The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[-Jrabbit]

Richie Havens, best known as the performer who opened Woodstock in 1969, has passed away at the age of 72.

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/1559103/richie-havens-folk-and-woodstock-legend-dead-at-72

Heart attack. RIP, Richie.

[Sava]

Sava - Do us a favour pal and get a life. The fact you have time for this forum vandalism on a daily basis is just plain sad.

YOU SHUT UP

[Wezil]

Looks like I struck a nerve...

TRUTH HURT DUDE?

[molly bloom]

Celebrating Richie Havens, a life in pictures :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/gallery/2013/apr/23/richie-havens-life-in-pictures

US folk musician Richie Havens, who opened the 1969 Woodstock music festival and energised the crowd with his version of Motherless Child/Freedom, died of a heart attack on Monday at the age of 72, his talent agency said.

Havens, who emerged from the New York folk scene in the 1960s, died at his home in Jersey City, New Jersey, Roots Agency president Tim Drake said.

Known for his driving guitar and soulful covers of pop and folk songs, Havens recorded, performed and toured for more than four decades, using acoustic guitar music to champion the causes of personal freedom and brotherhood. He retired from touring three years ago.

His family said a public memorial would be announced later and asked for privacy in the meantime.

"Beyond his music, those who have met Havens will remember his gentle and compassionate nature, his light humour and his powerful presence," a family statement said.

Havens's improvised version of the gospel song Motherless Child evolved into Freedom at Woodstock and became an anthem of the 1960s hippy generation. His performance of the song was included in the eponymous concert movie and broadened his audience.

A different version of Freedom was included on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino's 2012 slavery-era movie Django Unchained.

Other Havens' hits included versions of the Beatles' Here Comes the Sun and Strawberry Fields Forever as well as the Who's Won't Get Fooled Again.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/apr/22/richie-havens-dies-aged-72

&

Richard P. “Richie” Havens (born January 21, 1941; died April 22, 2013) was an American folk singer and guitarist. He is best remebered for his intense, rhythmic guitar style (often in open tunings), soulful covers of pop and folk songs, and his opening performance at the 1969 Woodstock Festival.

Born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Havens moved to Greenwich Village in 1961 in time to get in on the folk boom then taking place. Havens had a distinctive style as a folksinger, appearing in such clubs as the Cafe Wha? His guitar set to an open tuning, he would strum while barring chords with his thumb, using it essentially as percussion while singing rhythmically in a gruff voice for a mesmerizing effect. Havens was signed to Douglas Records in 1965 and recorded two albums that gained him a local following. In 1967, the Verve division of MGM Records formed a folk section (Verve Forecast) and signed Havens and other folk-based performers. The result was Havens’s third album, Mixed Bag. It wasn’t until 1968 and the Something Else Again album, however, that Havens began to hit the charts — actually, Havens’s fourth, third, and second albums charted that year, in that order. In 1969 came the double album Richard P. Havens 1983. Havens’ career benefited enormously from his appearance at the Woodstock festival in 1969 and his subsequent featured role in the movie and album made from the concert in 1970. His first album after that exposure, Alarm Clock, made the Top 30 and produced a Top 20 single in “Here Comes the Sun.” These recordings were Havens’s commercial high-water mark, but by this time he had become an international touring success. By the end of the ’70s, he had abandoned recording and turned entirely to live work.

Havens came back to records with a flurry of releases in 1987: a new album, Simple Things; an album of Bob Dylan and Beatles covers; and a compilation. In 1991, Havens signed his first major-label deal in 15 years when he moved to Sony Music and released Now.

On April 22, 2013, Havens died of a heart attack at home in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was 72.

Discography
* A Richie Havens Record (1965)
* Electric Havens (1966)
* Mixed Bag (February 1967)
* Something Else Again (1968)
* Richard P. Havens, 1983 (1969)
* Stonehenge (1970)
* Alarm Clock (1971)
* The Great Blind Degree (1971)
* Richie Havens On Stage (1972)
* Portfolio (1973)
* Mixed Bag II (January 1975)
* The End of the Beginning (1976)
* Mirage (1977)
* Connections (1980)
* Common Ground (1983)
* Simple Things (1987)
* Sings Beatles and Dylan (1987)
* Live at the Cellar Door (1990)
* Now (1991)
* Cuts to the Chase (1994)
* Time (1999)
* Wishing Well (April 2002)
* Grace of the Sun (2004)

Guest appearances

* Please Don’t Touch by Steve Hackett (1978)
* Starlight Express Music and Songs from (1987)
* OVO by Peter Gabriel (2000) (Soundtrack to the Millennium Dome Show)
* “Freedom” on The Best of The Jammy’s Volume One w/ The Mutaytor
* “The Long Road” (Duet with Cliff Eberhardt) on Cliff’s 1990 album “The Long Road”)

http://www.last.fm/music/Richie+Havens/+wiki

Richie:

[-Jrabbit]

Legendary country singer George Jones has died in a Nashville hospital. He was 81.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/arts/music/george-jones-country-singer-dies-at-81.html?emc=na

RIP, George.

[Grandpa Troll]

For those who knew much about him will get this:

I wonder if he will show up for his own funeral?

Gramps

[Uncle Sparky]

No-Show Jones?

[-Jrabbit]

He had a bit of history in that area, yes. But I think he'll probably make his funeral OK...

[molly bloom]

British boxer, character actor and stuntman, 'Nosher' Powell exits pursued by a seagull...

The abiding memory that millions around the world will have of Nosher Powell, who has died aged 84, is of him fighting in vain to save his aeroplane after it had been attacked by a seagull in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965). Gert Fröbe may have been the German officer in charge of the plane but it was Powell who, as the stuntman and double, ended up in the water.

Powell's first appearance as a stuntman was in Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944). He also had small roles in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) and Cosh Boy (1953), with Joan Collins. In 1952 he was a boxer in Emergency Call, in which he fought the former world champion Freddie Mills. Powell had a decent if not outstanding boxing career himself, reaching No 3 in the British heavyweight rankings.

George Frederick Bernard Powell was born in Camberwell, south London, where his father had a cart and two Suffolk Punch horses, broke and sold trotting horses and boxed in the preliminary bouts at the Ring, Blackfriars, to pay the rent. His mother gave him the nickname Nosher – for his prodigious appetite – before he could even stand, and as a child he acted as lookout for his father's illegal gambling joint.

Evacuated first to Sussex and then to Devon during the second world war, he sparred with Joe Louis when the then world heavyweight champion was touring American army camps giving exhibition bouts. Later he sparred with Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali as well as the hard-hitting Nino Valdez, whom he would ply with exotic fruit in the vain hope the Cuban would go easy on him.

His first job was as a porter in Covent Garden and his national service was in the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in Egypt. He had successful boxing bouts for the British Army and eventually became a sergeant. On his discharge, instead of returning to Covent Garden he turned professional, signing for six months with the small-time promoter Joe Jones at £5 a fight. In 1950 he won £500 in a novice heavyweight competition at Harringay Arena, north London, and from then on he worked mostly for the top promoter Jack Solomons.

In one six-round bout at the Wembley Town Hall in 1951, he was knocked down four times, and his opponent Ted Morgan nine, before Powell won on points. Later he would often close the bill for a Solomons promotion at either Earls Court or Harringay in a none too skilful but always entertaining contest to send the crowd home happy. He retired from the ring after outpointing Menzies Johnson at Wembley in 1960.

Following that contest he was approached in the dressing room by Jack Isow to act as doorman and take over the cloakroom concession at his restaurant in Brewer Street, Soho. It was there that he upset the Kray twins, barring them for not being properly dressed. He was visited the next day by their elder brother, Charlie, who appeared to accept his explanation. Afraid of no one, Powell nevertheless admitted that for the next few weeks, after the restaurant shut for the night, he had walked down the middle of the street and avoided multi-storey car parks. On another occasion he expelled Orson Welles for breaking wind but without the same potential comeback. A most genial companion with a good line in stories, Powell also worked as the bodyguard to the billionaire and philanthropist Sir Paul Getty and a plethora of visiting Hollywood stars including Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Ava Gardner.

In 1987 he starred as the home secretary, also named Nosher Powell, in the anarchic comedy Eat the Rich. He and his younger brother Dennis ("Dinny") performed stunts in many of the James Bond films, and Nosher taught Jean-Claude Van Damme how to box for the film Legionnaire (1998). When not appearing as a stuntman, a good deal of his time was spent playing Sir Frederick of Gaywood, along with Dinny as Viscount Oval and Nosher's son Greg as Sir Gregory of Dulwich, in jousting tournaments he organised around the country.

In 1951, Powell married Pauline Wellman, with whom he had shared a pram as a baby, and together they ran a pub near the Wimbledon greyhound stadium. Over the years he was bound to encounter some of the major London criminal families. Mostly he was able to deal with them satisfactorily, but he became deaf in one ear after a man called him on the telephone and then fired a gun down the line. In 1972 he was a guest of honour in the series This Is Your Life. He published his autobiography, Nosher, in 2001.

He is survived by his sons, Greg and Gary, both of whom became stuntmen and of whom he was immensely proud although he would good-naturedly complain they were paid far more for doing far less than he had done.


• George Frederick Bernard "Nosher" Powell, stuntman and boxer, born 15 August 1928; died 20 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/26/nosher-powell

From 'The Avengers' :

[molly bloom]

Allan Arbus is ready for his close-up:

The long-running US television comedy M*A*S*H, set during the Korean war, was often perceived as an allegorical look at the Vietnam war, which was still being fought when it began in 1972. But the television show focused less on the specific mindsets of Vietnam which had driven the nihilistic Robert Altman film on which it was based, and in tone was much closer to Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22, with its comedic take on the intrinsic absurdity of war.

No character brought that home more clearly than Major Sidney Freedman, the psychiatrist who appeared in 12 episodes over the show's 11-year run. Freedman was played by Allan Arbus, who has died aged 95. His approach to the mental health of the soldiers, and medics, at the 4077th mobile army surgical hospital unit relied on a humour that was perfectly paired with that of Alan Alda's character Hawkeye Pierce, but came wrapped in an almost zen attitude towards war and life itself.

Arbus was so convincing in the role that Alda recalled sitting between takes and asking him serious psychiatric questions, expecting authoritative answers. Alda credited the depth Arbus brought to the role with helping both audiences and the actors themselves "believe some of the stresses our characters were under".

Some of Arbus's empathy came from his own life, and the breakdown of his marriage to the photographer Diane Arbus. They had remained close after their split and when Diane took her own life in 1971, two years after their divorce, it was a testing time for him. Before he turned to acting, they had been partners in photography, and he had given her her first camera.

Allan Arbus was born in New York, where his father was a stockbroker and his mother taught English. He was only 15 when he graduated from DeWitt Clinton high school and enrolled at City College; he dropped out at 17 and took a job at Russeks department store. A year later, he met Diane Nemerov, the daughter of the store's owner. They came together through a shared love of photography and in 1941 they married, before Allan enlisted in the Army Signal Corps, serving as a photographer in Burma.

After the war, Diane's father backed them in opening their own photographic studio, with Russeks as a prime client, and they became successful fashion photographers, working for magazines such as Vogue, Glamour and Harper's Bazaar. In 1956, Diane left the partnership to pursue her own career, producing her now iconic portraits of 50s and 60s America. They separated in 1959, and Allan began taking acting lessons with Mira Rostova. He made his first, uncredited, appearance in the film Hey, Let's Twist! (1961).

He played Mr Bad News in Robert Downey Sr's cult classic Putney Swope (1969) and small roles in quality films including Cisco Pike (1972) and Cinderella Liberty (1973), as well as a memorable turn as a drug dealer shotgunned into his swimming pool by Pam Grier in Coffy (1973). His very New York combination of intensity and sensitivity meant he was in demand as a character actor, especially on television in programmes as varied as The Odd Couple, The Rockford Files and Taxi.

But M*A*S*H defined Arbus's career. He debuted in the show's first season, in the episode Radar's Report, but called Milton Freedman. When he returned three months later, the character had been renamed Sidney. His last appearance came in the feature-length final episode, Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen, in February 1983, at the time the most-watched programme in American TV history.

His best roles included the lead in Stanley Kramer's 1974 TV movie Judgment: The Trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and playing the film director Gregory La Cava opposite Rod Steiger in WC Fields and Me (1979). He starred in a short-lived 1979 TV series Working Stiffs alongside Jim Belushi and Michael Keaton, and was excellent married to Barbara Babcock in The Four Seasons (1984), which Alda adapted for TV from his own film. Arbus worked through the 90s, with recurring roles in three series, Brooklyn Bridge, In the Heat of the Night and Judging Amy. His final appearance came in 2000, in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

He is survived by his second wife, Mariclare Costello, whom he married in 1976, their daughter Arin, and two daughters, Doon and Amy, from his first marriage.

• Allan Arbus, actor, born 15 February 1918; died 19 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/apr/24/allan-arbus

[self biased]

****IN' SLAYER's Guitarist Jeff Hannenman dead at 49

Link

[Uncle Sparky]

http://www.today.com/entertainment/d...d-91-6C9692845

Deanna Durbin, Depression-era film heroine, singer dead at 91


Randee Dawn TODAY contributor

May 1, 2013 at 9:41 AM ET


She was a child star with a striking singing voice who retired from the business in her twenties, but Deanna Durbin, whose death at 91 was announced Tuesday, remained a beloved screen actress long after her star had faded.

The Deanna Durbin Society's newsletter announced her death, quoting her son Peter H. David, said the New York Times. He indicated that she died "a few days ago," but provided no other details. He also thanked fans for respecting her privacy.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1921, Durbin was a familiar face to the Depression-era audiences who flocked to movie houses. Signed to MGM at 13, she made her first film alongside Judy Garland in the 1936 short "Every Sunday." The oft-repeated story is that MGM head Louis B. Mayer, away on a trip, instructed his employees to "drop the fat one" from the studio's contract -- and they let Durbin go, but Mayer had meant Garland.

She was picked up at Universal and the subsequent success of her next films, including "Three Smart Girls" (and its two sequels) were credited with keeping the studio aloft. A 1936 nationwide search for the actor who would give her first screen kiss made news, and Robert Stack was the actor chosen for "First Love." ...
Durbin made her last film in 1948 ("For the Love of Mary") and retired to a French farmhouse with David, never again dipping her toes into Hollywood waters. She gave almost no interviews, but was quoted in the Times as having said "I hated being in a goldfish bowl."

A letter she sent reporters in 1958 read in part: "I was a typical 13-year-old American girl. The character I was forced into had little or nothing in common with myself -- or with other youth of my generation, for that matter. I could never believe that my contemporaries were my fans. They may have been impressed with my 'success.' But my fans were the parents, many of whom could not cope with their own youngsters. They sort of adopted me as their ‘perfect’ daughter.”

She added, "I was never happy making pictures. I’ve gained weight. I do my own shopping, bring up my two children and sing an hour every day."

[molly bloom]

Filmi Filmi :

Rashid Karapiet, who has died aged 84, was an actor, singer, playwright, broadcaster and teacher. He was not a star but a jobbing professional, one of the unsung heroes of the theatrical profession, a good companion with, as Tom Stoppard described it, a "vivid" personality. Rashid was also a much-loved and loyal friend.

The second of five children of Edward and Marie-Therese Carrapiett, he was born Reginald Carrapiett in India, and went to school at St Columba's, Delhi, and then St Joseph's and the Agricultural College in Allahabad. He travelled to Britain in the 1950s to train at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, then took a teacher-training course at the Central School of Speech and Drama, London, and adopted Rashid Karapiet as his professional name. An accomplished linguist, he taught for many years in Germany and the Netherlands.

In 1960, Rashid appeared in Santha Rama Rau's dramatisation of A Passage to India (one of the first times brown-skinned actors were seen in leading roles in the West End of London). Later roles were in Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink (1995), Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams (2002) and Ayub Khan Din's Last Dance at Dum Dum (2006). With the New Sussex Opera, he was in Peter Grimes (1981), directed by Nicholas Hytner.

He appeared in David Lean's film of A Passage to India (1984), Ronald Neame's Foreign Body (1986), Jamil Dehlavi's Jinnah (1998) and Dustin Hoffman's Quartet (2012). On television, Rashid's work ranged from The Jewel in the Crown (1984) to the groundbreaking soap opera about Asian families in Birmingham, Family Pride (1991-92), and a 2012 episode of Doctor Who.

His voice could be heard on All India Radio and in BBC radio drama. Rashid's plays were performed at the Sussex Arts Club. He had a strong social conscience, and his last public performance, in October, was reading poems by Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu in aid of a charity to help victims of the Bhopal disaster.

He is survived by his younger brother, Edward.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2013/may/01/rashid-karapiet-obituary

[molly bloom]

The Children of the Hydra have won, alas :

Sheila Whitaker

The Guardian, Tuesday 7 May 2013 20.06 BST


In 1933, the 13-year-old Ray Harryhausen saw King Kong at the cinema and was hooked – not only by Kong, who was clearly not just a man in a gorilla suit, but also by the dinosaurs. He came out of the theatre "stunned and haunted. They looked absolutely lifelike … I wanted to know how it was done." It was done by using stop-motion animation: jointed models filmed one frame at a time to simulate movement. Harryhausen, who has died aged 92, was to become the prime exponent of the technique and its combination with live action. He created the special effects for fantasy films such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958); Jason and the Argonauts (1963), with its famous army of skeletons; and Clash of the Titans (1981).

He was born in Los Angeles to Frederick and Martha Harryhausen, Americans of German ancestry. As a young boy he had an interest in prehistoric animals and created clay models. He began to experiment with a borrowed camera, working around the fact that it did not have a stop-frame mechanism, and he showed his experiments to Willis O'Brien, who had done the visual effects for King Kong. O'Brien's verdict – that Harryhausen's models did not have any character and that he should study anatomy – was a turning point in Harryhausen's approach to his craft.

He attended Los Angeles City College and continued his experiments with a new stop-frame 16mm camera. When, in 1940, George Pal, the puppeteer film-maker, fled to Hollywood from Europe, Harryhausen showed him his work and was subsequently hired to work on Pal's Puppetoon series for Paramount alongside O'Brien. Its unjointed wooden figures did not really suit either Harryhausen or O'Brien.

Harryhausen made room to begin his dream project: Evolution of the World, a history of the planet. Surviving footage and sketches show a debt to Gustave Dor̩ and to King Kong, but the time it would take to complete, combined with the release of Fantasia (1940) Рin which the Rite of Spring sequence covered much of the same ground Рstopped the project. In 1942 Harryhausen enlisted in the army, was assigned to the Signal Corps and got himself drafted into Frank Capra's unit to work on propaganda films. He also contributed to the Army-Navy Screen Magazine as an assistant photographer.

Unemployed after demobilisation in 1946, he began a series of animated two-minute fairy tales using out of date 16mm Kodak stock that he had found. Tied together with a Mother Goose prologue and epilogue, the resulting short film was successfully sold to schools and libraries.

O'Brien, who was working on Mighty Joe Young (1949), then called on Harryhausen to be his assistant. The film did not do well commercially, but O'Brien won an Oscar for the special effects. Harryhausen returned to his fairy stories, using the pseudonym Jerome Wray for his photography, and then began work on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), inspired by Ray Bradbury's short story The Fog Horn. He devised a dynamic split-screen technique which enabled him to eradicate the then expensive system of inserting miniatures or glass paintings to combine stop-motion with live action. This process was eventually named Dynamation for the marketing campaign for The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and subsequent films.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had an original budget of $65,000, which spiralled to $210,000. Warner Bros struck 500 prints in "glorious sepia tone" and, on some copies, tinted the underwater scenes green. The marketing led to the film supposedly taking more than $5m worldwide.

Harryhausen made a couple more fairytales and some TV commercials, and then met the producer Charles H Schneer and began work on It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), the start of their lengthy collaboration. In the film a giant octopus rises from the sea to destroy the San Francisco Golden Gate bridge, though because of the expense Harryhausen reduced the number of the octopus's tentacles to six. Permission to photograph the bridge was refused in case it undermined public confidence in the structure, so stock footage was used.

On The Animal World (1956), Harryhausen worked for the last time with O'Brien before returning to work with Schneer on Earth Vs the Flying Saucers (1956). There later followed further forays into space – First Men in the Moon (1964), from the novel by HG Wells, was the only time in which Harryhausen worked in wide screen and used humans wearing suits (children in insect outfits) to avoid the endless animation.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad was Harryhausen's first foray into colour. It involved front and rear projection, and Sinbad's swordfight with a skeleton was considered too frightening for children by the British censor.

During the pre-production of The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1959), Harry hausen and Schneer moved to the UK, where travelling matte facilities (the technique used to combine scenes separately photographed) provided by Rank were superior to those in Hollywood.

Jason and the Argonauts had a stunning variety of creatures – Talos, the man of bronze, the Harpies and the army of skeletons among them – populating the hero's mythical quest. The Valley of Gwangi (1969) – an abandoned project which O'Brien had originally worked on for RKO – was somewhat unjustly underrated. The sequence of cowboys attempting to rope a dinosaur took five months to film.

Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans were generally accepted, including by Harryhausen himself, to be his most successful pictures, but his career is littered with many other memorable creations – among them, the space monster Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957).

Sadly, however, Harryhausen's wonderful worlds of fantasy were rarely equalled by strong scripts or actors. He was "heartsick over some of my pictures and I could kick myself when I think of how I didn't insist on more from the director or the studio". It was only on his last film, Clash of the Titans, that his creative imagination was finally matched by the castlist, which included Laurence Olivier, as a sardonic Zeus, Maggie Smith and Claire Bloom. In 1992 he received the Gordon E Sawyer Academy Award for technical achievement. As with all film-makers he had innumerable unrealised projects, in his case Baron Munchausen and Dante's Inferno, both inspired by Doré's illustrations.

A modest and charming man with a delightful sense of humour and ineffable courtesy, Harryhausen was always good company. He published his Film Fantasy Scrapbook in 1972, dedicating it to O'Brien. It also included a preface from Bradbury, whom he had met as a teenager at the Los Angeles Science Fiction League; he was best man at Bradbury's wedding.

Harryhausen laid the groundwork for many special effects techniques today and clearly influenced, among other films, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). His admirers include Steven Spielberg, whose special effects dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) are in stark contrast to Harryhausen working alone with a small process screen, a vintage Mitchell camera, a pair of sliding matte glasses, partial miniature sets and glass paintings.

He published his autobiography, An Animated Life, in 2004. In retirement he had also returned to sculpting, and lectured and toured the world with exhibitions, culminating with one at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and at the London Film Museum in 2010 to celebrate his 90th birthday, together with a special event at the National Film Theatre hosted by John Landis. In 2012 the documentary Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan was released.

Once, when asked if he had a favourite among his creatures, Harryhausen replied: "It would be Medusa. But don't tell the others."

He married Diana Livingstone in 1962. She survives him, along with a daughter, Vanessa.

• Raymond Frederick Harryhausen,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/may/07/ray-harryhausen-dies

Dem bones, dem dry bones:

He added to my childhood greatly... and I watched 'Jason & The Argonauts' just over a week or so ago. What a great talent he was.

[Tuberski]

Yep, another former member of one of my deadpool teams...

ACK!