Passages

[Orlac]

British actress Shirley Anne Field, who appeared in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Alfie
amongst many films and television series.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-67687117

The Entertainer and Losey's The Damned too.

I mainly remember her from Horrors of the Black Museum and Peeping Tom.

[tolbs1010]

She was good in a small role as Saeed Jaffrey's mistress in My Beautiful Laundrette.

[colinr0380]

She is also in Peeping Tom, where her bad actress character unfortunately discovers the body in the chest on the film set during one take, leading to the immortal line from the frustrated director that: "The stupid bitch has fainted in the wrong scene!"

Plus she's also in the fantastic B-movie Beat Girl from the same year (along with holding the entire drama, as a really annoying character in another film released in BFI's Flipside series: Lunch Hour). And Joseph Losey's The Damned.

[Aspect]

Man, she was really gorgeous in The Damned. The last time I rewatched it was pretty much just for her. RIP.

[beamish14]

Andre Braugher of Homicide: Life on the Street and Brooklyn Nine-Nine

[domino harvey]

Damn. He was so great on Homicide

[hearthesilence]

That was my favorite character on television - I watched that show all the time, even caught the marathons that would run on A&E during Thanksgiving. I got to meet and talk with him for like half an hour by sheer chance last year, and I didn't even mention I was a fan of the show - he was just an incredibly sweet, funny and grounded human being. Ugh, this totally sucks.

[Beloved Aunt]

..whaat?! How old could he have been? Rest in peace. PS he's also good on "Brooklyn 9-9" or whatever it's called, which is a terrific show BTW

[swo17]

He was 61. I also loved him in the show Thief

[hearthesilence]

One news outlet was informed by the family that it happened after a short illness. Made sense - he seemed like in good health and great spirits when I talked with him (would've been the fall of 2022).

[brundlefly]

Refusing to accept this as true because it would hurt too much. The amount of surprise he could introduce into his delivery kept everything on edge. It worked as well in comedy (his Raymond Holt was a treasure) as it did in the box on Homicide. We're lucky he had two very different extended runs, in addition to all else. We're lucky to have had him.

(I've heard good things about Men of a Certain Age, but TNT has always a foreign land to my my cable packages; I see it's now on Max (unlike actual Max shows) so will have at that come the new year.)

[Beloved Aunt]

He's supposed to have one of his best film roles in Spike Lee's Get on the Bus. Alongside that glorious ham, Ossie Davis!

[bearcuborg]

Quite good in Get On the Bus, but also he also gave a really wonderful performance in Duets. While it’s not him singing, he still performs with grace.

Of course Homicide is how I knew him best, but the first thing I saw him in was Glory. He was great in everything.

[MichaelB]

Michael Blakemore, one of the greatest stage directors of his generation, who had a brief flirtation with film as both actor (Catch Us If You Can) and director (Privates On Parade).

His original 1982 production of Michael Frayn's Noises Off is still the funniest thing I've ever seen in a theatre, and I've consciously avoided the Peter Bogdanovich film version because I just can't see it matching the original's sense of danger (which was intimately bound up with it being performed live).

[colinr0380]

I had not realised that Blakemore adapted Uncle Vanya for his Australian-set film Country Life! Which I remember being a very good film though was somewhat unfortunately overshadowed by 1994's other bawdy Australian film with Sam Neill, Sirens, which stole the show with its supermodels in various states of undress and an immediately post-Four Weddings Hugh Grant.

[GaryC]

Also made in his native Australia was the autobiographical documentary A Personal History of the Australian Surf, which had a UK cinema release in 1982 - I caught it on Channel 4 a year or so later.

[hearthesilence]

I didn't realize Homicide: Life on the Street was unavailable for streaming - one reporter said it was due to music licenses not extending to streaming and that NBC has yet to be moved to do something about it (i.e. re-license). The old DVD's can be found for very cheap prices though.

Braugher was interviewed in the New York Times this year and said this about the show: “When I think back to that initial group, that first- and second-year group, it was a wonderful cast and boy, were we quirky. Boy, were we misfits, and I loved it.” It does seem like an inspired bit of casting, grabbing some excellent talent from very different corners of American culture, but it's also sobering that Kotto, Polito, Beatty, Belzer and now Braugher are all gone from that original cast.

[Aunt Peg]

I had not realised that Blakemore adapted Uncle Vanya for his Australian-set film Country Life! Which I remember being a very good film though was somewhat unfortunately overshadowed by 1994's other bawdy Australian film with Sam Neill, Sirens, which stole the show with its supermodels in various states of undress and an immediately post-Four Weddings Hugh Grant.

I feel that Country Life, Blakemore's adaptation of Uncle Vanya, remains the best version of that play in cinema to date.

[diamonds]

Emmanuelle Debever, by suicide.

[hearthesilence]

Braugher's publicist says he passed away from lung cancer after being diagnosed with it just a few months ago.

[oh yeah]

The great cinematographer Ken Kelsch died a couple days ago. Ken shot most of Abel Ferrara's films, including Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral, The Addiction and many more... all the way from The Driller Killer in 1979 to Welcome to New York in 2014.

[Mr Sausage]

I didn't realize, but back in February veteran translator from German, John E. Woods, died. He's probably most well known for saving Thomas Mann from the stiff old Porter-Lowe translations, but he was also Arno Schmidt's translator, including what has to be one of the most herculean feats of translation anyone's attempted: Schmidt's mammoth Bottom's Dream, 1500 enormous pages (it's like three times of the size of a normal book) of Joycean wordplay and unusual text formatting. Seriously, look how big it is.

[Aunt Peg]

Georgian film director Otar Iosseliani, 89: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otar_Iosseliani

[flyonthewall2983]

Braugher's publicist says he passed away from lung cancer after being diagnosed with it just a few months ago.

One of his last performances was for a Scooby Doo movie WB scrapped last year

[pistolwink]

Georgian film director Otar Iosseliani, 89: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otar_Iosseliani

He had a long and busy life, but this still makes me quite sad. A brilliant, one-of-a-kind filmmaker -- he created one of the most singular bodies of work of the past 50 years.