Passages

[dx23]

Actor Jack Wild Dies at 53

LONDON - Jack Wild, who earned an Oscar nomination as a teenager for his role as the Artful Dodger in the 1968 film "Oliver!" has died from cancer, his agent said Thursday. He was 53. Wild died Wednesday, agent Alex Jay said. The actor was diagnosed with mouth cancer in 2000, and surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy had left him unable to speak.

Born in Royton, northwest England, in 1952, Wild was spotted by a talent agent while playing soccer in a London park and later attended stage school. He appeared in the London stage production of "Oliver!" Lionel Bart's adaptation of Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist." Wild was cast in the film as cheeky pickpocket the Artful Dodger, a role that earned the 16-year-old an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

Wild also was known to a generation of children as the hero of "H.R. Pufnstuf," a psychedelic TV series about a boy stranded on a fantastical island with a talking flute, a friendly dragon and eerie, chatty trees. A feature film, "Pufnstuf," was released in 1970. He became a teen music idol, releasing three albums — "The Jack Wild Album," "Everything's Coming up Roses" and "Beautiful World."

But Wild struggled with alcoholism and his adult acting career was fitful, although he had a role in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" in 1991. The actor blamed his cancer on years of heavy drinking and smoking. "My lifestyle had made me a walking time bomb," he said last year.

Wild is survived by his wife, Claire Harding.

[toiletduck!]

Photographer, filmmaker Gordon Parks dies

[quote]Artist chronicled black America for 'Life' magazine, directed movie 'Shaft'

NEW YORK - Gordon Parks, who captured the struggles and triumphs of black America as a photographer for Life magazine and then became Hollywood's first major black director with “The Learning Treeâ€

[dx23]

Actress Maureen Stapleton Dies at 80

LENOX, Mass. - Maureen Stapleton, the Oscar-winning character actress whose subtle vulnerability and down-to-earth toughness earned her dramatic and comedic roles on stage, screen, and television, died Monday. She was 80. Stapleton, a longtime smoker who had been living in Lenox, died from chronic pulmonary disease, said her son, Daniel Allentuck.

Stapleton, whose unremarkable, matronly appearance belied her star personality and talent, won an Academy Award in 1981 for her supporting role as anarchist-writer Emma Goldman in Warren Beatty's "Reds," about a left-wing American journalist who journeys to Russia to cover the Bolshevik Revolution. To prepare for the role, Stapleton said she tried reading Goldman's autobiography, but soon chucked it out of boredom.

"There are many roads to good acting," Stapleton, known for her straightforwardness, said in her 1995 autobiography, "Hell of a Life." "I've been asked repeatedly what the 'key' to acting is, and as far as I'm concerned, the main thing is to keep the audience awake."

Stapleton was nominated several times for a supporting actress Oscar, including for her first film role in 1958's "Lonelyhearts"; "Airport" in 1970; and Woody Allen's "Interiors" in 1978. Her other film credits include the 1963 musical "Bye Bye Birdie" opposite Ann-Margret and Dick Van Dyke, "Johnny Dangerously," "Cocoon," "The Money Pit" and "Addicted to Love."

In television, she earned an Emmy for "Among the Paths to Eden" in 1967. She was nominated for "Queen of the Stardust Ballroom" in 1975; "The Gathering" in 1977; and "Miss Rose White" in 1992.

Brought up in a strict Irish Catholic family with an alcoholic father, Stapleton left home in Troy, N.Y., right after high school. With $100 to her name, she came to New York and began studying at the Herbert Berghof Acting School and later at the Actor's Studio, which turned out the likes of Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Julia Roberts.

Stapleton soon made her Broadway debut in Burgess Meredith's 1946 production of "The Playboy of the Western World." At age 24, she became a success as Serafina Delle Rose in Tennessee Williams' Broadway hit "The Rose Tattoo," and won a Tony Award. She appeared in numerous other stage productions, including Lillian Hellman's "Toys in the Attic" and Neil Simon's "The Gingerbread Lady," for which she won her second Tony in 1971.

She starred opposite Laurence Olivier in Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Stapleton's friendship with Williams was well-known and he wrote three plays for her, but she never appeared in any of them.

Along the way, she led a chaotic personal life, which her autobiography candidly described as including two failed marriages, numerous affairs, years of alcohol abuse and erratic parenting for her two children. She often said auditioning was hard for her, but that it was just a part of acting, a job "that pays."

"When I was first in New York there was a girl who wanted to play 'St. Joan' to the point where it was scary. ... I thought 'Don't ever want anything that bad," she recalled. "Just take what you get and like it while you do it, and forget it."

Cast throughout her career in supporting roles, Stapleton was content not playing a lead character, Allentuck said. "I don't think she ever had unrealistic aspirations about her career," he said.

Beside Allentuck, Stapleton is survived by a daughter, Katharine Bambery, of Lenox and a brother, Jack Stapleton, of Troy, N.Y.

[dx23]

Director Richard Fleischer Dies at 89

Director Richard Fleischer, a prolific filmmaker who helmed such movies as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fantastic Voyage, and Soylent Green, died Saturday of natural causes in Los Angeles; he was 89. The son of pioneering animator Max Fleischer (one of the men behind famed characters Betty Boop and Popeye), Richard joined RKO's New York branch in the early 40s as a writer and producer for the studio's Flicker Flashbacks series and won an Oscar for the documentary Design for Death. By the end of the decade was ensconced in Hollywood, directing a number of low-budget noir thrillers, one of his most famous being the train-set The Narrow Margin, one of the first films to use a handheld camera and filmed in only 13 days; it was later remade in the 90s. In 1954, Fleischer got his big break courtesy of Walt Disney (his father's rival), who tapped him to direct the big-screen adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason. Disney's first entire live-action movie made in the United States, it became one of the studio's most famous and well-known films, inspiring attractions at Disney's theme parks that utilized versions of the Nautilus submarine and the famed battle with a giant squid. Fleischer's career was marked by forays into numerous genres, with some of his more notable movies being The Vikings (1958), Fantastic Voyage (1966), The Boston Strangler (1968), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Soylent Green (1973), and the Neil Diamond version of The Jazz Singer (1980). He also directed some of Hollywood's most well-known flops, including the Oscar-nominated musical Doctor Dolittle, the biopic Che! and the slave drama Mandingo. Throughout the 80s, Fleischer worked on a number of modern-day B movies, including cult faves Conan the Destroyer (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Grace Jones) and Red Sonja. He is survived by his wife, Mary, three children and five grandchildren.

[dx23]

Author of 'Solaris' Dies at 84

WARSAW, Poland - Stanislaw Lem, a science fiction writer whose novel "Solaris" was made into a movie starring George Clooney, died Monday in his native Poland, his secretary said. He was 84. Lem died in a Krakow hospital from heart failure "connected to his old age," the secretary, Wojciech Zemek, told The Associated Press.

Lem was one of the most popular science fiction authors of recent decades to write in a language other than English, and his works were translated into more than 40 other languages. His books have sold 27 million copies. His best-known work, "Solaris," was adapted into films by director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and by Steven Soderbergh in 2002. That version starred Clooney and Natascha McElhone.

His first important novel, "Hospital of the Transfiguration," was censored by communist authorities for eight years before its release in 1956 amid a thaw following the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Other works include "The Invincible," "The Cyberiad," "His Master's Voice," "The Star Diaries," "The Futurological Congress" and "Tales of Prix the Pilot."

Lem was born into a Polish Jewish family on Sept. 21, 1921, in Lviv, then a Polish city but now part of Ukraine. His father was a doctor and he initially appeared set to follow in that path, taking up medical studies in Lviv before World War II. After surviving the Nazi occupation, in part thanks to forged documents that concealed his Jewish background, Lem continued his medical studies in Krakow. Soon afterward, however, he took up writing science fiction.

Lem is survived by his wife and a son, Zemek said. Funeral arrangements were not disclosed.

[ola t]

Local media is reporting that Swedish author and director Vilgot Sjoman -- best known for the I Am Curious films and (to Criterionites) the documentary series Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie -- died on Sunday after having suffered a stroke. He was 81.

[Galen Young]

Sorry to hear about Vilgot Sjoman -- weird too, because I had just tracked down this past week copies of his books I Am Curious (Blue) and I Was Curious, as well as the Lars Gorling novel 491, that he made into a film in 1964. Has anyone here seen it? Its sounds like something right up Criterion's alley... The more I watch the Curious films, the more I really like them.

Here's a hilarious excerpt from Sjoman's book L136, his diary about working on Bergman's Winter Light:

Dagens Nyheter today tells of Bunuel's love of Bergman:

Ingmar Bergman - a tragic case

thinks the Mexican director Luis Bunuel, who in the latest issue of ABF's magazine The Window is interviewed by Bjorn Kumm. According to Bunuel, Bergman is "a man who squanders his talent on rubbish. He is a very good director, but he is taken up with questions that are not interesting. What is it he asks about in every film? God, evil, good, whether God exists -- you can't keep on with that sort of thing! I can hardly sit his films out. He can keep on selling this superficial quasi-philosophy to the decadent public. It's typical that he has gained such success in America. The Americans, these gringos, are interested in that sort of thing."

Love passionately requited. This was noticeable when a TV program on films ran the communion parody from Viridiana last winter; IB's disgusted mutter:

"...how utterly tasteless and puerile."

[What A Disgrace]

I Am Curious Director Dies

Swedish director Vilgot Sjöman, whose controversial I Am Curious…Yellow and I Am Curious…Blue caused a sensation in international art houses when they were released in 1967, died this week, on April 9, at St. Görans Hospital in Stockholm. Emblems of the sexual revolution of the late sixties, the I Am Curious films titillated American audiences with their unabashed nudity and eroticism, paving the way for more freedom of expression in film. Sjöman was 81 years old.

[gubbelsj]

Shin Sang Ok

Shin Sang Ok, a pioneering film director who said that his life was too unbelievable to be a movie plot, what with his introducing the kiss to North and South Korean cinema, being kidnapped by a movie-loving dictator and turning up in Hollywood to create the "3 Ninjas" movies, died Tuesday in Seoul. He was 80.

Two of Mr. Shin's films were shown at Cannes, where he was a judge in 1994. He gained some recognition in the United States through showings of his work at the Museum of Modern Art and art-house cinemas, as well as through a broader American release of a horror film modeled on the Japanese Godzilla movies.

In South Korea, however, he was a major figure of that nation's film industry in the 1950s and 60s, leading some to call him the Orson Welles of South Korea. He directed at least 60 movies in 20 years, introducing techniques like the zoom lens and themes like the plight of women in Korean history. The South Korean government eventually took away his license because he refused to toe the line.

Mr. Shin's greatest fame in the West came when he and his wife, from whom he was estranged, were kidnapped in 1978 by North Korean agents. When Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator, demanded that he make propaganda movies, he refused. After eating grass and bark in prison for five years, he was suddenly released by Mr. Kim, who told him he could make any movies he liked.

Mr. Shin made seven films before escaping in 1986 during a stopover in Vienna. He and his wife turned up in Reston, Virginia, where their insights into Mr. Kim's personality, backed up by recordings they had secretly made, were of considerable interest to United States intelligence officers.

Mr. Shin and his wife moved to Los Angeles in 1989 after living under the protection of the CIA for three years. He said that he got the idea for his humorous "3 Ninjas" movies, done for Disney, by repeatedly watching "Home Alone" and trying to think of a way to do something similar that would involve the martial arts. He returned to South Korea in 1994 and continued to produce movies there.

He is survived by his wife, two sons and two daughters. --NYTimes

[Richard]

Italian actress Alida Valli dies

ITALIAN actress Alida Valli, who featured in films by Alfred Hitchcock and Luchino Visconti, died in Rome on today at the age of 84, Ansa news agency said.

Alida Maria Laura von Altenburger was born on May 31, 1921, in Pola, which was then part of Italy and has since become Pula, in Croatia.

She made her cinema debut at the age of 15 and appeared in over 100 films. The best known include Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947) with Gregory Peck, The Miracle of the Bells (1948) by Irving Pichel with Frank Sinatra, and Carole Reed's The Third Man (1949) with Orson Welles.

She married surrealist painter Oscar de Mejo in 1994 but the couple divorced several years later.

Valli was discovered by US producer David Selznick, who gave her a contract, thinking that he had found a second Ingrid Bergman. Her English language film career was short-lived due to her thick accent but she continued to work in the Italian, and occasionally French, cinema.

ACTRESS ALIDA VALLI DIES AT 85

(AGI) - Roma, April 22 - The Roman actress Alida Valli died this morning at home in Rome. Born in Pola in 1921, her original name being Alida Maria Altenburger, Alida Valli became a real icon of Italian cinema and appeared in such films as "The Paradine Case" by Hitchcock, "The Third Man", "The Innocents", "Oedipus Rex" by Pasolini and "Strategy of the Spider" by Bertolucci. On the wishes of Mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, the service will be carried out at city hall on Monday morning. In the afternoon the actress will be commemorated, again at city hall, in the presence of the highest state dignitaries.

Lovely actress. I really liked her in The Third Man.

[HerrSchreck]

I really dug her in EYES WITHOUT A FACE. She exudes eeriness without going over into campy horror acting, yet maintains the nuance of innocence exhibited by the sense of the existence of a moral line in her characters head whcih she's not willing to pass.

[Michael]

Terribly sad.

I'd love to have images of Valli from Spider's Stratagem. Does anyone have them?

[Dylan]

David, the subtitles on your "Spider's Stratagem" copy are much better than on the New Yorker Video copy I have (which has an unacceptably very large font for the subs). The visual quality is equal though. This one really needs to get out there, it's a great film, brilliantly psychological (like all of maestro Bernardo's), and the ending really stays with me. And of course, Valli is great in it.

Michael, I saw "Senso" on TCM a few years ago just as I was getting into Italian cinema. It's a hell of a beautiful film, and Valli is as exquisite as ever in it. I really want to see it again, I can't believe it's not on DVD yet.

[dx23]

'Third Man' co-star Alida Valli dies

ROME (AP) — Alida Valli, one of Italy's great actresses who co-starred in the 1949 film The Third Man and Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case, died Saturday in Rome, the mayor's office said. No cause of death was given. She was 84. Valli, born Alida von Altenburger, had a film career that spanned more than 60 years and worked with some of the greats of Italian cinema, including Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said Italian cinema had lost one of its most significant stars in the dark-haired beauty, who was often compared to Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman.

Valli, who was born in 1921 in Pula, in what is now Croatia, made her film debut in Italy in the mid-1930s but moved to Hollywood a decade later, where she appeared opposite Gregory Peck in Hitchcock's The Paradine Case.

Two years later, in 1949, she got top female billing in Carol Reed's The Third Man, the classic tale about the new world order of moral ambiguity, set in post-World War II Vienna.

After her brief sojourn in Hollywood, Valli returned to Italy, where she starred in Visconti's 1953 film Senso (Sense) and also appeared on stage.

[Gordon]

Director/screenwriter Val Guest dies at 94

Val Guest was a superb craftsman. The Day the Earth Caught Fire is one of the great 'intelligent' sci-fi films, I feel. Beautifully shot (with orange tinting sequences) by the great Harry Waxman (Brighton Rock; The Wicker Man) with superbly detailed sets by Tony Masters (2001: A Space Odyssey; Papillon; Dune). Leo McKern is great, as always, too. The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2 remain quite gripping and witty films with quite a few imaginative shots. I have a soft-spot for The Abominable Snowman; I like how the yetis are ultimately shown to be sympathetic, which is unusual for a Hammer film. Hell Is a City has a helluva lotta energy and is atypically British, much like Losey's, The Criminal and is well-photographed by Arthur Grant (Quatermass and the Pit; The Devil Rides Out; Paranoiac and Losey's The Damned) in scope on grim Manchester locations.

Dangerous Davies - The Last Detective (1981), adapted by Guest from Leslie Thomas' superb novels, with the legendary Bernard Cribbins in the lead is also fantastic, shockingly overlooked, but on DVD at last.

But one of Guest's best films is his most forgotten - 1961's The Full Treatment, adapted by Guest and Ronald Scott Thorn from his own brilliant novel and starring Claude Dauphin as a psychiatrist trying to understand why a racing car driver (Ronald Lewis) who has an accident, starts to feel the urge to kill his wife. It was a Hammer co-production, but like many of the non-horror Hammer films, it seems to have been lost in the shuffle. Black and white scope photography by Gil Taylor and sets by Tony Masters. I'd love to see it again on DVD in its OAR.

Guest provided many audio commentaries and interviews for DVDs of his films. His track on The Day the Earth Caught Fire, moderated by Hammer expert Ted Newsom is one of the best I have ever heard; fascinating and absorbing with all bases covered.

Not a famous name, but Guest was a fine writer and director who crafted some fine fantasy-suspense films in the late 50s and 60s. He also seemed an affable and modest gentleman and he had a good innings, as we Brits say!

[cdnchris]

No love for Casino Royale? The movie was terrible, but considering he somehow got the crap job of having to make sense out of the mess he was stuck with I think he did a better job than anybody else could have.

[htdm]

Japanese news agencies have just reported that Japanese director Imamura Shohei (Ballad of Narayama, Black Rain, Insect Woman, Pigs & Battleships, Vengeance is Mine, etc.) died on the afternoon of the 30th (Japan time). Imamura was the first Japanese director to ever win top honors at Cannes twice and, according to the Japanese news reports, only the fourth in the world to do so. As is often the case, the cause of death isn't mentioned. Imamura's oldest son is director Tengan Daisuke.

[Don Lope de Aguirre]

Liver cancer was the cause of death.

[Michael Kerpan]

The cause of death was grimly appropriate -- considering the subject matter of his next-to-last feature film -- Dr. Akagi (Liver Doctor).

I am very sad. Imamura was my favorite living "senior director".

[Steven H]

A very sad day. Imamura was certainly one of the great filmmakers. I recently watched The Profound Desire of the Gods (a few times, actually... I love this film) and his earlier 60s work will someday find a real audience in the west. It's brilliant stuff.

[Grimfarrow]

So sad RIP Imamura Shohei

[Cinephrenic]

Shohei Imamura, 1926-2006
Master filmmaker Shohei Imamura died of cancer on Tuesday, May 30, at the age of 79. The first Japanese director to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (in 1983, for the astonishing The Ballad of Narayama, and then again for The Eel, in 1997), Imamura was one of the country's trailblazing new wave auteurs, surveying his society's sexual and social landscape. His dense filmography includes Insect Woman, The Pornographers, Vengeance Is Mine, and Black Rain. He was widely considered Japan's greatest living filmmaker.

Yet there is hardly any of his films in the collection...

[erick]

Yet there is hardly any of his films in the collection...

I agree that this is a rather sad state of affairs, especially given Criterion's exquisite treatment of Ozu's work. I can only hope they acquire the rights to Imamura's films, especially Black Rain and, for purely personal reasons since it was the first Imamura film I ever saw, Pigs and Battleships.

[Matt]

Only vaguely film-related, but still...

Gyorgy Ligeti, 1923-2006

June 12, 2006
'Space Odyssey' Composer Ligeti Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:54 a.m. ET

VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who survived the Holocaust and fled Hungary after the 1956 revolution, then won acclaim for his opera ''Le Grand Macabre'' and his work on the soundtrack for ''2001: A Space Odyssey,'' died Monday. He was 83.

Ligeti, celebrated as one of the world's leading 20th century musical pioneers, died in Vienna after a long illness, said Christiane Krauscheid, a spokeswoman for his publisher, Germany-based Schott Music. Details were unavailable, but Austrian media said he spent the last three years in a wheelchair.

Ligeti (pronounced lig'-ih-tee) was born in 1923 to Hungarian parents in the predominantly ethnic Hungarian part of Romania's Transylvania region. His father and brother later were murdered by the Nazis. He took Austrian citizenship in 1967 after fleeing his ex-communist homeland.

He began studying music under Ferenc Farkas at the conservatory in Cluj, Romania, in 1941, and continued his studies in Budapest. But in 1943, he was arrested as a Jew and sentenced to forced labor for the rest of World War II.

''My life in the Nazi era and under communist rule was full of risks, and I believe I still reflect this feeling,'' he once told the Austria Press Agency in an interview.

After the war, Ligeti resumed his studies with Farkas and Sandor Veress at Budapest's Franz Liszt Academy. After graduation in 1949, he did research on Romanian folk music and then returned to the academy as an instructor in harmony, counterpoint and formal analysis.

Ligeti attracted wide atttention for ''Macabre,'' which he wrote in 1978.

Ligeti's early work was heavily censored by Hungary's repressive regime, but his arrival in Vienna in 1956 opened up new possibilities. In the Austrian capital, he met key players in Western Europe's avant-garde music movement such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig and Herbert Eimert, who invited him to join an electronic music studio at West Germany's state radio in Cologne in 1957.

He won early critical acclaim for his 1958 electronic composition ''Artikulation'' and the orchestral ''Apparitions.'' He gained notoriety for a technique he called ''micropolyphony,'' which wove together musical color and texture in ways that transcended the traditional borders of melody, harmony and rhythm.

Ligeti spoke at least six languages, including his native Hungarian, German, French, and English, said Stephen Ferguson, who worked as his assistant and editor at Schott Music from 1992-96.

''He was one of the few avant-garde composers who found his way into the modern program,'' Ferguson said. ''He was fascinated by patterns, but at the same time created wonderful atmospheres, such as in the music used in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' or in 'Clocks and Clouds.'

''He reintroduced techniques of polyphony out of the tradition of Bach and Palestrina with a playful and innovative sense of sound. He developed a new sound -- cluster sound -- which fascinated director Stanley Kubrick and propelled Ligeti to the top of the great composers of the second half of the 20th century.''

Excerpts of his ''Atmospheres,'' a requiem and 1966's ''Lux Aeterna'' were used on the bestselling soundtrack for Kubrick's ''Space Odyssey.'' Although the music was not the film's well-known fanfare, which was composed by Richard Strauss, it won Ligeti a global audience.

Kubrick returned to Ligeti in 1999, using the composer's Musica Ricercata II (Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale), as the theme for what turned out to be his final film, ''Eyes Wide Shut.''

Ligeti, who for a time also lived in Germany and San Francisco and was a visiting professor at the Stockholm Academy of Music for many years, was known for striking a playful note with his music, epitomized by a piece he wrote for 100 metronomes.

Sir Simon Rattle was a fan of Ligeti and led many performances of his works during his tenure at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra before taking over the Berlin Philharmonic.

Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel hailed Ligeti on Monday as ''the greatest Austrian in the 20th century music world,'' and the city of Vienna said it would offer a special grave site in honor of its adopted composer.

Ligeti is survived by his wife, Vera, and a son, Lukas, a percussionist who lives in New York. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.

[tavernier]

Ligeti's death is a huge loss, as he was one of the greatest composers of the past 50 years. The richness of his music is only hinted at in the selections we heard in Kubrick's films.