Passages

[MichaelB]

Czech stop-motion animator Vlasta Pospíšilová, who directed dozens of films in her own right, but internationally she's probably best known for animating some of the major masterpieces of her compatriots Jiří Trnka (A Midsummer Night's Dream) and Jan Švankmajer (Jabberwocky, Dimensions of Dialogue).

[Fred Holywell]

Catherine Spaak

One of the loveliest ladies of '60s cinema. RIP

[hearthesilence]

DJ Kay Slay, after a four-month struggle with COVID. (He declined to get vaccinated). The popular radio personality on New York's Hot 97 was known for his pugnacious mixtapes which stoked rap beefs, broke artists and helped change the music business.

[MichaelB]

Polish composer and electronic music specialist Andrzej Korzyński, whose film-score filmography spans 1967-2018 and a huge number of titles, but he'll probably be best remembered for his collaborations with fellow Andrzejs Wajda (Everything For Sale, Hunting Flies, The Birch Wood, Man of Marble, Man of Iron) and Żuławski (The Third Part of the Night, The Devil, On The Silver Globe, Possession, Szamanka, La Fidelité, Cosmos).

[Roger Ryan]

Robert Morse, at age 90, whose early success came with his Tony-award winning Broadway performance in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (he starred in the film version as well). Cast in the lead as a British poet in Tony Richardson's 1965 satire The Loved One, the American Morse's accent was so atrocious that he was required to post-sync all of his dialogue after working with a trainer (with still less-than-great results). Morse had great success later in life with his Emmy-nominated role on Mad Men as the grand old man of the advertising agency.

[Never Cursed]

Jacques Perrin

Amazingly, we still have three of the Rochefort leads, but this still stinks...

[Soothsayer]

DJ Kay Slay, after a four-month struggle with COVID. (He declined to get vaccinated). The popular radio personality on New York's Hot 97 was known for his pugnacious mixtapes which stoked rap beefs, broke artists and helped change the music business.

Sad about this one. Also worth noting he was featured in Style Wars as a graffiti artist, 2 out of the 4 elements covered!

His final contribution to hip hop was pretty great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGIEVyfarS4

[beamish14]

Robert Morse, at age 90, whose early success came with his Tony-award winning Broadway performance in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (he starred in the film version as well). Cast in the lead as a British poet in Tony Richardson's 1965 satire The Loved One, the American Morse's accent was so atrocious that he was required to post-sync all of his dialogue after working with a trainer (with still less-than-great results). Morse had great success later in life with his Emmy-nominated role on Mad Men as the grand old man of the advertising agency.

I wish I’d been able to see his performance as Truman Capote in TRU. He was also in a Peter Medak-directed episode of the 1980’s Twilight Zone revival where he played Cupid

[beamish14]

Polish composer and electronic music specialist Andrzej Korzyński, whose film-score filmography spans 1967-2018 and a huge number of titles, but he'll probably be best remembered for his collaborations with fellow Andrzejs Wajda (Everything For Sale, Hunting Flies, The Birch Wood, Man of Marble, Man of Iron) and Żuławski (The Third Part of the Night, The Devil, On The Silver Globe, Possession, Szamanka, La Fidelité, Cosmos).

Oh, wow. Some of his Zulawski work recently got some great and long overdue vinyl reissues

[Rayon Vert]

Guy Lafleur.

Hard week for hockey idols of my childhood.

[MichaelB]

Critic turned TV presenter turned prolific TV director turned occasional film director (Dreamchild, Danny the Champion of the World, Complicity) Gavin Millar.

[fiddlesticks]

Radu Lupu, 76
Nicholas Angelich, 51
A bad week for the piano.

[beamish14]

Critic turned TV presenter turned prolific TV director turned occasional film director (Dreamchild, Danny the Champion of the World, Complicity) Gavin Millar.

Sad to hear that. Dreamchild is an all-time favorite. Among the best work from Dennis Potter and Jim Henson, too. The Iain Banks adaptations are excellent as well, and I’m curious about the well-regarded Pat and Margaret with Victoria Wood

[GaryC]

Critic turned TV presenter turned prolific TV director turned occasional film director (Dreamchild, Danny the Champion of the World, Complicity) Gavin Millar.

RIP. While Dreamchild is the only one of his cinema films I've seen, I'll echo the praise for it.

I do remember his work as a television presenter, and his once-a-month film show Talking Pictures, back in 1979, which only ran to four episodes. Before then, he'd presented Arena: Cinema. He also turned up to give an introduction to the BBC's two showings of Mirror in 1982 and 1985, as clearly the BBC thought the film needed a little more explanation than most!

[MichaelB]

The Iain Banks adaptations are excellent as well, and I’m curious about the well-regarded Pat and Margaret with Victoria Wood

It deserves its regard. He also directed Intensive Care, which I think was the first time Alan Bennett starred in one of his own scripts, and it seems to have been a challenge for both. Not in a negative, mutually recriminatory way, but because… well, Bennett tells it better than I could:

27 April [1982]. Gavin Millar rehearses Julie Walters and me in our two main scenes from my television film Intensive Care. I play a shy schoolteacher, she a night nurse in the intensive-care unit where my father hovers between life and death. In the first scene, after a bit of palaver, I ask her to go to bed; in the second scene we do so, and in this brief absence from duty and the paternal bedside my father, of course, dies. The scene was suggested by an incident in the life of Gandhi, whose father died while he was actually screwing. I had had some thoughts while writing the play that I might act the schoolmaster, but coming to the bedroom scene I sighed with relief, knowing this was something I wouldn’t be prepared to tackle – an experience that occurs too frequently when I am writing for it to be just accidental; i.e. I deliberately write myself out of my own work. In this case, though, Gavin hasn’t been able to find anyone else to play the part, so here I am. It is a hard job because I have written myself very few lines, something I regularly do with the central character. Supporting parts I don’t find difficult, either to invent or to supply with dialogue; the central character is a blank, a puzzle, and one which I hope the actor will solve for me. But now the actor is me and I don’t know what to do.

[L.A.]

Re Styles of The Tubes at 72.

[domino harvey]

Jacques Perrin

Amazingly, we still have three of the Rochefort leads, but this still stinks...

Completely missed this. RIP. Fun fact I didn’t know until recently: in addition to starring, he fully funded Z upfront when he couldn’t get any studio to do it

[agnamaracs]

Re Styles of The Tubes at 72.

That really sucks... especially since she more or less dropped off the face of the earth after 1979. I missed her presence on their last three albums.

Since the article already includes "Prime Time," I feel obligated to post her other big feature.

[Fred Holywell]

Jacques Perrin

Amazingly, we still have three of the Rochefort leads, but this still stinks...

Completely missed this. RIP. Fun fact I didn’t know until recently: in addition to starring, he fully funded Z upfront when he couldn’t get any studio to do it

Missed this, too. And just a few days after the passing of Catherine Spaak. Both part of that early '60s wave of young European actors who always seemed to be alternating between French and Italian cinema. Deneuve, Belmondo, Delon, and Cardinale may have been better known, but Perrin and Spaak were talented presences in a whole spate of films. Even making at least one together, 1964's La Calda Vita.

[knives]

Orrin Hatch

[swo17]

Orrin Hatch

That actor from Traffic?

[colinr0380]

Orrin Hatch

That actor from Traffic?

There is that great extra on the Criterion DVD (and presumably Blu-ray) of all the extended footage from the montaged-up cocktail party scene in the final film that allows all the unedited discussions of different politicians with Michael Douglas's character that gives them time to put their different points of view on the drugs debate, and there is a specific 4:38 piece involving Orrin Hatch and Charles Grassley (he even turns it around on Douglas with his question to the new Drugs Czar of "what can we do to help you?", which seems to make the actor a little flustered and retreat into politician-style platitudes, which weirdly works!)

[JSC]

Eric Chappell. Writer of several British sitcoms including
Rising Damp, Only When I Laugh, and The Bounder.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lin ... e-61207651

[Pavel]

Kane Tanaka, previously thought to be the oldest living person

[MichaelB]

She may be the oldest person whose age was ever authenticated, if a theory about Jeanne Calment turns out to have a factual basis.

(Namely, that the woman claiming to be Jeanne Calment might have been her daughter, although the evidence is admittedly circumstantial.)