According to reports:

Ron SILVER - Actor

Ron SILVER - Actor

One of the most familiar character actors from the 1980s on, a Tony winner (Speed the Plow) and Emmy nominee (Billionaire Boys' Club, The West Wing), his film roles included Silkwood, Romancing the Stone, Garbo Talks, Enemies: a Love Story, Reversal of Fortune (probably the closest he came to an Oscar nomination) and Ali.

In recent years, he concentrated on his TV work, and also was frequently scene as a post-9/11 converted Republican after having been a liberal activist. (His transformation actually began as a Giuliani supporter going back to his mayoral races).

He had been battling esophagus cancer for the last two years. He was 62.

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I learned of his passing listening to Stern this morning. What a great man he was, eventhough he got caught up in the conservative movement for a while. He was a tremendous actor and political commentator. The last that I saw him was during last summer's political conventions news coverage and how jarring it was to see him has his health was deteroriating.

May he rest in peace! May God Bless him and his family during this hour of need.

Among Ron Silver's greatest "accomplishments" were his conversion to Republicanism, becoming a prominent supporter of George W. Bush and his war on "terrorism," and serving as an advisor to the Lewis Libby Legal Defense Fund. ('Nuff said.)

I remember Ron Silver as the guy who's characters drove me crazy ala Entity, Time Cop, Reversal of Fortune,etc. But I thought he was great in Wiseguy, opposite Jerry Lewis.
RIP.

Thanks for remembering Wiseguy - I personally thought a lot of Silver's performances were one note and repetitive (Reversal of Fortune an exception), but he (and Lewis) indeed was terrific in Wiseguy, a wonderful if short-lived series.

RIP, Mr. Silver!

He was a great actor!

quote:

Originally posted by seanflynn:
Thanks for remembering Wiseguy - I personally thought a lot of Silver's performances were one note and repetitive (Reversal of Fortune an exception), but he (and Lewis) indeed was terrific in Wiseguy, a wonderful if short-lived series.

Also another short-lived series in which is was very good in was Skin. I just thought it was worth mentioning. Ron Silver was a great actor and he will be missed greatly.

Millard KAUFMAN - Writer

Twice nominated in the screenplay category (Take the High Ground and the very fine Bad Day at Black Rock), he also was part of the team that created Mr. Magoo. Other screenplays included Raintree County, Never So Few and The War Lord.

He fronted for Dalton Trumbo on Joseph Lewis' great Gun Crazy, and wrote and directed Convicts Four.

He was 92, and his wife of 66 years survives him.

Coy WATSON Jr. - Actor

Likely one of the last survivors of silent films, Watson was a child actor from the age of 1 (1913) through the end of the 1920s when sound came. He was the oldest of 9 children, all of whom did film work while their father was employed as a horse wrangler and special effects man.

Watson appeared in numerous comedy shorts and other films, primarily under the great Mack Sennett, and eventually got the nickname of "the Keystone Kid." He also played in significant features such as the Lon Chaney Hunchback of Notre Dame and King Vidor's The Show People.

As he left childhood and sound came, he had little interest in sticking around, and eventually became a photographer and later a TV news cameraman.

He was 96, and is survived by his wife.

Gene Kelly’s ‘teenage bride’ Betsy Blair dies, aged 85

The American actress Betsy Blair, who rose from New Jersey chorus girl to become the teenage bride of Gene Kelly, went on to star in one of the classic Hollywood films of the 1950s, and later became a Londoner when she married the film-maker Karel Reisz, has died in London after suffering from cancer. She was 85.

Blair first met Kelly (pictured with Blair and the actor Montgomery Clift, left) when she was only 15 and he was choreographing shows for a New York nightclub, long before he became a Hollywood star with such films as On the Town and Singing' in the Rain. In a 2001 Guardian interview she recalled how she inadvertently turned up a day early for an audition and spoke to a man moving tables and chairs. "I thought he was a busboy. I said, 'I'm here to see Mr Rose' and he asked me if I was a dancer. I said I was and he told me the audition was the following day."

Blair started to leave when the 'busboy' asked her, "Are you a good dancer?"
Said Blair: "I turned round and said, 'Very'. The next day, I went to the audition and it was Gene moving the tables and chairs around. He was the choreographer." Needless to say, Blair got the job and the two fell in love, spending the next year and half working in nightclubs and in musical comedies on Broadway.

When she was 17, Gene asked Betsy to marry him. "It was in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York. We were sitting by the fountain and he said he couldn't leave me to the mercy of New York when he went to Hollywood. I said yes immediately. I didn't have any reservations at all. You don't when you're in love."

They arrived in Hollywood as husband and wife on December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Kelly, 29, was contracted to David Selznick but before long MGM asked him to be in For Me and My Gal and a star was born.

Betsy claimed not to be fazed by his increasing fame. "I loved his work and he was a great dancer and he was also a really interesting, educated fellow. The fact that he was a star didn't matter to me. I was a snippy kid, I never thought of him as an icon."

After the war, when the couple lived on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Betsy also broke into films, appearing in The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947) and The Snake Pit (1948) alongside Olivia de Havilland. But the parts dried upafter she became involved in union politics and, like so many other Hollywood left-wingers, was subject to investigation by Senator Joe McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.

However, she had one big film part to come - that of Ernest Borgnine's plain-Jane girlfriend in the 1955 classic Marty, which won all the big prizes at the 1956 Oscars. It was always said that she got the part only because Kelly threatened to stop shooting at MGM if his young wife was not allowed to work.

The marriage came to an end in 1957 and Betsy moved to Paris where she made films with such European directors as Michelangelo Antonioni (The Cry). While filming at Pinewood she met the Czech émigre Karel Reisz. They married in 1963. He had already directed Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and would go on to make Morgan and The French Lieutenant's Woman.

In 2003, Blair published her autobiography, The Memory of All That. "I have nothing bad to say about Gene in any way," she said. "We were married 16 years and it just came to an end."

Betsy BLAIR - Actress

Not much to add to the above, although it deemphasizes how the blacklist obliterated a promising career.

That she got the role in Marty indicates a couple things - the film was made as a tax write-off, and as an independent film, nobody much cared that she was cast. Burt Lancaster, one of the producers (who actually had his name taken off the credits because it seemed like such a minor film, and he had grander plans) deserved great credit nonetheless for casting her.

But despite the success and her nomination, her career in Hollywood was over. Other sources indicate that the toll of the blacklist did eventually cause the end of her marriage to Kelly.

This doesn't happen that often for me, but she is a case where I was surprised to here that she was still alive. In life, as on screen, she was too easily overlooked and forgotten.

(Small world note - Blair's husband Karel Reisz was a good friend and collaborator with Vanessa Redgrave's first husband Tony Richardson, was of course was Natasha Richardson's father. Reisz also directed Isadora, one of Vanessa's greatest performances. I have no way of knowing how close if at all Blair remained with Vanessa, but it is a poignant coincidence at this awful moment.)

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Jack LAWRENCE - Composer

Best song nominee for Hold My Hand from Susan Slept Here (1954), he is best known for some songs that became classics and later were heavily used in films, including Beyond the Sea, All or Nothing at All and Tenderly.

He was 96, and died after complications resulting for a fall.

It's unfortunately official:

Natasha RICHARDSON - Actress

Betsy Blair may have been largely forgotten and Marty may draw lots of ridicule as a BP Winner, but I loved her performance in the movie. To me, it is one of the best in the supporting actress category that I have seen.

For me, Natasha Richardson's is the most tragic death of an actress in recent years. I find it so much easier to cope with when old age is the device to take the beloved away; when its literally an instantaneous mishap like bumping your head that suddenly kills you, in what would have been the middle of your life, it's all the more heartbreaking.

I'm praying for Neeson and the kids. How absolutely tragic.

Dorothea HOLT REDMOND - illustrator/designer

This is the kind of craftsman for whom the Oscars have no category, usually labor in anonymity yet play a vital role in movies. The LA Times had a very nice obituary for her, which I reprint here. She was 98; her husband of 68 years survives her.


Dorothea Holt Redmond dies at 98; designer helped create the look of several Hitch**** films
By Valerie J. Nelson

March 16, 2009

Dorothea Holt Redmond, an illustrator and production designer who helped visualize several Alfred Hitch**** films and worked with Walt Disney to design a private apartment in Disneyland's New Orleans Square, has died. She was 98.

Redmond died of congestive heart failure Feb. 27 at her longtime home in the Hollywood Hills, said her daughter, Lynne Jackson.

In Hollywood, Redmond broke ground in 1938 as the first woman to invade the "heretofore exclusively male field" of motion-picture production design, at David O. Selznick's studio, The Times reported that year. Her male colleagues so resented her, they insisted that Redmond's work space be walled off from theirs, her daughter recalled.

Redmond came to be regarded as one of the most talented illustrators in the industry, according to research by Tania Modleski, a USC English professor who is documenting the contributions women made Hitch****'s films.

Working with Hitch**** and an art director, Redmond would create an illustration that became the basis for communicating to the cameraman and others -- and essentially set the tone of key scenes, Modleski told The Times in an e-mail.

The artist "was masterful at working with light and shadow," Modleski said, "and deserves credit for working with Hitch**** to convey the German Expressionist aesthetic he has been praised for adopting throughout much of his career."

"Casting a Shadow: Creating the Alfred Hitch**** Film," an exhibit staged last year at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, also documented Redmond's collaboration with Hitch****. The director was known for presenting himself as an auteur when in reality he was deeply collaborative, the exhibit pointed out.

Redmond's suspense-filled graphite drawings interpreting a sequence in Hitch****'s 1943 film "Shadow of a Doubt" helped transform a sleepy town into a threatening locale, which was essential to the movie's evolution, according to the 2007 book "Casting a Shadow," based on the exhibit.

Hitch**** was "one of her very favorite people to work with," said Redmond's daughter. "She just loved his personality and his taste."

In a film career that started with 1937's "Nothing Sacred" and spanned 20 years, Redmond contributed to seven Hitch**** films, including "Rebecca" (1940), "Rear Window" (1954) and "To Catch a Thief" (1955).

Among the more than 30 films she worked on are such classics as "Gone With the Wind" (1939), "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) and "The Ten Commandments" (1956).

In 1964, she joined what is now known as Walt Disney Imagineering and helped envision elements of Disneyland and Disney World.

Disney died in 1966 before the elaborate New Orleans Square hideaway she designed with him could be completed. For decades, the space was used as a gallery.

Following Redmond's original renderings, the park recently restored the apartment above Pirates of the Caribbean and turned it into the Disneyland Dream Suite, where randomly chosen park visitors can stay overnight.

Redmond also designed the interior and exterior settings of many restaurants and shops in New Orleans Square.

For Florida's Walt Disney World, she completed moody studies of Fantasyland and opulent renderings of Main Street, according to Disney.

"Her watercolor sketches were extraordinary place-making," Marty Sklar, an executive with Walt Disney Imagineering, said last fall when Redmond was named a Disney Legend in a hall-of-fame program that honors those who have had lasting impact on the Walt Disney Co.

The elaborate mosaic murals in the archway of Disney World's Cinderella Castle were also designed by Redmond and realized by another artist in a million pieces of glass. Some of the murals were later duplicated in Tokyo Disneyland.

Dorothea Holt was born May 18, 1910, in Los Angeles, the only child of Harry and Mary Holt. Her father co-owned Western Lithograph Co.

After studying architecture and earning a bachelor's degree in fine arts from USC in 1933, Redmond received a degree in illustration in 1936 from what is now the Art Center College of Design. She later taught at the school, her family said.

In 1940, she married Harry Redmond, a producer she met at Selznick's studio. The couple built a house in the Hollywood Hills and finished designing it themselves when the architect died midway through the project, completed in 1948.

For about a decade, Dorothea Redmond worked for the architectural firm of William Pereira and Charles Luckman before joining Disney. She retired in 1974.

About a week before Redmond's death, a private exhibit of her artwork opened at Walt Disney Imagineering's Information Research Center in Glendale.

In addition to her daughter and husband, Redmond is survived by a son, Lee Redmond; three granddaughters; and three great-grandsons.

Services were private.

Instead of flowers, the family suggests donating to the Motion Picture & Television Fund, www.mptvfund.org.

Stephen BACH - executive

One of the brightest, smartest people ever to oversee a studio, as well as a quiet gay pioneer in the executive suites. And as the NYTimes obituary says, time has been kind to Heaven's Gate, which ended his career.

Steven Bach, Producer, Biographer and Memoirist, Dies at 70
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Steven Bach, who as a studio executive at United Artists took the fall for the colossal failure of the western epic “Heaven’s Gate” but went on to write “Final Cut,” a gripping insider account of the debacle, died on Wednesday at his home in Arlington, Vt. He was 70 and also had a home in Munich.

The cause was cancer, said Robert Lescher, his agent.

At United Artists, where he became senior vice president in charge of worldwide production in 1978, Mr. Bach had the misfortune to be associated with one of the greatest cinematic disasters in Hollywood history, the 1980 film “Heaven’s Gate,” a sprawling historical drama about range wars in Wyoming in the 1890s. Under the direction of Michael Cimino, whose film “The Deer Hunter” had recently won five Academy Awards, the film grew to enormous length — the first version screened in New York ran three and a half hours — and ended up costing $36 million, five times the budget of an average studio film at the time.

The reviews were savage, even after the film had been drastically shortened.

“If the film was formless at four hours, it was insipid at 140 minutes,” Roger Ebert wrote. “At either length it is so incompetently photographed and edited that there are times when we are not even sure which character we are looking at.”

The box office was worse. “It is as if somebody called every household in the country and said, ‘There will be a curse on your family if you go see this picture,’ ” one United Artists executive said.

In the aftermath Mr. Bach was fired. He turned around and documented his experience in “Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of ‘Heaven’s Gate’ ” (1985), regarded as a classic insider account of Hollywood.

“It is the best book ever written about the making of a movie,” the film critic David Thomson said. “It gives you an understanding of the battles, the egos, and how a film like that could come about. It’s all the more remarkable because he’s one of the stooges in the story: he let it happen, and he admits that.”

Mr. Bach was born in Pocatello, Idaho, and attended high school in Boise. After studying at the Sorbonne and earning a degree in French and English from Northwestern University in 1961, he taught American literature at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill.

In 1966 he moved to Los Angeles and, after working in public relations, earned a doctorate in film at the University of Southern California, writing a dissertation on the films of Josef von Sternberg.

For the next decade he worked as a story editor on theatrical and film projects with the producer Gabriel Katzka, and as executive story editor for Palomar Pictures International, which produced “Sleuth” and “The Heartbreak Kid.”

As a partner in Pantheon Pictures in the early 1970s, he helped produce the plays “The Comedians” and “Anna Christie,” with Liv Ullmann, on Broadway, and several films, including “The Parallax View,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” and “Mr. Billion.”

As vice president and head of international production at United Artists, Mr. Bach did more than preside over the “Heaven’s Gate” affair. He helped bring to the screen critically or commercially successful films like “Raging Bull,” “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” “Stardust Memories,” “Annie Hall,” “Eye of the Needle,” “Cutter and Bone” and “True Confessions.”

No matter. Close proximity to “Heaven’s Gate” sealed his fate and that of the studio, which was sold to MGM while “Heaven’s Gate” was being shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

Mr. Bach, regarded as perhaps too much of an intellectual and a gentleman to run a studio, turned his hand to writing and teaching. He wrote three well-received biographies: “Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend” (1992), “Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart” (2001) and “Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl” (2007).

In the late 1990s he taught in the film program at Columbia University and for the last decade he taught film and literature at Bennington College.

He is survived by his companion, Werner Rohr.

He lived long enough to see critical opinion begin to shift on “Heaven’s Gate.” “That’s the final irony,” Mr. Thomson said. “I think it’s a much more interesting picture than its legend would lead one to believe. It wouldn’t surprise me if one day it’s regarded as a great film.”

This from EW.com:

Academy Award-winning film composer Maurice Jarre, 84, dies
Mar 29, 2009, 09:45 PM | by Tim Stack

Categories: Film, Legacy, Movie biz, Movies

Academy Award-winning film composer, Maurice Jarre, 84, has died of cancer in Los Angeles, according to the AFP. Jarre won three Oscars for his work in Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India. Jarre's most recent score was for the 2001 TV mini-series, Uprising.

The world has lost another great composer.
Everyone knows his work for The Longest Day, Is Paris Burning?, Ryan's Daughter, Witness and Year of Living Dangerously.
But i also revere him for his haunting scores for such smaller films as ASH WEDNESDAY, THE LAST TYCOON, CROSSED SWORDS and A WALK IN THE CLOUDS.