The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Uncle Sparky]

Dr. Joyce Brothers is dead-
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/wor...207287091.html

Joyce Brothers, the pop psychologist who pioneered the television advice show in the 1950s and enjoyed a long and prolific career as a syndicated columnist, author, and television and film personality, has died. She was 85.

Brothers died Monday of respiratory failure in New York City, according to her longtime Los Angeles-based publicist, Sanford Brokaw.

Brothers first gained fame on a game show and went on to publish 15 books and make cameo appearances on popular shows including "Happy Days" and "The Simpsons." She visited Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show" nearly 100 times.

The way Brothers liked to tell it, her multimedia career came about "because we were hungry."

It was 1955. Her husband, Milton Brothers, was still in medical school and Brothers had just given up her teaching positions at Hunter College and Columbia University to be home with her newborn, firmly believing a child's development depended on it.

But the young family found itself struggling on her husband's residency income. So Brothers came up with the idea of entering a television quiz show as a contestant...

Born Joyce Diane Bauer in New York, Brothers earned her bachelor's degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia.

She wrote numerous advice books, including "Ten Days To A Successful Memory" (1964), "Positive Plus: The Practical Plan for Liking Yourself Better" (1995) and "Widowed" (1992), a guide to dealing with grief written after the death of her husband in 1990.

Brothers is survived by sister Elaine Goldsmith, daughter Lisa Brothers Arbisser, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

[molly bloom]

Geza Vermes scrolled down :

Geza Vermes, who has died aged 88, was one of the world's leading authorities on the origins of Christianity. In the early 1950s he completed the first-ever doctorate on the Dead Sea Scrolls – a risky topic to choose. In 1947, an Arab shepherd had chanced upon the first scrolls – texts written in ancient Hebrew and its sister language Aramaic – in a cave in the cliffs along the north-west shore of the Dead Sea. These were published rapidly, but reports kept circulating that more caves containing more manuscripts were being found. No scholarly consensus had yet emerged as to when the scrolls were written, or by whom. Wildly fluctuating dates were assigned to them, some even claiming that they had been copied in the middle ages.

From careful analysis of the published material, Vermes argued that the Jewish sect behind the scrolls originated at the time of the Maccabean crisis in the middle of the second century BCE. It was a brilliant hypothesis which gained many adherents and became academic orthodoxy. Vermes himself never saw grounds for modifying it throughout his career.

He was born in Makó, Hungary, to assimilated Jewish parents. His mother, Terézia, was a schoolteacher, and his father, Erno, a journalist and poet who associated with leading Hungarian intellectuals. When the family moved to Gyula, Vermes was enrolled in a Catholic primary school, and the family converted to Catholicism – "to give me a better chance", as he wrote in his autobiography. That may have been his father's intention, but his mother took the conversion seriously and became a devout Catholic. Vermes also seems to have taken it seriously enough to consider becoming a priest, when he graduated from the Catholic gymnasium. It was 1942 and life was becoming increasingly difficult for Hungarian Jews. The family's baptismal certificates proved useless to protect them. Vermes was desperate to further his education but saw little chance, as a Jew, of gaining a place at university. Entering the priesthood offered a way forward.

Turned down by the Jesuits, he was accepted by the diocese of Nagyvárad, and began life as a seminarian. The move was providential and saved his life, when, in March 1944, German forces occupied Hungary, setting up a puppet government, which, under Adolf Eichmann, rapidly began to implement against the Jews the Nazis' "final solution". Vermes's parents perished – exactly when, where and how he never discovered. With the aid of the church Vermes managed to remain hidden, and was liberated by the Red Army in Budapest in December 1944.

He resumed his studies for the priesthood, but as ordination approached, the thought of parish ministry appealed to him less and less. He was desperate to continue studying. An attempt to join the Dominicans was rebuffed, but he was admitted to the Order of the Fathers of Notre-Dame de Sion, and after a hair-raising journey across war-ravaged Europe he entered their house in Louvain, Belgium, in 1948. The nearby Catholic University of Louvain gave him the chance to become a licencié in theology and philosophy, and he completed his doctorate on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

His superiors then moved him to the Paris house of the Fathers of Sion. There he engaged with Paul Démann in a campaign, fought through the pages of the order's journal, Cahiers Sioniens, to challenge the anti-Judaism then rampant in the Catholic church. He broadened his education, meeting leading scholars such as André Dupont-Sommer and attending the classes of Georges Vajda. Renée Bloch introduced him to Jewish Bible commentary (midrash) – a field in which he later excelled.

On a visit to Britain, he was introduced by a mutual friend to Pamela, and, in late 1955, they fell in love. The situation was complicated and stressful. Pam was married with two young daughters. Vermes was a Catholic priest. It was resolved (reasonably amicably) by Pam separating from her husband, joining and subsequently marrying Vermes, and Vermes leaving the Fathers of Sion, and the Catholic priesthood.

Desperate for a job that would allow him to remain in Britain, he gladly accepted in 1957 a temporary lectureship in divinity in King's College (then a constituent college of the University of Durham, but now the University of Newcastle). There he cemented his international reputation with Scripture and Tradition (1961), a seminal study of early Jewish bible commentary, and with an English translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1962. The latter, steadily augmented as new scrolls were published, has not been out of print since.

When he was offered the position of reader in Jewish studies at Oxford in 1965 (promoted to full professor in 1989), some in the Jewish community decried the appointment, but buoyed by the support of Oxford luminaries such as David Daube, he dug himself into Oxford life. It was there I first met him, in 1967, when I joined a class he was teaching on the early Jewish law-code the Mishnah. Subsequently I did a doctorate with him on the Aramaic translations of the Bible.

His achievements at Oxford were immense. He took on the editorship of the Journal of Jewish Studies, turning it into one of the foremost in its field, and collaborated with Fergus Millar and Martin Goodman on a major revision of Emil Schürer's multi-volume classic The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ. In Vermes's own truly epoch-making Jesus the Jew (1973), one of the earliest of his many studies of Jesus and the origins of Christianity, he helped launch the new quest for the historical Jesus.

He continued work on the scrolls, but felt he was treading water because the publication of the numerous texts had virtually ground to a halt. Worse still, the small editorial team to whom they had been assigned were barring access to the manuscripts to others willing and able to do it for them. Vermes was at the forefront of the battle to rectify this situation, and it was in part due to his well-fought campaign that in 1991 the unpublished scrolls were finally "liberated" (as he put it), and access granted to any scholar who wanted it. Vermes was invited to become an editor, and, together with myself, published the Cave 4 fragments of the Dead Sea Sect's rule-book, the so-called Community Rule.

Vermes helped build up Jewish studies as an academic discipline, acting as first president both of the British Association for Jewish Studies and of the European Association for Jewish Studies. He attracted a group of talented students to work with him, many of whom became scholars of distinction. Recognition followed thick and fast, including a fellowship of the British Academy, honorary doctorates from Edinburgh, Durham, Sheffield and the Central European University, Budapest, and a vote of congratulation by the US House of Representatives "for inspiring and educating the world".

When Pam died in 1993, he was devastated. But in 1995 he married Margaret, a younger friend, whom he and Pam had known for years. With Margaret came her son Ian from her former marriage. Vermes found himself, to his surprise and delight, playing in his 70s the role of paterfamilias. He was rejuvenated. His intellect and memory remained undimmed to the end, and only weeks before he died he was discussing a new book he planned to write.

He is survived by Margaret and Ian, and by Pam's daughters Tina and Anna.



• Geza Vermes, historian, born 22 June 1924; died 8 May 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/14/geza-vermes

[molly bloom]

Silenced, Bryan Forbes :

The director, actor and writer Bryan Forbes, who has died aged 86, was one of the most creative forces in the British film industry of the 1960s, and the Hollywood films he directed included the original version of The Stepford Wives (1974). In later life he turned to the writing of books, both fiction and memoirs.

The turning point for him in cinema was the formation of the independent company Beaver Films with his friend Richard Attenborough in 1958. For the screenplay of their first production, The Angry Silence (1960), Forbes received an Oscar nomination and a Bafta award. Attenborough played a factory worker shunned and persecuted for not joining a strike. His colleagues are shown as being manipulated by skulking professional agitators and to some it seemed more like a political statement than a human story about the crushing of an individual.

Forbes then wrote and/or directed a string of notable British productions. He both wrote and took the part of one of the disaffected officers turning to crime in The League of Gentlemen (1960), and directed Whistle Down the Wind (1961), about children who mistake a convict on the run for Jesus. He took a novel by Lynne Reid Banks as the basis for The L-Shaped Room, which he also directed, and one by Kingsley Amis for Only Two Can Play (both 1962). He provided the screenplay for and directed Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), concerning the sinister abduction of a child, and The Whisperers (1967), in which Edith Evans was outstanding as a lonely old woman.

For Hollywood, Forbes scripted and directed King Rat (1965), a thoughtful study of British and American soldiers in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. It was a critical success and did well commercially – except in America.

Other Hollywood work arrived, but in 1969 Forbes accepted the offer of the impresario Bernard Delfont, then with EMI, to run Elstree Film Studios, which the company had taken over. This amounted virtually to an attempt to revive the ailing British film industry by instituting a traditional studio system with a whole slate of films in play, one of which happened to be from my political novel Candidate of Promise. However, some EMI executives raised difficulties over Forbes both heading the studio and directing his own film, The Raging Moon (1971), starring his wife Nanette Newman as a woman paralysed from the waist down who finds love.

One success of the venture was the production of The Railway Children (1970), but most of the announced films – including Candidate of Promise – were never made. Forbes, who had a three-year contract, left after two years, complaining privately that for the first time in his life he had made powerful enemies. Delfont's explanation to me was that Forbes lacked business and organisational skills: "My mistake was not to see that he was creative, but only creative."

For The Stepford Wives, William Goldman provided a screenplay from the surreal novel by Ira Levin, with Newman as the figure who became the computerised fantasy of boorish men in a small American town. The final Hollywood film that Forbes directed was The Naked Face (1984), with Roger Moore as a psychiatrist who gets caught up with the Chicago mafia. His last screenwriting credit came with Attenborough's Chaplin (1992).

Forbes was born John Clarke into a working-class home in West Ham, east London. His cultural horizons were extended when he was evacuated during the second world war to Cornwall and stayed in Porthleven with the Rev Canon Gotto, a cultivated cleric with an enormous library. Forbes said that Gotto and his wife "gave me a grounding I wouldn't have had otherwise".

Another mentor was the BBC radio producer Lionel Gamlin, who made him question master of the Junior Brains Trust, and advised adopting his stage name of Bryan Forbes. (The actor John Clark, who portrayed Just William on radio for the BBC, had already registered his name with Equity.) Though he got to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at 17, Forbes thought he was seen as too short and too "working-class" to play juvenile leads. He worked in repertory theatre, and had just taken over a part in Terence Rattigan's Flare Path when he was called up for second world war service, first in the Intelligence Corps and then the Combined Services Entertainment Unit.

A published collection of short stories, Truth Lies Sleeping (1951), pointed to his promise as a writer, but his initial course was to continue acting. Presciently, he wrote to a friend while at a repertory company: "One day I shall direct a film – preferably a film of one of my own scripts." He also took supporting film roles when possible. His first film appearances had included Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Small Back Room, and the comedy Dear Mr Prohack (both 1949), the latter adapted from an Arnold Bennett novel.

In the early 1950s, he went to Hollywood with the actor who was briefly his first wife, Constance Smith. But it was not long before he returned to Britain and undertook the rewriting of scripts as well as acting. In 1954 he had a part in Guy Hamilton's film of JB Priestley's play An Inspector Calls and the following year he starred in the same director's classic war film The Colditz Story, whose cast included John Mills and Lionel Jeffries. He met his second wife, Newman, while playing a man being run over by a train. They got married in 1955.

When he returned to writing books, it was with wry fiction about the tribulations suffered by the creative spirit in showbiz, The Distant Laughter (1972) and The Rewrite Man (1983). Ned's Girl (1977) was a biography of Evans, and That Despicable Race (1980) concerned actors as a breed. Later novels were mostly about spies, though sometimes embraced comedy, as with Partly Cloudy (1995), about domestic disasters brought about by the clash of the generations during one traumatic weekend.

Forbes was a founder of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain; with Attenborough he helped form Capital Radio, the London station launched in 1973; and he served as president of the National Youth Theatre. He wrote with incomparable irony about the bizarre workings of the film industry in his two volumes of autobiography, Notes for a Life (1974) and A Divided Life (1992). In 2004 he was appointed CBE.

He is survived by Newman and their daughters, Emma and Sarah.

• Bryan Forbes (John Theobald Clarke), actor, director and writer, born 22 July 1926; died 8 May 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/may/09/bryan-forbes-obituary

and a life in pictures at the pictures...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/gallery/2013/may/09/bryan-forbes-pictures

[molly bloom]

Avant garde composer Steve Martland :

Steve Martland, who has died of a heart attack aged 53, was one of the most vibrant, unconventional and dynamic forces in British music. He first came to prominence in 1983 with Babi Yar, for large orchestra in three groups, championed by the Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM) and premiered separately on the same day by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Cleobury, and the St Louis Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin. It was later recorded to critical acclaim.

After that, though, he avoided the orchestra, preferring, from American Invention and Re-Mix (1985) onwards, to compose for smaller ensembles, not usually exceeding 13 players, such as those scored for his Steve Martland Band (formed 1992), which toured internationally like a rock group; string quartets, as with his Patrol (1992) or arrangement of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor from the same year; and Wolf-Gang (1991), six operatic arias by Mozart reimagined for wind band.

He produced a series of successful choral works, including Street Songs (1997) for the King's Singers and percussionist Evelyn Glennie, carols and unaccompanied works such as Skywalk (1989), Three Carols (1997) and Tyger Tyger for Youth Music's "Sing Up" campaign.

Martland was born in Liverpool. He studied at Liverpool University (1978-81) and then attended the Royal Conservatory in the Hague on a Mendelssohn scholarship. There he was taught by Louis Andriessen, about whom he later wrote and directed a television film, A Temporary Arrangement With the Sea (1992). He also studied composition at the Berkshire Music Centre, in Massachusetts, with Gunther Schuller.

Martland pursued a highly individual, at times iconoclastic career as composer, performer and teacher. His pupils held him in the highest regard despite his demands of them, mainly due to his warm-heartedness and humour. He was involved in a large number of musical and composition projects in schools in the UK and elsewhere as well as the annual "Strike out" course for children.

Martland was an outspoken critic of academic dogma, believing diversity of musical influence was of far greater benefit, as his own compositions eloquently demonstrated. His style was rooted ultimately in an Andriessenesque combination of the minimalist style – advocated from the late 1960s in the works of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and John Adams – with more popular elements. The chugging, repeating syncopated ostinatos and rhythms played by instruments more common in jazz, pop and rock – saxophones, electric guitar and bass, drum kits with high-hat cymbals – gave his music a distinctive, edgy timbre, as in Beat the Retreat and Horses of Instruction (1995), but it was recognisable even when purely acoustic ensembles were deployed, as in Principia for winds and percussion (1989), later used as the theme music to the BBC's The Music Machine, or Crossing the Border for strings (1990).

The muscular cast of his music proved continually attractive to choreographers, as with Crossing the Border, produced as a ballet by the National Ballet in Amsterdam, and Dance Works (1993), written for the London Contemporary Dance Company, the music existing in two versions, for ensemble and two amplified pianos. Martland's music was also used in film and TV, including Albion (1988) – a multimedia work that gave voice to his left-of-centre political views, including an attack on Thatcherism and the poverty of its cultural legacy – and scores for the 1992 children's series Wilderness Edge, for Granada.

In the later 1990s, Martland's production slowed to a set of arrangements of Purcell. From 2000 to 2002 he concentrated on his role as artistic director of the SPNM, and resumed significant composition only in 2003 with a series of works for string ensembles: Plaint (2003), Tiger Dancing (2005, commissioned for the Henri Oguike Dance Company), Eternity's Sunrise, Reveille (both 2007) and the test piece for string quartet and percussion, Starry Night, for the Tromp International music festival in 2008. He served as composer-in-residence for the Etna music festival (2006-07) and in 2009 he returned to choral music composition with the cantata Darwin and Sea Songs (2011), written for the conductor and baritone Paul Hillier and premiered by Ars Nova in Denmark last year.

• Steve Martland, composer, born 10 October 1959; died 6 May 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tone/obituaries?page=2

[molly bloom]

Missoni goes missing permanently :

Ottavio Missoni, who has died aged 92, was the co-founder of the Italian fashion brand Missoni and the patriarch of a dynasty. In 1953, with his wife, Rosita, he set up the company that became known around the world for its brightly coloured geometric knits and zigzag patterns.

Ottavio, known as Tai, and Rosita began with a few knitting machines, making designs for other brands. The first Missoni collection appeared in 1958 and included two striped dresses that sold out in the Milan store La Rinascente. Adapting the Raschel knitting machine (which was usually used for shawls) in 1963, the Missonis created the distinctive zigzag lightweight knits which became their signature.

Their first fashion show was in 1966, and the brand began to grow in the 70s, with a colourful, bohemian aesthetic. Supporters included the influential fashion journalist Anna Piaggi and the American Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, who reportedly commented, on seeing the vibrant knits: "Who said that only colours exist? There are also tones."

Sixty years after its foundation, Missoni, based in Sumirago, in the countryside outside Milan, continues to be successful – it had a turnover of £59m last year, with 40 stores around the world and celebrity fans ranging from the Duchess of Cambridge to Jennifer Lopez. It has also expanded into homewear and hotels. This suited Ottavio perfectly. "I've never done what was fashionable," he said in 2011. "Going against the rules comes naturally to me."

The son of a sea captain, Vittorio, and his wife, Teresa De Vidovich, Countess of Capocesto and Ragosniza, Ottavio was born in Dubrovnik and grew up in Zadar – now part of Croatia but then Italian territory. He fought with the Italian army in the second world war at the Battle of El Alamein and was a prisoner of war in Egypt for four years.

He was also a talented athlete, who had competed in track events before the war. A member of the Italian national team at 16, he was a champion at the World Student Games in 1939. He continued exercising regularly into his 90s, and had a swimming pool and gym installed at his home. In an interview with Women's Wear Daily in 2011 he said: "Running was a natural gift. They called me 'son of Apollo'."

Sport turned out to be his unlikely entry into fashion. He represented Italy in the 400m hurdles at the 1948 Olympic Games in London, and made knitted tracksuits that were worn by members of the Italian team. Sixteen-year-old Rosita Jelmini was a student spectator at the event and the couple met at a lunch organised by the Italian team.

Married in 1953, they turned out to be a formidable fashion force. The Missoni brand combined Ottavio's burgeoning design skills with Rosita's background in textiles – her family had owned a shawl-making factory. They began with a small factory in Gallarate, Lombardy, where Rosita had grown up.

As with other Italian fashion houses, from Versace to Ferragamo, family has been central to the Missoni brand. Although Ottavio and Rosita continued to preside over its progress, in the 90s they handed over the day-to-day running of the business to their three children, Vittorio, Luca and Angela. Angela has designed the ready-to-wear collections since 1996. The couple continued to live near Sumirago and Ottavio devoted more time to painting and tapestry, also writing an autobiography, Una Vita sul Filo di Lana (A Life on the Woollen Thread, 2011).

Ottavio saw the evolution of the Missoni dynasty as a natural choice rather than something expected of the second generation. "I never pushed for them to pursue this career," he said, "but I'm happy because they chose the company themselves. And we all agree it's a family firm and it must remain as such."

Three generations are now involved in the business – Ottavio and Rosita's granddaughter, Margherita, designs accessories – and rather than using models, the photographer Juergen Teller has captured the family at home for ad campaigns since 2010.

Ottavio is survived by Rosita, their children and grandchildren. Their son Vittorio and his wife, Maurizia, have been missing since January, when their plane disappeared over the coast of Venezuela.

• Ottavio Missoni, fashion designer, born 11 February 1921; died 9 May 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2013/may/09/ottavio-missoni

[-Jrabbit]

Politician dies in jail...

Former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, who took power over Argentina in a 1976 coup and led a military junta that killed thousands of his fellow citizens in a dirty war to eliminate people considered to be subversives, died in his sleep Friday while serving life in prison for crimes against humanity. He was 87.

[Wezil]

A name Canadians will remember.

Elijah Harper, a former Manitoba MLA and MP who was a key player in defeating the Meech Lake Accord, has died at age 64.

Harper died early Friday in Ottawa as a result of cardiac failure due to diabetes complications, according to a statement released by his family.

Harper achieved national fame in 1990 by holding an eagle feather as he stood in the Manitoba legislature and refused to support the Meech Lake accord, effectively blocking the constitutional amendment package negotiated to gain Quebec's acceptance of the Constitution Act of 1982.

Harper protested that the proposed accord was negotiated in 1987 without the input of Canada's Aboriginal Peoples.

The accord required ratification by all 10 provincial legislatures and Parliament, and Harper's action prevented Manitoba from doing so before the deadline.

[molly bloom]

Hi de ho no... Paul Shane has died :

In one episode of the 1980s sitcom Hi-de-Hi!, the tragi-comic holiday camp crooner and funnyman Ted Bovis dreams up a sure-fire money-making scheme. His plan is to defray his alimony expenses by charging campers entry to a secret night-time screening of a blue movie so hot that the police want to confiscate it.

Bovis was always concocting scams – dodgy bingo, rigged raffles, embezzling the campers' amenity fund. Paul Shane, who has died aged 72 after a short illness, played the character in 58 episodes, from 1980 to 1988, and was ideally cast as the portly, sad-eyed clown with the loud check suit, teddy-boy quiff and gruff voice.

If Les Dawson and Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons had been poured into the same body and given a hopeless job at a holiday camp in a coastal town they forgot to close down, the result would have been Bovis. His scheming never did pay dividends – and so it was in episode two of series four, first broadcast in 1982. Spike, Ted's trainee comedian, substitutes a Laurel and Hardy comedy for the blue movie, much to the punters' disgust and Ted's financial embarrassment.

Jimmy Perry and David Croft, who also wrote Dad's Army and It Ain't Half Hot Mum, created Shane's character as one of those disappointed Britons – in the line of Harold Steptoe, Rupert Rigsby, and Basil and Sybil Fawlty – trapped in lives that fall well short of their dreams. Bovis thought that he, rather than the stuck-up ex-Cambridge archaeology professor Jeffrey Fairbrother, should have been entertainments manager. He believed he had more to offer the world than being a compere for plebby holidaymakers at Maplin's (the late-1950s holiday camp Perry and Croft devised) and should be entertaining golf-club nobs instead. In reality, he was reduced to mentoring Spike, thinking up ways to make money, and demonstrating potato peelers in supermarkets out of season.

Bovis never made the big time but the character was the making of Shane. When asked his biggest career achievement, he replied: "Hi-de-Hi! because I was a club act before that, and that led to everything else I did."

Born George Frederick Speight in Thrybergh, near Rotherham, South Yorkshire, he appeared on stage in his teens at venues such as the Grafton pub in Rotherham and, later, S****horpe's Cemetery Road social club, where he sang and developed a stand-up routine. From the age of 16, he was a miner at Silverwood colliery, but he was pensioned off after an accident in 1967 (surely apocryphally written up as involving him slipping on a bar of soap at the pithead baths).

His wife and childhood sweetheart, Dory, whom he married in 1961, suggested that he go into entertainment full-time after the accident. His first TV part came in the Alan Bennett drama A Day Out (1972). "I played a cyclist and all I had to say was, 'My bum's numb!'" Later he landed the role of Frank Roper in a 1979 episode of Coronation Street. He recalled: "I've got Corrie to thank for getting Hi-de-Hi! I was in Coronation Street doing a three-minute scene in Alf Roberts's shop. Jimmy Perry loves Coronation Street and he saw me."

In a 1982 interview, Shane recalled going to Croft's house to read for the part. "I was frightened to death, but now it's all happening for me. I'm doing a summer season on the South Pier at Blackpool this year. Who would ever have offered Paul Shane any work there before Hi-de-Hi!? Suddenly I'm a desirable commodity – the show has made household names of people who have been around for years."

In Hi-de-Hi!, which was based on Perry's experiences as a Butlins redcoat, he starred alongside Su Pollard (as the chalet maid Peggy) and Ruth Madoc (as chief yellowcoat Gladys). Most of the show's characters, like Bovis, battled failure – they were entertainers at the tail end of their careers.

Shane later starred in two sitcoms that reunited him with several of his Hi-de-Hi! co-stars. Perry and Croft cast him as the butler Alf Stokes in You Rang M'Lord? (1988-93), a parody of dramas like Upstairs, Downstairs. As Stokes, Shane once more played a swindler – this time striving to outfox Lord Meldrum and his family of dimwit toffs, as well as the below-stairs shirkers. In Oh Doctor Beeching! (1995-97), written by Croft and Richard Spendlove, he played a station manger, Jack Skinner, on a branch line threatened with closure.

Shane would never repeat the success of Hi-de-Hi! and he recalled: "After Dr Beeching ended I was in Oliver! on stage [at the Palladium] in London for 10 months playing Mr Bumble. But then not a lot happened until I got a small part in the daytime show Doctors." He appeared in Emmerdale, Common As Muck, Holby City and A Touch of Frost on TV and reckoned to have starred in around 40 pantos. His career nadir came in 1996 when he sang You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' on the BBC's Pebble Mill at One show – a performance included in a Channel 4 poll of the funniest TV moments.

Dory died in 2001. Shane, who underwent heart surgery in 2009, is survived by three daughters and six grandchildren.

• Paul Shane (George Frederick Speight), actor and comedian, born 19 June 1940; died 16 May 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/may/17/paul-shane

[molly bloom]

Joe Farman, scientist :

Joe Farman, who has died aged 82, was the leader of a small group of scientists who made one of the most important discoveries in recent history. In 1985, they published a landmark paper on the ozone layer, the protective skin that filters the sun's ultraviolet rays and without which the rays can cause cancers and eye damage. Their research showed that the ozone layer was being rapidly depleted over the Antarctic.

Just two years later, world governments signed the Montreal protocol, a treaty phasing out the use of CFCs, the chemicals used in aerosols and other applications that were reacting with the ozone. This swift action bore witness to the scale of the threat, and the protocol still stands as the most successful environmental treaty ever. Disaster was averted, and the dangerous chemicals were replaced by – somewhat – safer alternatives. Full repair of the ozone layer will still take decades – the gaps in the atmosphere should close by 2080, at current rates – but without the work of Farman the effects could have been catastrophic.

The story of the ozone layer is one of the most important lessons in modern science. Millions of tonnes of dangerous chemical compounds had been poured into the air from industrial activities over decades. Unknown to the people below, these chemicals were causing drastic changes to the atmosphere that were imperilling life on earth in ways barely understood. For years the damage went unnoticed.

Although work by the chemists Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and others in the 1970s had shown that CFCs could react with ozone, there was no empirical evidence that such destruction was actually happening. Satellites from the US space agency Nasa had found nothing. It appeared, in the early 1980s, that fears for the ozone layer were unfounded.

When Farman ran his first readings from a primitive Dobson spectrometer, wrapped in a quilt in the Antarctic in the early 1980s, he thought the instrument must be wrong. The readings suggested a drastic drop in the levels of ozone above the south pole. He got a new machine, but it gave the same results.

Convinced, after nearly five years of careful research, he, Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin published their findings in the peer-review journal Nature on 16 May 1985. The results, showing a 40% drop in ozone, were explosive. It transpired that Nasa had failed to find the drastic drop because, although its satellites and instruments had detected the absence, its software was set to ignore such unusual readings.

In the teeth of strong opposition from the chemicals industries – which protested that the cost of replacing CFCs was too much to bear – the Montreal protocol forced a massive change. Ironically, one of the key groups of replacement chemicals was that of hydrofluorocarbons, later found to be greenhouse gases thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet.

Crucially, Farman had the support of Margaret Thatcher, who was a former chemist and who championed his work and the Montreal protocol. Her support started before his key discoveries: Farman worked for the British Antarctic Survey, which had been threatened with savage reductions and possible closure under the Tories' cuts, and Thatcher saved the research establishment, ringfencing its budget, though not only for scientific reasons; the strategic value of a research outpost in the Antarctic was not lost on the victor of the Falklands war.

Farman was born in Norwich, the son of a builder and a primary school teacher, and with a sister eight years his senior. As a boy he spent his leisure time cycling the length and breadth of Norfolk, and as a member of the Scouts. A pupil of Norwich school, he won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences. After taking his degree, Farman joined De Havilland, then a major aircraft manufacturer.

In 1956, he saw an advertisement for people to practise physics in the Antarctic. It appealed to his sense of adventure – he answered the ad and got the job. There followed many years of research near the south pole, in what was at first called the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey and was later renamed the British Antarctic Survey.

In 1959 he met Paula Bowyer, an Oxford history graduate and teacher, and they married in 1971. They moved to Cambridge, to the British Antarctic Survey's laboratory headquarters, in 1976. He was elected a fellow of Corpus Christi College in 1989.

Farman continued to conduct research in Antarctica in later years, though he disparaged the comparative luxury that modern scientists enjoy. Once, in 1990, having set out on foot to retrieve some instruments, he was surprised to see a helicopter from another research centre land near him and offer him a lift. His reply is unrecorded.

Crutzen, Molina and F Sherwood Rowland were awarded the Nobel prize in 1995 for their work on CFCs. Farman and the team that found the data proving their hypothesis, and the danger to the planet, were not similarly honoured. But Farman won the Polar medal, the Society of Chemical Industry environment medal, the Chree medal and prize, and membership of the United Nations Global 500 roll of honour. He was appointed OBE in 1988 and CBE in 2000.

Always an active man, and a keen hockey and rugby player in his youth, Farman was to be seen every morning, until the day before he suffered a stroke in February, cycling to Cambridge University's chemistry department, which he joined after he retired from the civil service (to which the British Antarctic Survey belongs) at the age of 60. When not there, he was likely to be on his allotment, where he grew vegetables and experimented with methods to create compost.

He is survived by Paula.

• Joseph Charles Farman, geophysicist, born 7 August 1930; died 11 May 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/may/16/joe-farman

[SlowwHand]

Ray Manzarek -- who co-founded "The Doors" with Jim Morrison in 1965 and played keyboard -- has died, this according to the band's official Facebook page.

Manzarek was 74.

According to the website, Manzarek passed away today at the RoMed Clinic in Rosenheim, Germany after a lengthy battle with bile duct cancer.

At the time of his death, Ray was surrounded by his wife Dorothy and his brothers Rick and James.

RIP, Ray.

[-Jrabbit]

Jazz drummer Ed Shaughnessy, 84, best known as drummer in the classic Johnny Carson-era Tonight Show Orchestra, has passed away.
One of the greats. May he rest in peace.

[-Jrabbit]

Back in the day, Shaughnessy and the great Buddy Rich staged a famous series of "drum duels" on The Tonight Show... Both were absolute monster players.

[Wezil]

Tim Curry isn't ready to say "Hello" to oblivion quite yet...

British stage and screen actor Tim Curry is recovering at his home in Los Angeles after suffering a major stroke on Thursday Night, according to the Daily Mail. The 67-year-old star of 1975's "Rocky Horror Picture Show" is said to be "doing great" following the collapse. "He absolutely can speak and is recovering at this time and in great humor," his longtime agent, Marcia Hurwitz, told the paper.

[molly bloom]

The Baron gives up his title :

Steve Forrest, who has died aged 87, was a product of the Hollywood studio system, then at its tail end in the 1950s. Although MGM had the handsome, rugged 6ft 3in actor under contract for five years, from 1952 to 1957, they gave him few chances to shine. It was only when he left the studio that Forrest got bigger and better parts in feature films – one of his best performances was as the white brother of Elvis Presley, who plays the son of a Native American mother and a Texas rancher father, in Don Siegel's excellent western Flaming Star (1960) – and he was able to start a long and busy career on television.

In fact, it was on the small screen that Forrest would build his fame, notably in S.W.A.T. (1975-76), a cop series set in Los Angeles, the acronym referring to the police department's special weapons and tactics team. It ran for 37 episodes, with Forrest as a stern, level-headed Lieutenant Dan "Hondo" Harrelson, who would cry out "Let's roll" as he climbed into a van to go on another mission to catch villains.

Forrest was born in Huntsville, Texas, one of 13 children of a Baptist minister. An older brother, 15 years his senior, was the more famous Dana Andrews, who was to become a leading man in films during the 1940s and 50s. It was through this older brother that Forrest got his first taste of the movie business when, aged 18, he had a bit part as a young sailor in Crash Dive (1943), which starred Andrews and Tyrone Power.

After serving as a sergeant in the army during the second world war, Forrest moved to Los Angeles to study at UCLA. He graduated in 1950 with a bachelor's degree in theatre arts and became a stagehand at La Jolla Playhouse, gradually getting roles. He resumed his postwar movie career with a small role in another of Andrews's pictures, Sealed Cargo (1951).

But the following year, Forrest was able to distance himself from Andrews when he landed the MGM contract. At first he only had small parts, such as playing the actor in Lana Turner's screen test in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). He was glimpsed as a soldier in Battle Circus (1953), starring Humphrey Bogart and June Allyson, and played an army recruit under tough training sergeant Richard Widmark in Take the High Ground! (1953).

His first real parts came when he was loaned out to Warner Bros for two pictures. In So Big (1953), based on a sprawling novel by Edna Ferber, Forrest plays long-suffering Jane Wyman's selfish son, for which he won a Golden Globe for most promising male newcomer. He was hardly able to fulfil his promise in the role of a scientist suspected of being a serial killer in Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954), a feeble adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe.

Back at MGM, Forrest was given more substantial roles than previously. In Prisoner of War (1954), a simplistic "Red Scare" movie, Forrest was one of a group of brave American PoWs, including Ronald Reagan, being subjected to torture and brainwashing in a North Korean camp. When a brutal Soviet officer asks Forrest where his family lives, he replies: "In Hollywood with my brothers Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy and my sisters Esther Williams and Janey Powell."

Much better was Rogue Cop (1954), in which a poker-faced Forrest plays a policeman who is honest, unlike his detective brother played by Robert Taylor in the title role. Forrest was finally given rare top billing as a young man studying for the priesthood in Bedevilled (1955), a quasi-religious thriller, and as the writer hero in Mexico in The Living Idol (1957), a risible synthesis of exotic romance and mysticism. According to the New York Times, "a pretty young man named Steve Forrest plays the reporter chap. He is purely ornamental until he goes into a bare-handed battle with a jaguar."

Freed from his MGM contract, Forrest portrayed a New York reporter falling for a rural Doris Day in It Happened to Jane (1959), and in Heller in Pink Tights (1960) he played a gunfighter who wins blonde dancer Sophia Loren in a poker game, but loses her to Anthony Quinn. The latter role gave the often stolid Forrest an opportunity to show more ebullience.

In the meantime, he had established a parallel career on television, appearing notably in westerns such as Bonanza, Death Valley Days, The Virginian and Rawhide. In 1965, he and his family moved to London, where he starred in 30 episodes of the ATV series The Baron. Forrest was rugged and charming in the title role, the nickname given to John Mannering, a Texas-born, London-based antique dealer who is really a secret agent.

On the big screen, Forrest would have a key role as the lawyer boyfriend of Joan Crawford (Faye Dunaway) in Mommie Dearest (1981), a rather trashy melodrama in which he looked plainly uncomfortable, nor was he in his element as a heavy in the unfunny spoof Spies Like Us (1985).

He then returned to television, notably with 15 episodes of Dallas in 1986, playing Wes Parmalee, an impostor pretending to be Jock Ewing, and in several episodes of Murder She Wrote.

He is survived by his wife, Christine, and sons, Michael, Forrest and Stephen.

• Steve Forrest (William Forrest Andrews), actor, born 29 September 1925; died 18 May 2013

[Wezil]

Henry Morgentaler, the Toronto doctor who provoked both anger and praise while fighting to allow Canadian women unfettered access to abortions, has died at the age of 90.

Morgentaler died of an apparent heart attack at his home in Toronto, his family said. A private funeral is planned.

His death comes just a few months after pro-choice advocates marked the 25th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision that he helped to put into motion that struck down Canada’s abortion laws as a violation of women's rights.

Morgentaler was born in Poland and survived the Dachau concentration camp in his childhood before moving to Canada and becoming a physician. He opened a family practice in Montreal in 1955 but closed it in 1968 to open his first abortion clinic.

At the time, abortions were allowed only on limited terms in some hospitals, and only after women had gone before hospital committees for approval.

Morgentaler's Montreal clinic was repeatedly raided after it opened in 1973 and charges were eventually laid against the doctor.

In 1975, he was sentenced to 18 months in jail for performing abortions illegally, but served only 10 months.

When the Parti Quebecois came into power in Quebec in 1976, the government decided not to prosecute Morgentaler and other physicians providing abortions in the province. As Morgentaler opened more clinics across Canada, they were met with protests and legal challenges until early 1988, when the Supreme Court struck down abortion laws as unconstitutional.

Morgentaler had played a key role in the historic decision. But abortion opponents continued to attack the doctor and his abortion clinics.

At the opening of a Toronto clinic in 1983, a man lunged at Morgentaler with garden shears. In 1992, the same clinic was firebombed.

Morgentaler was not harmed in those incidents, but he started to wear a bullet-proof vest after several shootings targeting abortion providers in Canada and the United States.

Morgentaler’s clinics were also challenged in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but by 1995, both provinces were forced to allow private abortion clinics.

In 2008, Morgentaler was named to the Order of Canada-- a decision that sparked protests across the country and provoked some other members to return their orders.

Then-Governor General Michaelle Jean said at the time that Morgentaler had been selected for "his commitment to increased health care options for women, his determined efforts to influence Canadian public policy and his leadership in humanist and civil liberties organizations."

Morgentaler proudly accepted the honour, saying that Canada was “one of the few places in the world where freedom of speech and choice prevail in a truly democratic fashion.

"I'm proud to have been given this opportunity coming from a war-torn Europe to realize my potential and my dream -- that is to create a better and more humane society,” he said.

Even in death, Morgentaler remains a polarizing figure.

Joyce Arthur, executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, called him a "Canadian hero" who saved the lives of countless women.

But a spokesperson for the Campaign Life Coalition told The Canadian Press that Morgentaler’s death marks what she called "an end to the killing in Canada."

http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/controversial-abortion-crusader-dr-henry-morgentaler-dies-at-90-1.1302143#ixzz2Uiecj6EH