2014 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool - Now under New Management

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

I can't believe I was the only one who picked Ariel Sharon. Does that mean I got the First Blood bonus?

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Ah, no. I see Run Run Shaw went first.

[Tuberski]

Great that it's done, But, the lists are ****ing ponderous.

ACK!

[-Jrabbit]

Um HC didn't do anything on this

Oopsie. Senior moment, I guess.

And get off my lawn!

[Uncle Sparky]

I think, once you list celebrities, you will notice that 'Fats' Domino and Lemmy Kilmister are not unique picks...

[self biased]

[regexcellent]

self biased loses 100 points for sass

[Aeson]

Team names are definitely doable. There's even a spot reserved for them in the database. (And adding them to the display is of course easy. Just a few seconds of typing. I'm sure it could be finished by October.)

Any suggestions about how to format/present the lists would be great.

[self biased]

John Henson: DEAD.

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20787683,00.html

[self biased]

is it supposed to look like this?

[Aeson]

It's been designed on light themes for now. I'll look into making it look better on dark themes ...

[self biased]

dammit, aeson, i was looking for something else to blame reg for.

[molly bloom]

Director of a film which has never left my top 10 and a great Dane, Gabriel Axel has left the table :

In April 1988, a week before his 70th birthday, the film director Gabriel Axel, who has died aged 95, walked up on stage at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles to receive the best foreign language film Oscar for Babette's Feast (1987), the first Danish movie to achieve that honour. In a mixture of Danish and French, the slim, grey-bearded, bespectacled Axel quoted a line from the character of the General in the film: "Because of this evening, I have learned, my dear, that in this beautiful world of ours, all things are possible."

It was the pinnacle of Axel's long career and marked the beginning of a resurgence of Danish cinema. (Another Danish film, Bille August's Pelle the Conqueror, won the foreign language Oscar the following year.) Despite several fine films, there was previously little in Axel's oeuvre to predict the perfection of Babette's Feast.

This superb adaptation of the 1950 short story written by Karen Blixen (under her nom de plume of Isak Dinesen), which first appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal magazine, remains true to its literary source with no loss to cinematic quality. In this entrancing bittersweet mix of comedy and poignancy, Axel shifts from past to present and between voiceover narrative and dialogue with considerable skill.

With the help of Henning Kristiansen's atmospheric cinematography, in a range of muted primary colours, Axel captures the bleak Jutland peninsula of the 1870s, where live two unmarried sisters (Bodil Kjer, Birgitte Federspiel), daughters of the former pastor, and founder of an austere religious sect, who devote themselves to keeping alive his memory and his teachings in the tiny remote community. Subtle changes occur when Babette (Stéphane Audran), a French woman who has fled the wartorn Paris of 1871, turns up on their doorstep seeking refuge and becomes their cook-housekeeper.

Fourteen years elapse before it is revealed that Babette is a cordon bleu cook – a fact that leads to her cooking the sisters and their guests a sumptuous once-in-a-lifetime meal, a cathartic event for her, her employers and the community, leaving the diners questioning their lifelong denial of mortal pleasures. Audran, no stranger to meals in the films of her former husband, Claude Chabrol, stands out among a flawless cast, which includes Ingmar Bergman's favourites Bibi Andersson and Jarl Kulle.

Axel was born in Ã…rhus, Denmark, but spent most of his childhood in France, where he learned to speak fluent French, a gift that would enable him to make a number of films for French television from 1977 to 1986. This period may have been an element of what attracted him to Babette's Feast – the contrast between French hedonism and Danish stoicism.

He first trained as an actor at the Royal Danish theatre in Copenhagen, before joining Louis Jouvet's theatre ensemble in Paris. He started acting and directing on Danish TV from 1951, venturing into feature films only in 1957. Most of his films were family comedies, strictly for the Scandinavian market, most often starring Dirch Passer, considered one of Denmark's best comedians. At the same time, Axel directed the softest of soft porn movies such as The Girls Are Willing (1958), Crazy Paradise (1962), and Paradise and Back (1964).

Three Girls in Paris (1963) is a light comedy that tells of the troubles of three Danish girls who have left their luggage and most of their money at a Paris hotel, but forget the name of the hotel or where it is located.

The first film by Axel to get an international showing was Hagbard and Signe (aka The Red Mantle, 1967), a saga set in 1100 and shot entirely on location in Iceland. The critic Roger Ebert wrote: "There is a battle scene halfway through that is among the most perfect and brutal I have ever seen; it ranks with the battle in Orson Welles' Falstaff."

For all the bloodshed, the Icelandic landscape is beautifully photographed, and the Swedish-speaking cast is splendid, led by Gunnar Björnstrand and Eva Dahlbeck (veteran Bergman stars) and the young lovers Gitte Hænning and Oleg Vidov in the title roles, who have a tender nude love scene.

Axel then made the documentary Danish Blue (1968), which combines interviews, reconstructions and fiction, in an attempt to mock and undermine Denmark's censorship laws at the time. The film may be said to have been successful in its objective as, a year after its release, Denmark legalised pornography.

After the high of Babette's Feast, Axel's career could go in only one direction. Christian (1989), an adventure film about a young man travelling through Europe to heal a broken heart, made no impact.

Prince of Jutland (1994), shot in English in Denmark, was a risible effort to retell the story of Amled, drawing on the 12th-century work that inspired Shakespeare's Hamlet. The starry cast – Helen Mirren, Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Byrne and Christian Bale – struggled against bad dialogue and cinematography. There was some excuse for its failure: Axel fell ill during the editing process and was unable to complete post-production work. In the US, Miramax acquired the rights, re-cut the film and eventually released it on video in 1998 with the title Royal Deceit.

After a six-year absence, Axel returned to film-making for his final feature, Leïla (2001), a love story about a teenage Moroccan girl and a young Danish tourist, depicted, for some reason, with only voiceover and no dialogue.

There was some consolation in his latter years, when he received a lifetime achievement award at the Copenhagen international film festival in 2003.

He is survived by his daughter, Karin.

• Gabriel Axel, film director, born 18 April 1918; died 9 February 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/10/gabriel-axel

'Babette's Feast' :

[molly bloom]

The groove runs out on Anna Gordy Gaye, songwriter and unwilling muse for 'Here, My Dear' :

When Anna Gordy divorced Marvin Gaye in 1975, the settlement was unusual: she would receive the proceeds from his next album – $305,000 from the advance and $295,000 in future royalties – in lieu of maintenance and child support. Gaye claimed to be broke, but since he was enjoying a period of success with such hits as What's Going On and Let's Get It On, Gordy, who has died aged 92, could have looked forward to substantial compensation for the end of their turbulent 12-year marriage. What she could not have expected was that her ex-husband would turn the album into a post-mortem examination of their relationship.

Gaye had begun the project with the aim of rushing through it to meet his obligation while paying scant attention to quality. As he became more involved in the music, however, he created a rambling but ultimately compelling catalogue of his own feelings towards a woman 17 years his senior, ranging from the tenderly reminiscent to the bitterly dismissive. Stretching over two 12-inch long-playing discs, the album was unambiguously titled Here, My Dear.

The critics didn't like it much, and neither did Anna: she briefly considered another lawsuit, this time for invasion of privacy, mentioning a sum of $5m. She would have been equally unhappy about its relative commercial failure, but time has shown it to be the last of Gaye's masterpieces for Motown, the company founded by Anna's younger brother Berry.

It was not the only imprint she left on the soul music of the 1960s and 70s. The words of some of Gaye's early hits, notably Pride and Joy, were inspired by the beautiful and sophisticated woman he had met when he was still a session drummer. She became his occasional songwriting partner, collaborating on two songs – Flyin' High and God is Love – for the classic album What's Going On, and on The Bells and Baby I'm For Real, two of the finest soul ballads of the early 1970s, both recorded by the Originals, a Motown vocal group, under Gaye's supervision.

The third of the eight children born to Berry "Pops" Gordy II and his wife Bertha, Anna was not a year old when the family moved from Oconee, Georgia, her birthplace, to Detroit, a city on whose worldwide reputation the ambitious and entrepreneurial family would have much influence. At 18, after graduating from high school, she moved to California, soon joined by Berry Jr, one of her younger brothers, who was then pursuing a career as a boxer.

Both eventually returned to Detroit, where Berry Jr would found the Motown group of labels, with Gaye among its first artists. Anna, however, had also made an early move into the music business, first as a local distributor for New York's Gone and Chicago's Chess labels and then, in 1958, as the co-founder with her sister Gwen of the Anna label, whose biggest hit was the much-covered Money (That's What I Want) by Barrett Strong.

Gaye had been hired as the label's house drummer, and when it folded he signed a new contract with Berry Jr as a singer. Marvin and Anna – "the glamour girl of the family", in Berry Jr's words – were married in 1963, the year Pride and Joy topped the R&B charts; he was 24, she 41. Three years later they adopted a son who had been born to Anna's teenaged niece, although the public was told that the boy, Marvin III, had been naturally conceived by the Gayes.

In 1972 they moved to a house in Hollywood, where Marvin built a studio. But the marriage, although founded on a mutual infatuation that never quite burnt itself out, was scarred by both parties' infidelities and by violent outbursts, sometimes in public. In 1973 Marvin left Anna for the 16-year-old Janis Hunter, who became his second wife and the mother of two more children.

They were amicably reconciled in the years immediately before Gaye was shot dead by his father in 1984. She helped the three children to scatter his ashes in the Pacific, and in 1987 she and Marvin III accepted his posthumous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Here, My Dear, with its mixture of remembered joy and present anguish, will remain as an extraordinary memorial.

She is survived by Marvin III and two grandsons, Marvin IV and Dylan Gaye.


• Anna Ruby Gordy Gaye, songwriter, born 28 January 1922; died 31 January 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/feb/06/anna-gordy-gaye

Marvin Gaye performs 'Flyin' High (In The Friendly Sky)'

[-Jrabbit]

Longtime baseball bigfoot Jim Fregosi has died at age 71.

Jim Fregosi, a baseball lifer who made six All-Star teams as a player and managed the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies to the National League pennant, but who is probably best known — by New Yorkers, at least — as the player the Mets received from the California Angels in exchange for the future Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan in one of baseball’s more infamous trades, died Friday in Miami. He was 71.

Major League Baseball’s website said Fregosi had suffered multiple strokes on a Caribbean cruise with other baseball alumni six days earlier.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/sports/jim-fregosi-all-star-71-dies-was-traded-for-nolan-ryan.html?_r=0