming and me had him listed! (Ming is on fire! The list of life is doomed!)

As is this pool. Fitting.

[ColdWizard]

Ming getting hits broke Wezil's will to continue.

[Robert]

Ming getting hits broke Wezil's will to continue.

So how do I find out if I crawled back into my #2 position?
Calculating things myself seems like a silly idea.