2014 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool - Now under New Management

[Tuberski]

Devo Guitarist Bob Casale, 61:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/devo-guitarist-bob-casale-dead-at-61-20140218

ACK!

[Aeson]

Updated the styling on the tables to be more dark-theme-friendly.

[Uncle Sparky]

The real Maria von Trapp, the last surviving member and second-eldest daughter of the musical family whose escape from Nazi-occupied Austria was the basis for The Sound of Music, has died. She was 99.

[molly bloom]

Christopher Malcolm, British Canadian actor, finds out if there is a god does she really look like Marianne Faithfull.... ?

Christopher Malcolm, who has died of cancer aged 67, played Brad Majors in the original production of The Rocky Horror Show in 1973 and, as his life as an actor started to overlap with an interest in producing the shows themselves, he became, after co-producing the West End revival of Rocky Horror in 1990, the executive in charge of all subsequent worldwide productions.

His death came just a few days after his latest project, the revival of Oh What a Lovely War at Stratford East, opened to enthusiastic notices, probably sealing a West End transfer. The way the show turned out was a good example of the kind of creative partnerships he enjoyed and nurtured throughout his career. For more than 30 years, he worked as an "insider" producing link between such London fringe venues as the Half Moon, Stratford East and the King's Head, and the commercial sector, collaborating with talents of his own generation such as Richard O'Brien (the Rocky Horror author), Simon Callow, Steven Berkoff and Sir Howard Panter, now joint chief executive of Britain's largest theatre conglomerate, the Ambassador Theatre Group.

He maintained his acting career, best known on television as Saffy's gay father Justin in Absolutely Fabulous, and he made several notable films, from Bruce Beresford's The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), with Barry Humphries, to Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) and Jim Henson's Labyrinth (1986). His last television appearance was as Daphne du Maurier's publisher, Nelson Doubleday, in Daphne (2007) on BBC2.


But his life was really the theatre. He was born in Aberdeen, the second of four children of a farmer (and sometime insurance salesman), William Malcolm, and his wife, Paddy English, an amateur theatre enthusiast. When his parents took the young family to Canada on an emigration £10 scheme, the irrepressible Paddy became renowned as the woman who brought pantomime to British Columbia. They settled on a farm in Vernon, BC, and the children were raised, effectively, as farmhands. Chris dropped out of his course at the University of British Columbia to help build the new Powerhouse theatre in Vernon and started acting. After an unhappy love affair, at the age of 19 he simply got on a boat and came back to Britain to live with his grandmother in Elsenham, Essex.

She used to play bridge with the mother of the Royal Shakespeare Company's associate director John Barton, so an audition was arranged, and Chris played small parts in Stratford-upon-Avon and London between 1966 and 1968, becoming firm friends with the actor siblings Frances and Andy de la Tour, who semi-adopted him.

He acted at Charles Marowitz's Open Space in 1968-69 and began a significant association with the Royal Court in 1970, when he appeared in Peter Gill's production of Michael Weller's Cancer alongside Martin Shaw, Al Mancini and David Healy. In Cancer, later re-titled Moonchildren, a group of college seniors shared an apartment in the mid-1960s, very much talking 'bout their generation. Malcolm's background meant he was easy in American, Scottish or Canadian inflections, and this, with his robust physical presence and open demeanour, made him ideal casting for the "Americana" of Jim Sharman's productions of Sam Shepard plays, and Rocky Horror, in the Court's Theatre Upstairs.

His first show as a producer was the aptly named , alas, Disaster, by O'Brien, at the ICA in 1978, in which a group of B-movie stereotypes were stranded in the Bermuda Triangle. But he immediately co-produced a smoky Half Moon revival of Pal Joey starring Siân Phillips and Denis Lawson in the West End, gathering momentum with Nell Dunn's glorious Steaming (from Stratford East) in 1981, which played for two years at the Comedy (now the Harold Pinter) and toured worldwide, and Julie Walters and Brian Cox in Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, also at the Comedy, in 1986, a sexy romance played out by a short-order cook and a waitress.

Malcolm was literally thrown off his stride and seriously injured when knocked off his Norton motorbike at Vauxhall, south London, in 1987. He spent five years with a fractured femur in his right leg, but a chance meeting with a Swiss surgeon led to a successful series of operations and a fused knee, though he always walked with a pronounced limp thereafter.

Undaunted, he carried on with notable presentations of the work of Berkoff, a series which had begun with Tim Roth in Metamorphosis at the Mermaid in 1986, and brought Decadence and Greek to the Wyndham's in 1988-89. The Rocky Horror producing saga began for him at the Piccadilly theatre in 1990, in a production that eventually succeeded on Broadway in 2000. He took care of the National's transfer of Alan Bennett's Single Spies to the Queen's theatre in 1988 (Callow directed one of the plays and appeared in both) and co-produced Dusty Hughes's A Slip of the Tongue at the Shaftesbury in 1992, in which John Malkovich gave a blistering performance as a Czech dissident writer embroiled in a political sex comedy.

Other credits included Callow's revival of The Pajama Game at the Birmingham Rep and the Victoria Palace in London in 1999, with designs by the American painter Frank Stella and choreography by David Bintley; popular money-spinners – Footloose the Musical (2003) and Flashdance the Musical (2008); Berkoff's tremendous Messiah at the Old Vic in 2003; and the UK tour of Our House, using music by Madness, in 2008.

One sister predeceased him. He is survived by two brothers and another sister, and by his wife, the actor Judy Lloyd, with whom he lived for 40 years. The couple had three children, one of them the playwright and screenwriter Morgan Lloyd Malcolm; they, and one grandson, survive him, too.

• Christopher Malcolm, actor and producer, born 19 August 1946; died 15 February 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/feb/17/christopher-malcolm

[molly bloom]

Ken Jones, actor/writer :

Though the actor Ken Jones, who has died aged 83 of cancer, was a television sitcom star in his own right, he is destined to be remembered in the supporting cast of the hugely popular Porridge, alongside Ronnie Barker's wily lag Norman Fletcher. He played "Horrible" Ives, who earned his nickname – from both inmates and warders – through displaying the loathsome qualities of being a creep and a snitch. Jailed for fraud, Bernard Ives was also a perpetual cheat, notable for starting his sentences with the words: "'Ere, listen."

Jones readily identified the key to Porridge's success. "If you get a closed environment like a prison and an anarchist like Fletcher trying to break the system, there's wonderful conflict," he told Richard Webber, co-author of Porridge: The Inside Story.

However, after appearing in half of the first series, in 1974, Jones left after just one episode of the following year's run. As the star of another sitcom, The Squirrels (pilot 1974, series 1975-77), set in the accounts department of a television rental company, he managed to juggle both recording schedules for a while. He worked on Porridge in the mornings and The Squirrels in the afternoons, but this eventually became unfeasible, although Jones did later appear in the 1979 film version of Porridge.

He was also in the 2003 spoof documentary Life Beyond the Box: Norman Stanley Fletcher. Whereas most of the former inmates were seen to have gone straight, Ives was shown collecting money for a fake charity.

Jones was born in the Everton district of Liverpool and, on leaving school, went into the building trade before working as a signwriter. He also acted with the amateur Merseyside Community theatre, where he met the actor-writer Sheila Fay, then a teacher. The couple ran a theatre in Liverpool and married in 1954.

Deciding to turn professional, both trained at Rada and, on graduating in 1958, joined Joan Littlewood's celebrated Theatre Workshop in Stratford, east London. Jones later reflected that Littlewood's ban on make-up forced actors to get inside characters without using artificial aids.

He made his TV debut in a 1962 episode of Probation Officer. Television producers and directors were then quick to cast him in one-off character roles in dozens of dramas and comedies. He appeared in seven Wednesday Play productions during the 1960s, including five directed by Ken Loach.

One of them was a surreal musical fantasy by the poet Christopher Logue and the composer Stanley Myers, The End of Arthur's Marriage (1965). It featured Jones in the lead role of a man using his father-in-law's £400 life savings, given to him as the deposit on a house, to go on a spending spree with his young daughter.

Jones's first sitcom starring role came in The Last of the Baskets (1971-72), in which he played Clifford Basket, a factory worker inheriting a stately pile as the 13th Earl of Clogborough. During his run as the accountant Rex in The Squirrels, he and his wife also starred in The Wackers (1975) as a couple, Billy and Mary Clarkson, bringing up their divided Liverpool family – half Protestant, half Catholic, half Liverpool football club supporters, half Everton supporters.

These programmes made Jones a familiar face on television. More sitcom roles followed, as Detective Sergeant Arnold Dixon, one of the police officers pitted against a family of petty criminals, in The Nesbitts Are Coming (1980), as boxing trainer Dave Locket in Seconds Out (1981-82), as Archangel Derek in the celestial comedy Dead Ernest (1982), and as the local authority gardener Tom in Valentine Park (1987-88).

He also popped up as Beryl's Uncle Dermot in the second and third runs (1971-72) of The Liver Birds (Fay played Beryl's mother) and Uncle Bernard in the 1991 series of Watching. In the children's series Behind the Bike Sheds (1985) he played Whistle Willie.

On the West End stage, Jones acted in Donald Howarth's A Lily in Little India (1966), Willy Russell's Breezeblock Park (1977) and Raymond Briggs's When the Wind Blows (1983).

Jones and Fay wrote many plays together, including Gulpin (1977), about a girl not wanting to be a bridesmaid when Liverpool football club are playing at home. It was televised by the BBC, with Jones directing.

Fay died last year, and Jones is survived by his sister, Edith.

• Kenneth Jones, actor, born 20 February 1930; died 13 February 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/feb/16/ken-jones#start-of-comments

[molly bloom]

Stuart Hall writer, broadcaster and sociologist :

Stuart Hall was an utterly unique figure. Although he arrived at the age of 19 from Jamaica and spent the rest of his life here, he never felt at home in Britain. This juxtaposition was a crucial source of his strength and originality. Because of his colour and origin, he saw the country differently, not as a native but as an outsider. He observed this island through a different viewfinder and it enabled him to see things that those shaped and formatted by the culture could not. It took an outsider, a black person from a former colony, to understand what was happening to a post-imperial country seemingly locked in endless decline.

His impact was to be felt across many different fields. Perhaps best known is his pioneering work in cultural studies, but his influence was to be felt in many diverse fields. By the end of the 1970s, it was the connections that he started to make between culture and politics that was to redefine how we thought about politics.

This was how my own relationship with Stuart began in 1978. Soon after I became editor of Marxism Today, I commissioned an article from him on Thatcher. The result was one of the most important pieces of political writing of the past 40 years. Stuart, drawing on his cultural insights and the work of Antonio Gramsci, proceeded to rewrite the way in which we make sense of politics; and in the process, incidentally, he invented the term Thatcherism. For the next decade, it felt as if we lived in each other's pockets. The way in which Stuart wrote was fascinating. Some, like Eric Hobsbawm, the other Marxism Today great, produced a perfect text first time out. Stuart's first draft, in contrast, would arrive in an extremely incoherent and rambling form, as if trying to clear his throat. Over the next 10 days, one draft would follow another, in quick succession, like a game of ping-pong. His was a restless, inventive intellect, always pushing the envelope, at his best when working in some form of collaboration with others. His end result was always worth savouring, his articles hugely influential.

Tragically, Stuart's ill health slowly but remorselessly curtailed and undermined his ferocious energy. For the last 20 years or so, he was a semi-invalid. But his mind remained as alert and involved as ever. The response to his death has served to demonstrate how much his work has influenced so many people in so many different ways: cultural studies, race and ethnicity, politics, the arts, the media, academe. Little has been left untouched by his intellectual power and insight.

Stuart's extraordinary impact was not because he happened to be black and from Jamaica. It was because he was black and from Jamaica. It took an outsider, a black Jamaican, to help us understand and make sense of Britain's continuing decline. He was in so many ways well ahead of his time. It is difficult to think of anyone else that has offered such a powerful

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/feb/16/appreciation-stuart-hall-1932-2014-sociologist-cultural-theorist

Damn. One of those Caribbean authors....

[-Jrabbit]

RIP Harold Ramis, 69.

(CNN) -- Harold Ramis, the actor, writer and director whose films include "Stripes," "Ghostbusters," "Groundhog Day" and "Analyze This," has died. He was 69.

His death was caused by complications related to autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a condition Ramis battled for four years, according to United Talent Agency, which represented Ramis for many years.

Ramis died Monday morning in his Chicago-area home, the agency said.

For more than 40 years, Ramis was a leading figure in comedy. A veteran of the Second City troupe in his hometown of Chicago, he was a writer for "SCTV" and wrote or co-wrote the scripts for "National Lampoon's Animal House" (1978), "Caddyshack" (1980), "Stripes" (1981), "Ghostbusters" (1984), "Groundhog Day" (1993) and "Analyze This" (1999).

The films often featured members of his generation of comedy talents -- veterans of the National Lampoon's recordings, "Saturday Night Live" and "Second City TV" -- most notably Ramis' old comedy colleague and fellow Chicagoan Bill Murray.

His directing credits include "Caddyshack," "National Lampoon's Vacation" (1983), "Groundhog Day," "Analyze This" and -- in a change from his usual comedies -- the dark 2005 film "The Ice Harvest." He occasionally acted as well, most notably playing Murray's friend in "Stripes," Dr. Egon Spengler in "Ghostbusters" and a doctor in "As Good as It Gets" (1997).

"Ghostbusters" star Dan Aykroyd wrote on Facebook, "Deeply saddened to hear of the passing of my brilliant, gifted, funny friend, co-writer/performer and teacher Harold Ramis. May he now get the answers he was always seeking."

Steve Carell, who worked with Ramis on "The Office," tweeted, "Harold Ramis. Funny, gracious, kind hearted. A joy to have known you."

Ramis directed several episodes of that TV series.

Ramis' films were some of the most influential -- and highest-grossing -- comedies of recent decades. "Animal House" remains a model for knockabout laughs and gross-out moments. "Caddyshack" is eminently quotable. "Ghostbusters" was the second-biggest box office hit of 1984, just behind "Beverly Hills Cop."

But though the movies were full of silly moments, Ramis often tried to tap into larger themes. Perhaps most successful was "Groundhog Day" in which Bill Murray's cynical weatherman is forced to relive the same day over and over again until he finally comes to terms with his life. The film has been used as the subject of philosophical and religious discussions.

That intellectual bent didn't always go over well with studio bosses, Ramis observed.

In an interview with the Onion A.V. Club, he mentioned the studio for his 2009 film "Year One" was uncertain how to pitch it.

"When the studio said, 'Well, what is the movie about?' I said, 'The movie tracks the psycho-social development of civilization.' And they said, 'Uh, that's not going to be too good on a poster.' "

Ramis was also a mentor to several current comedy writers and directors, the Chicago Tribune noted in its obituary. Judd Apatow, a fan, cast him as Seth Rogen's father in "Knocked Up." Jake Kasdan put him in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" (which was co-produced and co-written by Apatow).

Ramis was usually a good-natured presence, playing understanding characters -- often doctors, of one sort or another. It was true to his personality, the late Second City founder Bernie Sahlins told the Chicago Tribune in 1999.

"He's the least changed by success of anyone I know in terms of sense of humor, of humility, sense of self," Sahlins told the paper. "He's the same Harold he was 30 years ago. He's had enormous success relatively, but none of it has gone to his head in any way."

Indeed, Ramis always seemed to find a way to laugh.

Asked by The New York Times about the existential questions raised by "Groundhog Day" -- and competing interpretations of the film's meaning -- he mentioned that he didn't practice any religion himself.

''Although I am wearing meditation beads on my wrist,'' he noted. ''But that's because I'm on a Buddhist diet. They're supposed to remind me not to eat, but actually just get in the way when I'm cutting my steak.''

Ramis is survived by his wife, Erica Mann Ramis, three children and two grandchildren.

[Hauldren Collider]

Ghostbusters
Groundhog Day

Bill mother ****ing Murray

[Tuberski]

Harold Ramis made Bill Murray.

He will be missed.

[Colon™]

Paco De Lucia.

[Uncle Sparky]

RIP

[Tuberski]

Not many know who he is on here, I'd guess, but comedian Tim Wilson died of a heart attack yesterday at 52:

http://www.today.com/entertainment/comedic-country-singer-tim-wilson-dies-52-2D12183366

ACK!

[molly bloom]

Malcolm Tierney stage, television and film actor :

Malcolm Tierney, who has died aged 75 of pulmonary fibrosis, was a reliable and versatile supporting actor for 50 years, familiar to television audiences as the cigar-smoking, bullying villain Tommy McArdle in Brookside, nasty Charlie Gimbert in Lovejoy and smoothie Geoffrey Ellsworth-Smythe in David Nobbs's A Bit of a Do, a Yorkshire small-town comedy chronicle starring David Jason and Gwen Taylor.

Always serious and quietly spoken offstage, with glinting blue eyes and a steady, cruel gaze that served him well as authority figures on screen, Tierney was a working-class Mancunian who became a core member of the Workers' Revolutionary party in the 1970s. He never wavered in his socialist beliefs, even when the WRP imploded ("That's all in my past now," he said), and always opposed restricted entry to the actors' union, Equity.

Offstage, he looked the part, wearing broad-brimmed hats and long coats and scarves, ideal casting when he took over as the bibulous actor-laddie Selsdon Mowbray in the National Theatre's delirious revival of Michael Frayn's Noises Off in 2000 on its transfer to the Comedy (now the Harold Pinter), via the Piccadilly. Earlier in the same year he played two sober authority figures in Margaret Edson's harrowing Wit at the Vaudeville, the first play to deal with ovarian cancer.

Also on stage, he played the jazz singer George Melly, the painter LS Lowry and Jim Robinson, one of the four men wrongly convicted of murdering the newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater in 1978; that solo performance in a 1999 play, Just Not Fair, was given on a double-bill with his friend Corin Redgrave's recital of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis.

And he achieved theatrical notoriety (with the rest of the cast) at the Royal Court in 1968 as Benjamin Disraeli in William Gaskill's production of Edward Bond's Early Morning, which featured Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale as lesbian lovers and a final act in heaven where everyone ate each other. This was the last major play to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain, and was performed under club conditions in Sloane Square.

Tierney's father, Ernest, was a boilermaker and trained draughtsman from Warrington who worked at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach (where Malcolm's grandmother ran a boarding house) on the shooting ranges and darts in the summer. His mother, Agnes, nee Kennedy, worked in the cotton mills.

He attended St Mary's Roman Catholic school in Failsworth, Oldham, and studied design at the Manchester School of Art. While working as a textile designer and printmaker he became involved in amateur dramatics at the Little theatre in Bolton, which had been set up by John Wardle (father of the drama critic Irving Wardle), whose wife, Norma, became something of a mentor to Tierney.

As a result, he came south on a scholarship to the Rose Bruford drama school in Sidcup, Kent, in 1958 and landed his first acting job in 1962 at Bernard Miles's Mermaid theatre, London, a rare revival of Sean O'Casey's Red Roses for Me. He then joined Sally Miles's repertory company at the Theatre Royal, Margate, playing in Great Expectations to an audience of one – who gave the cast an enthusiastic standing ovation (it was a cold night).

He spent six months at the Mayfair in the third takeover cast of Beyond the Fringe but counted his West End debut as appearing with Trevor Howard in Strindberg's The Father at the Piccadilly in 1964. He appeared at the Young Vic in 1971 with Vanessa Redgrave and Bob Hoskins in Robert Shaw's extraordinary play Cato Street, about the 1820 conspiracy to assassinate the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and his entire cabinet.

Three years later he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Aldwych in London to play Claudio in Keith Hack's production of Measure for Measure (with Francesca Annis and Michael Pennington) and Macduff in Trevor Nunn's Macbeth starring Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren.

Tierney had been acting on radio and television regularly since 1963 and moved successfully into supporting roles in numerous films, including George Lucas's Star Wars (1977), Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father (1993), as the public prosecutor, and Mel Gibson's Braveheart (1995) – he was the English magistrate responsible for executing William Wallace's wife.

Back on stage he played major roles in the regions, including, in 1999, Walter in Arthur Miller's The Price at the Bristol Old Vic and the philosopher George Moore in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers at the Birmingham Rep, though the eccentric, self-defeating logician was the sort of "comic personality" role for which his trademark phlegmatic dryness and imperturbability were not quite enough.

He was better suited to Agamemnon in Hecuba, Euripides' great tragedy translated for the RSC by Tony Harrison in 2005, in which he was reunited with Redgrave; Laurence Boswell's production played at the Albery (now the Noël Coward) before touring America. Tierney's shifty, tense warlord suggested that he knew what lay in wait for him once he arrived home.

Tierney's last stage appearance was in Anya Reiss's seriously updated version of Chekhov's The Seagull at the Southwark Playhouse in 2012, when the Guardian's Lyn Gardner wrote that his languid Sorin "could have been dozing in this sunlit garden on the edge of the lake for a century or more".

He met the Austrian artist and translator Andrea Schinko when acting at the English Speaking Theatre in Vienna, where she was working in the cloakroom. They married in 1979 and separated amicably 15 years ago.

He is survived by Andrea and their two daughters, Elsa, an artist and jewellery maker, and Anna, an actor, and by two siblings, John, also an actor, and Maureen.
Michael Coveney


Vanessa Redgrave writes: I first met Malcolm in 1971. We worked with the director Peter Gill, producer Michael White, and actor and playwright Robert Shaw on Bob's play Cato Street. Malcolm played the Tory government spy and agent provocateur who was recruited by the home secretary Viscount Sidmouth to create an armed conspiracy that would justify the hugely repressive Six Acts legislated in the wake of the Peterloo massacre in 1819.

On a summer eve of 2005, as I entered the Kennedy Center in Washington DC to play Hecuba, with Malcolm playing Agamemnon, I saw his face convulsed with grief: he said that my sister-in-law Kika had just called and told him of my brother Corin's massive cardiac arrest.

I saw Malcolm last at Corin's funeral in 2010. He was a loving man, and very loved; a brilliant actor. Only my brother or sister could make me laugh the way Malcolm did. He was a steadfast, hardworking trade unionist, and unafraid. On a profound level of civic conscience, Mal was the kind of citizen everyone needs everywhere. He was one of our rare visitors from Seamus Heaney's Republic of Conscience.

• Malcolm Tierney, actor, born 25 February 1938; died 19 February 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/feb/21/malcolm-tierney

[Sava]

Bill mother ****ing Murray

also

bill murray would think you are stupid

[ColdWizard]

Score my hit.