Friday, May 16-------Warren Cowan, 87, one of Hollywood's most influential press agents who represented a who's who of A-list stars during a seven-decade career, has died of heart failure and cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. 

Cowan began working as a publicist while still at student at UCLA. One of his first clients was actress Linda Darnell. In 1950, he became a partner with Henry Rogers in the firm Rogers & Cowan, which grew to become the largest public relations agency in Los Angeles. Its clients included such stars as Danny Kaye, Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Shirley MacLaine and Elton John.

Among his legendary achievements, he helped the then out-of-favor Joan Crawford win her sole Academy Award for her performance in MILDRED PIERCE (1945) and represented future President Ronald Reagan, who was all but washed up in Hollywood, become host of the television series "General Electric Theater", which made him a household name and cemented his future reputation as the "great communicator".

In 1988, Rogers & Cowan was sold to British conglomerate Shandwick, and six years later Cowan set up a new company, Warren Cowan & Associates. Even though many of the stars whose careers he guided had faded from the scene, he continued to introduce new personalities to Hollywood, including Italian actor Roberto Benigni, who surprised all the pundits when he won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL.

Cowan was a fixture of classic Hollywood and did not feel comfortable in today's "say-anything" press atmosphere, where the private lives of celebrities are open game for snoops and papparazzi. "The most important part of my work was to show loyalty", Cowan once said in an interview. "That quality is all but lost in today's Hollywood, and it is much the worst for it." Amen. Goodnight, Mr. Cowan.

Sandy Mandelberger, In Memoriam Editor

Friday, April 4-----Jules Dassin, an American director, screenwriter and actor who found success making movies in Europe after he was blacklisted in the United States because of his ties to the Communist Party, died Monday in Athens, where he had lived since the 1970s. He was 96. Mr. Dassin is most widely remembered for films he made after he fled Hollywood in the 1950s, including NEVER ON SUNDAY (1960) with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, whom he later married; TOPKAPI (1964), with Ms. Mercouri, Peter Ustinov and Maximilian Schell; and the 1954 French classic heist thriller RIFIFI.

Dassin was born on December 18, 1911, one of eight children of Samuel Dassin, an immigrant barber from Russia. Shortly after Jules was born, his father moved the family to Harlem and he attended high school in The Bronx. His working-class environment created a class consciousness that was common in the post World War I urban centers. He joined the Communist Party in 1930s, but left in 1939, when he became disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler.

In the mid-1930s, Dassin studied drama in Europe before returning to New York, where he made his debut as an actor in the Yiddish Theater. He also wrote radio scripts. He went to Hollywood shortly before World War II erupted in Europe and was hired as an apprentice to the directors Alfred Hitchcock and Garson Kanin. Soon he was directing films for MGM, including REUNION IN FRANCE  (1942), a Joan Crawford vehicle with John Wayne in which her character comes to believe that her fiancé is a Nazi collaborator.

In the late 1940s, Dassin became one of the prime forces behind “film noir”, a brutal expressionist style that relied on expressionistic camera angles and brutish anti-heros to capture the cynicism of the post war period. Among his best films of this period were BRUTE FORCE (1947), a prison drama starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn; THE NAKED CITY (1948), an influential New York City police yarn shot on location that won Academy Awards for cinematography and editing; THIEVES’ HIGHWAY (1949), about criminals who try to coerce truckers in California; and NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950), a film shot in London starring Richard Widmark (who died last week) as a shady but naïve wrestling promoter. The latter film is considered by many to be Dassin’s masterpiece.

The release of the film in 1950 was parallel to the brouhaha being created by the House Un-American Activities Committee, a Congressional committee looking into Communist influences in Hollywood and the new medium of television. While Dassin was no longer a member of the Communist Party, he was blacklisted along with other prominent directors and actors. Unable to find work in the studio system, Dassin left the United States for France in 1953 but remained largely unemployed for years. In need of money, he agreed to direct RIFIFI, a low-budget production about a jewelry heist. Dassin also acted in the movie, under the name Perlo Vita, playing an Italian safe expert. The film became an unexpected hit, winning Dassin the Best Director prize at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. During this period, he directed the films HE WHO MUST DIE (1957), whe (...)

Richard Widmark in KISS OF DEATH 

Thursday, March 27--------No one quite mastered the sneer as did actor Richard Widmark, who died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut at the age of 93. That sneer and a high-pitched giggling laugh is what shot him the stardom in 1947, when he played the psychopathic killer Tommy Udo in the gangster film KISS OF DEATH. Nothing in the movies before or since can compare with the scene in that film when Widmark tied up an old woman in a wheelchair with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoved her down a flight of stairs to her death. In that one scene, Widmark became the personification of evil and fear on screen. The role won him his sole Academy Award nomination in a career that spanned nearly six decades.

 Richard Widmark was born on December 26, 1914, in Sunrise, Minnesota and spent his childhood moving from one Midwestern town to another. Graduating in 1936 from Lake Forest College in Illinois, he spent two years as an instructor in the Lake Forest drama department, directing and acting in two dozen plays. Then he headed to New York City in 1938, where one of his classmates was producing 15-minute radio soap operas and cast Mr. Widmark in a variety of roles. At the beginning of World War II, Widmark tried to enlist in the army but was turned down three times because of a perforated eardrum. So he turned, in 1943, to Broadway. In his first stage role, he played an Army lieutenant in F. Hugh Herbert’s KISS AND TELL, directed by George Abbott. Appearing in the controversial play TRIO, he received glowing reviews as a college student who fights to free the girl he loves from the domination of an older woman.  

He made his screen debut in 1947 with KISS OF DEATH, which typecast him for the rest of the decade as a sadistic hood. His mobsters were drenched in evil. Even his heroes, including the doctor who fights bubonic plague in Elia Kazan’s PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950), the daredevil pilot flying into the eye of a storm in SLATTERY’S HURRICANE (1949) and the pickpocket who refuses to be a traitor in Samuel Fuller’s PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953) defined a new kind of hero….the anti-hero, personified by much younger actors such as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and James Dean.

Among the standout roles in the 65 movies he made over the next five decades were THE COBWEB (1955), in which he played the head of a psychiatric clinic; SAINT JOAN (1957),  as the Dauphin to Jean Seberg’s Joan of Arc; JUDGMENT AT NUREMBURG (1961), as an American army colonel prosecuting German war criminals; John Ford’s revisionist western CHEYENNE AUTUMN (1963) and the Cold War drama THE BEDFORD INCIDENT (1965).

Widmark found his seminal role as a loner detective in Don Siegel’s action-packed policier MADIGAN (1968). The film proved so popular that he later played the loner Madigan on an NBC television series during the 1972-73 season. His later roles often cast him as gray-haired auth (...)

Friday, March 21-----Paul Scofield, the golden-throated British actor of stage and screen, who won a Best Actor Oscar in 1966 for his portrayal of Sir Thomas More in A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, passed away on Wednesday. The seasoned actor, 86, who died at a hospital near his home in southern England, had been suffering from leukemia. 

Scofield had a lifelong attachment to the theatrical stage, where he began his career 60 years ago. He found his first successes in a variety of Shakespearean roles during and after World War II. His physical presence, resonant voice and total commitment drew comparisons to fellow thespian Laurence Olivier. While continuing his theater work, Scofield began appearing in a handful of films in the 1950s and early 1960s, most notably the John Frankenheimer thriller THE TRAIN (1962).

The following year, he debuted the role of Sir Thomas More in the original stage production of A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. The play, written by Robert Bolt, was the true story of More, the Chancellor of England, who refused to go along with King Henry VIII’s break from the Roman Catholic Church and was eventually executed for his principled stand. Scofield played the role on stage in London and New York before starring in the film adaptation, directed Oscar-winning filmmaker Fred Zinnemann. The film was the “prestige picture” of 1966, winning an impressive six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Fred Zinnemann) and Best Actor for Scofield.

Despite the Oscar win, the actor was only used sparingly in film, keeping his focus on work in live theater. His forays into cinema were primarily in stage-to-film adaptations, including Peter Brook's version of KING LEAR and Edward Albee's A DELICATE BALANCE, opposite Katharine Hepburn. He found the second role of a lifetime in the stage production of AMADEUS, where he played the tortured and envious composer Antonio Salieri, a rival to the impetuous young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Inexplicably, he lost the role in the acclaimed 1984 film adaptation to relatively unknown F. Murray Abraham, who would win an Oscar for Best Actor in the part.

Later roles included supporting parts in Kenneth Branagh’s version of HENRY V and the Franco Zeffirelli production of HAMLET. He returned to prominence, and a second Oscar nomination, for his supporting role in QUIZ SHOW, director Robert Redford’s look at the television quiz show scandals of the 1950s.  His last major film role was in 1996's THE CRUCIBLE, which won him his third BAFTA Award. The golden voice is now silenced, but his filmography is a living testament to his sublime talent. 

Sandy Mandelberger, In Memoriam Editor

Director Anthony Minghella 

Thursday, March 20----Anthony Minghella, the British filmmaker who won an Academy Award for his direction of THE ENGLISH PATIENT in 1997, died Tuesday morning in London at the age of 54. The cause was a brain hemmorage, brought on by complications from surgery he underwent a week ago to treat tonsil cancer. 

Anthony Minghella was born on January 6, 1954, and grew up on the Isle of Wight, where his parents, immigrants from Italy, ran an ice cream factory. Minghella began his career writing scripts for British television programs, before his play MADE IN BANGKOK found mainstream success in London's West End in 1986. This led to his movie-directing debut of TRULY MADLY DEEPLY starring Alan Rickman, which had originally been made as a made-for-television production, but was released theatrically in 1990. Minghella went on to adapt a number of novels for a series of well-reviewed films.

In addition to winning the directing Oscar in 1997 for THE ENGLISH PATIENT— which garnered a total of nine Oscars, including Best Picture—Minghella also received an adapted-screenplay nomination. In 2000 his screenplay for THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY was nominated as well. That same year Minghella joined fellow director Sydney Pollack to form Mirage, an independent production company that concluded a three-year first-look deal with the Weinstein Company earlier this month. They collaborated as producers on a number of films and worked on each other’s films as well, including COLD MOUNTAIN (2003). 

In the past few years, aside from continuing to develop projects for the big and small screens, Minghella found creative expression in directing grand operatic productions. His acclaimed staging of MADAME BUTTERFLY in 2006 at the English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera was a major success d’estime. He was recently commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to direct and write the libretto for a new work by the composer Osvaldo Golijov that was scheduled for the 2011-12 season. 

Minghella and the Weinstein Company recently concluded a deal with HBO and the BBC to air the adaptation of the literary franchise THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY, an adaptation of an Alexander McCall Smith novel, which was filmed in Botswana, as the pilot of a series that was to have a 13-episode run on both networks. Minghella was also attached to write and direct the adaptation of Liz Jensen's France-based psychological thriller THE NINTH LIFE OF LOUIS DRAX, in development at the Weinstein Company, and had served as a producer on the recently wrapped THE READER, set for a fall release. 

Minghella had written but not yet cast or shot his segment of NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU, the follow-up to the city-centric set of romantic vignettes PARIS JE T’AIME. Shooting was set to start next month in Manhattan. Plans are (...)

Suzanne Pleshette and Troy Donahue 

Friday, January 25--------While the Sundance Film Festival and the on-going drama surrounding the tragic death of Heath Ledger dominated this week's news, I wanted to note the passing of a personal fave. Suzanne Pleshette, the husky-voiced 1960s actress who later redefined the television sitcom wife in the 1970s on THE BOB NEWHART SHOW, died last Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 70 and had been battling lung cancer for the past few years.

A native New Yorker, Pleshette started her acting career on the stage, moving effortlessly between off Broadway and the lights of Broadway in the 1950s. She made her feature film debut in the 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy THE GEISHA BOY. But it was her second film, ROME ADVENTURE (1962), in which she starred opposite blond hearthrob Troy Donahue, that got her noticed in Hollywood. Her lowkey performances in a number of films that centered on budding female sexuality (either playing the virgin or the knowing good time girl) often transcended the rather thankless roles she had in bad (and badly dated) potboilers. Troy Donahue was a regular co-star, and she even married him, in a relationship that lasted less than a year.

For me, and legions of fans, her most striking movie role was a supporting one. She played a small-town teacher consumed with bitterness and jealousy, who eventually is pecked to death by an angry flock of birds in the Alfred Hitchcock classic THE BIRDS (1963). Her soulful performance brought a deep sense of regret and longing to the minor character, who dies mid-way through the film. While the film ostensibly starred icy blonde Tippi Hedren and stalwart hero Rod Taylor, it is Pleshette who anchors the story, and who walked away with the best reviews of her career. Her movie work was a mix of melodramas and mainstream comedies. In 1964, she played a flight attendant who survives an airplance crash in FATE IS THE HUNTER. In 1965's A RAGE TO LIVE, she played a sexually compulsive heiress. The 1969 comedy IF IT'S TUESDAY, THIS MUST BE BELGIUM, about a busload of unhappy American tourists, was one of her biggest hits. Her film career began to decline in the first half of the 1970s, while she became a staple actress in several Walt Disney films of the period, including THE SHAGGY D.A. (1976).

Her penchant for comedy was best exploited on television, where she was cast as the wise-cracking wife in THE BOB NEWHART SHOW, which ran for six seasons from 1972 to 1978, and was a consistent ratings winner. The show, which presented the wife as an equal to her husband in every way, was groundbreaking and obviously influenced by the growing feminist mood in the country. For the role, she was nominated for the Emmy Award several times, although she never scored a win. The series has been in syndication for the past 30 years and the chemistry between Newhart and Pleshette continues to offer charming comedy nuggets to a new generation of fans. Recently, she won prai (...)

Heath Ledger and Jake Gylenhaal in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN 

Tuesday, January 22--------In an ironic twist of fate, on the same day that the Academy Award nominations were announced, 2005 Oscar nominee Heath Ledger was found dead in his New York loft in the Soho district of New York City. An official autopsy will be done tomorrow, but news has leaked out that the naked body of the actor was found next to a cache of sleeping pills and other drugs. The Australian actor, only 28 years old, was nominated for Best Actor for his performance in the Ang Lee film BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, playing a tormented cowboy who misses out on love because of his fear of homosexuality and his emotional hangups.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN was a significant film for Ledger. Not only did it bring him Oscar , Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, he won the New York Film Critics Circle prize as Best Actor for the role. Aside from the critical praise and Hollywood clout, it is also where met his future girlfriend, actress Michelle Williams (who played his wife in the film and also received an Oscar nomination for her performance). The two had lived in New York City together and had a daughter, Matilda, until they split up last year.

The actor grew up in Perth, Australia and began his acting career doing local theater. At the age of 16, he moved to Sydney, quickly landing TV movie roles and guest spots on Australian television. After several independent films and a starring role in the short-lived Fox TV series ROAR, Ledger moved to Los Angeles and costarred in 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU. He began to gain critical attention for his supporting roles as Billy Bob Thornton's suicidal son in MONSTER'S BALL (the film that won Halle Berry her Oscar) and opposite Mel Gibson in the historical epic THE PATRIOT.

He won leading roles in A KNIGHT'S TALE and CASANOVA, and recently completed filming his most commercial role yet, that of The Joker, the arch-nemesis of Batman in THE DARK NIGHT, a sequent to 2005's BATMAN BEGINS (the film opens in Summer 2008). The prolific actor can currently be seen playing one of seven incarnations of folk rock legend Bob Dylan in the Todd Haynes' film I'M NOT THERE (for which Cate Blanchett received an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress earlier today). For Heath Ledger, his best work may have been ahead of him, but both he and we will never know where his talents could have led him.

Sandy Mandelberger, In Memoriam Editor

 Brad Renfro

Wednesday, January 16----------Actor Brad Renfro, whose career began promisingly with a childhood role in THE CLIENT (1994), but rapidly faded as he struggled with drugs and alcohol, was found dead Tuesday in his home in Los Angeles. He was 25. The cause of death was not immediately determined, but an autopsy could be conducted as early as today. The actor, who served time in prison in May of 2006 for pleading no contest to driving while intoxicated, has also been convicted of possession of heroin.

While the actor was known to be in drug rehab, he continued to drift into alcholism and drug abuse. A native of Knoxville, Tennesee, Renfro's film career began when he was 12, acting opposite Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones in  THE CLIENT. That performance won him the Young Artist Award in 1994. In 1998, his role in the Bryan Singer-directed APT PUPIL opposite Sir Ian McKellan won him the Best Actor prize at the Tokyo Film Festival. Other film credits include SLEEPERS, GHOST WORLD, DEUCES WILD, and THE JACKET. His final on-screen appearance is in the dramatic thriller THE INFORMERS, an adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, where he stars opposite Wynona Ryder, Mickey Rourke, Billy Bob Thorton and Kim Basinger. The film was produced and is being sold by Senator International, a German company, and does not yet have American distribution. Sleep in peace, young prince.

Sandy Mandelberger, In Memoriam Editor

Tuesday, December 4------------As the film world enters into the breathless marathon also known as the "awards season", it is worth noting that one of the key architects of the national film critics prizes has passed away. Hollis Alpert, a film critic and author who co-founded the National Society of Film Critics more than 40 years ago has died at the age of 91. The Society was started in 1966 after Alpert -- then a critic for the weekly Saturday Review magazine -- and other reviewers were denied membership in the New York Film Critics Circle, which then favored critics who worked for newspapers.

Though the first members were all New Yorkers, they called their group a national society because they wrote for publications with national reach. Today, the group's 60 members also include critics for major daily and weekly newspapers. Each December, the Society chooses films as awards winners that impact those films' and performers' chances of winning the Oscar.

Alpert was widely seen as a serious, knowledgeable, dedicated film critic. The Saturday Review was a considerable presence on the scene during his tenure, when movie reviews mattered and were taken seriously as an intellectual matter. The prolific author and critic also wrote many fiction and nonfiction books. He captured the controversial history of "The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess" (1990). In another book, "Broadway!: 125 Years of Musical Theatre" (1991), he presented a concise history of the American musical. Among the biographies he wrote were "The Barrymores" (1964), about the illustrious acting family , and "Fellini: A Life" (1986) about the Italian film director. He also co-wrote autobiographies with actors Richard Burton and Charlton Heston. He even fictionalized Hollywood filmmaking in the mid-1960s novel "For Immediate Release" and the 1973 novel "Smash".

Born Sept. 24, 1916, in Herkimer, N.Y., Alpert was the son of Abram and Myra Alpert. His father left the family before Alpert reached adolescence, and his mother ran a girdle and bra factory. During World War II, he served in the Army as a combat historian, writing lengthy accounts of war battles while sending home short stories that were published in magazines. After the war, Alpert returned to New York City and worked as assistant fiction editor at the New Yorker from 1950 to 1956. He continued to write freelance book and film reviews for other publications, which led to his being named movie critic for the Saturday Review. In 1975, Alpert left his reviewing post and served as editor of American Film Magazine for six years. A true New Yorker and respected man of letters in the world of film criticism has left his mark on the industry he loved.

Sandy Mandelberger, In Memoriam Director

 MARTY

Tuesday, November 20----------Delbert Mann, who directed the acclaimed live TV production of  MARTY, the classic tale of a lonely Bronx butcher by pioneering television scenarist Paddy Chayefsky, and then won an Academy Award for the 1955 movie version, passed away last week at the age of 87. MARTY, which was the first and most successful of the television-to-film-adaptations, was one of the most celebrated films of the 1950s, winning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor (Ernest Borgnine), Best Screenplay (Paddy Chayefsky) and Mann's win as Best Director. The film won most Film Critics Awards in 1955 and also several BAFTA honors, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Considered one of the premier directors of the golden age of live television, Mann directed MARTY, starring newcomer Rod Steiger in the title role, for NBC in 1953. When Chayefsky turned his story into a screenplay, he insisted that Mann direct it. The film was his auspicious feature debut, winning for the first-time director the Oscar and many other honors. The film, produced by Burt Lancaster, was also the first teleplay to be transferred to the movies. Mann, who also won a best director award from the Directors Guild of America for MARTY went on to direct 15 more feature films, including THE BACHELOR PARTY, THE DARK AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS, an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS, the Oscar winner SEPERATE TABLES and the Doris Day comedies LOVER COME BACK (with Rock Hudson) and THAT TOUCH OF MINK (with Cary Grant).

Between 1949 and 1955, Mann directed more than 100 live television dramas. But even after turning to films, he returned to television and directed productions for such television anthology series as  "Playhouse 90," and "Ford Star Jubilee". He also directed more than two dozen films for television from the late 1960s to the early '90s, including "Heidi," "David Copperfield," "Jane Eyre," "Kidnapped" and "The Member of the Wedding." Mann, who served as president of the Directors Guild of America from 1967 to 1971, received the DGA's Honorary Life Member Award in 2002.

Sandy Mandelberger, In Memoriam Editor

Deborah Kerr and Peter Viertel 

Friday, November 9-------Less than three weeks after his second wife, actress Deborah Kerr, passed away, news comes from Marbella, Spain that her second husband, screenwriter and novelist Peter Viertel, has died at the age of 86. Peter Viertel was a noted author and screenwriter who plumbed his relationships with the aristocracy of Hollywood, including Greta Garbo, John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn and others, to produce provocative works of fiction and memoir.

The author of at least 9 novels and 11 feature films, Mr. Viertel deftly used his movie work to fuel and enhance his literary output, and vice versa. He tis probably best known for his screenplay of the 1951 film THE AFRICAN QUEEN, directed by old-friend John Huston, and starring Humphrey Bogart (in his only Oscar winning performance) and Katharine Hepburn. The film was a major hit and usually ranks high among the public's favorite Hollywood films of all time. Viertel's often bitter experience as an on-the-set script doctor for the film served as the basis for a novel about the making of a very similar African film, WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART, published in 1953. That novel was turned into a film in 1990, both directed by and starring Clint Eastwood (with Viertel assisting on the screenplay adaptation). Another life-long friend was the novelist Ernest Hemingway. The scenarist adapted two of Hemingway's novels for the big screen, including THE SUN ALSO RISES (1957) and THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1958).

Peter Viertel was born in Dresden, Germany, on Nov. 16, 1920. Six years later, he moved to Hollywood, where his father, Berthold Viertel, worked as a film director and screenwriter. Peter Viertel’s mother, the former Salka Steuermann, was screenwriter for many of the films of Greta Garbo. His mother was infamous for hosting a Sunday afternoon salon in Santa Monica, where the young Viertel met such luminaries as Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann. After attending Dartmouth College and the UCLA, Viertel wrote his first novel in 1940. He then served as a Marine in the Pacific during World War II, and sold a screenplay of his experiences to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that became the wartime film BATAAN (1944), starring Robert Taylor.

Viertel travelled in Hollywood's elite circles. In his 1992 memoir DANGEROUS FRIENDS, he tells stories about his encounters with such luminaries as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Orson Welles, and many others. Known as a womanizer, he was married three times, lastly to actress Deborah Kerr. He has been in retirement for the past decade in their home in southern Spain. The f (...)

 Cary Grant + Deborah Kerr in AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER

Thursday, October 18-------Today we have lost one of the best, and a personal favorite of mine. Actress Deborah Kerr, who shared one of cinema's most intimate moments on a sea swept Hawaii beach in the clutches of Burt Lancaster in the Oscar winning film FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953) has died at the age of 86. She spent her last years in rural England, suffering from Parkinson's  Disease. Although nominated six times for the Academy Award for taboo-shattering roles in the 1950s and 1960s, Kerr never won the coveted Award. However, she was honored by the Academy in 1994 for her "impeccable grace and beauty, perfect, discipline and elegance."

She was never a showy performer. In fact, in a 1950s of blond bombshells, her patrician beauty and soft-spoken manner gave her an allure of class, even when she played the unhappy, slightly sluttish wife of an Army officer in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. She excelled at playing forceful, though sometimes frustrated women in such role as a sexually repressed nun in BLACK NARCISSUS (1948), a lonely faculty wife in TEA AND SYMPATHY (1956, reprising a role she originated on the Broadway stage) and as the proper English schoolteacher in the film version of the Rodgers and  Hammerstein classic THE KING AND I (1956). Her intense acting style and touch-of-class polish pushed the limits of Hollywood's treatment of women and sexuality on the screen during the censor-bound 1950s.

Deborah Kerr was born in 1921, the only daughter of a civil engineer and architect who died when she was 14. Raised in Scotland, she moved to England in her teenage years, when she started to study dance in the Bristol school of her aunt. Kerr won a scholarship to study ballet in London, and made her stage debut in 1938 at the age of 17. She soon switched to drama, and began playing small parts in repertory theater in London until war broke out in 1939. 

Her first film role was a reprise of a role she had done on the stage, the part of a Salvation Army worker in the 1940 adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's satire MAJOR BARBARA (1940). She continued making films in Britain during the war, including one, COLONEL BLIMP (1944), in which she played three different women over a span of decades. In 1946, she was invited to Hollywood by Metro Goldwyn Mayer to play opposite Clark Gable in THE HUCKSTERS, and thus began her Hollywood career of 30 years. She was typecast in her early Hollywood films as the uptight English lady, and successfully won a release from her MGM contract to take the role of Karen Holmes, the unhappy and sexually predatory Army wife in the adaptation of James Jones' Pearl Harbor novel, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953). The film was a huge hit and it opened up new pos (...)

Thursday, October 11------Charles Griffith, a screenwriter and director best known for writing the screenplay for the 1960 cult classic THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, died last week at the age of 77. Griffith made a name for himself in low-budget horror-comedy films, frequently collaborating with the producer/director Roger Corman, who also gave burgeoning filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppolla, Dennis Hopper and others their first cracks at directing feature films.

Corman & GriffithTHE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, both produced and directed by Roger Corman, is the satiric story of Seymour, a timid young man who works in a flower store, who unwittingly creates a carnivorous plant that feeds on human flesh. The film features a cameo by a young actor named Jack Nicholson, years before he became an international superstar. Though the film found little acclaim on its initial release, it developed a huge cult following and later inspired a highly successful 1982 Off Broadway musical.

A BUCKET OF BLOODGriffith, who was known for using dark humor in his scripts, wrote dozens of genre films for American International Pictures, Roger Corman's company, including such low-budget classics as A BUCKET OF BLOOD, THE WILD ANGELS , DR. HECKYL AND MR. HYPE and DEATH RACE 2000, which featured then-unknowns Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine. He also directed a handful of films, the best known being EAT MY DUST, which starred a young Ron Howard.

Sandy Mandelberger, In Memoriam Editor

 Marcel Marceau

Tuesday, October 9-------Although he was not strictly an actor, nor was his work in films his most enduring legacy, it is important nevertheless to mark the passing of Marcel Marceau, the internationally famous French pantomimist, who died at the age of 84 on September 24th. Although his visage was one of the most famous in international culture, it was ironically always obscured by his trademark white makeup. Few except close associates would even recognize the man outside of his mime persona. But in it, he was an enduring icon, the mime of the Millenium, for several generations of international fans.

Marcel Marceau was born Marcel Mangel, of Jewish parents in Strasbourg, France, on March 22, 1923. His father, a butcher, was deported to a concentration camp by the Germans in 1944 and never returned. Marcel moved to Paris, with a new surname and false identification papers. Until the liberation of Paris, he worked in the Resistance, hiding Jewish children from the Gestapo and the French police, who helped round up Jews for deportation. In 1944 he joined the French army, and the next year, while stationed in Germany, he gave his first public performance as a mime for an audience of some 3,000 American soldiers.

After the war , Marceau attended the acting school run by Charles Dullin at the School of Dramatic Art in the Sarah Bernhardt Theater in Paris. He planned to become a speaking actor, but he studied under Etienne Decroux, a master of miming, who had taught the noted mime Jean-Louis Barrault. Mr. Barrault invited Marceau to join his theater company, and the rest was silence. Since 1946, Marceau had performed an average of 200 shows a year, most of them abroad. His repertory changed little over the decades, but he played to full houses in the United States, Germany and other European countries, Australia and Japan. However, in his native France, he was rather under-appreciated.....or pehaps the art form that he so exemplified was regarded by leading cultural critics as old fashioned and rather cliched. However, in recognition of his international impact, in 1970 the French government named him a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur for cultural affairs. And in 1978, Jacques Chirac, then the mayor of Paris, established a subsidy for Mr. Marceau's school for mimes, which went on to produce hundreds of performers.

MM in BARBARELLAOver the course of a 60 year career, he appeared in only 13 films, usually as a specialty performer reprising one of his signature stage persona or a supporting part that allowed him to show off his great physical dexterity. In the early 1950s, he appeared in three short films. In the 1960s, he had a supporting role in the German film (...)