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FrauBlucher wrote:Very sorry to hear that. M*A*S*H was one of my favorite TV shows. I still enjoy watching the reruns.

John Cusack's dad in Better Off Dead too iirc.

And both played father figures to Kelsey Grammer in Frasier-Stiers playing a gay man in fact. That must have felt good for him.

Science Fiction critic and historian Peter Nicholls, whose expertise covered both film and literature. The Enyclopedia of SF, in its various iterations, remains a key reference work for the genre.

Kate Wilhelm, novelist and short-fiction writer, mostly in the SF and crime/mystery genres, aged 89. In the SF genre, she helped establish long-running writing workshops with her husband Damon Knight. Her story "Andover and the Android" was adapted by the BBC for Out of the Unknown - one of the highest-rated episodes of the first series, but sadly now lost.

Peter Temple, aged 71. He won the Miles Franklin Award for his novel Truth and his Jack Irish series of crime novels were adapted for TV starring Guy Pearce.

Comedian Ken Dodd at 90. He is probably most famous for his songs like Happiness and brandishing his 'tickle stick' at people (and more notoriously for his tax evasion charges in the late 1980s). My dad was a big fan and went to see him perform live a number of times - Dodd's shows were notorious for overrunning considerably, to the point of two or three hours past their scheduled end time, apparently simply because he loved performing and did not want to leave an audience once he was on stage. Whenever my dad went to see one of his shows it was pretty certain that he would not be home until 1 or 2 in the morning, exhausted but glad for the experience!

Film-wise, he has a brilliant cameo in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 version of Hamlet. That is a film studded with stars doing cameos in every role (and strangely mostly comedians: Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and so on, which perhaps shows the fine line between comedy and tragedy), but compared to some of the strange casting elsewhere (Jack Lemmon as a palace guard) there is something inspired and perfectly apt about Dodd's brief wordless appearance in flashback as Yorick!

MODERATORS: PLEASE DELETE THIS POST AS I HAD DONE A REPEATED OBITUARY

colinr0380 wrote:Film-wise, he has a brilliant cameo in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 version of Hamlet. That is a film studded with stars doing cameos in every role (and strangely mostly comedians: Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and so on, which perhaps shows the fine line between comedy and tragedy), but compared to some of the strange casting elsewhere (Jack Lemmon as a palace guard) there is something inspired and perfectly apt about Dodd's brief wordless appearance in flashback as Yorick!

Yes, Dodd, Charlton Heston and possibly Robin Williams are the three bits of Hamlet stunt-casting that I'd be inclined to defend. The fact that Dodd's skull appears before the flashback makes his cameo doubly delicious, as they did a brilliant job on matching those instantly recognisable teeth.

This happened a while back but Douglas Mulder, the Dallas DA who had prosecuted Randall Adams in the murder of Officer Robert Wood. Investigating the case was, of course, the basis for The Thin Blue Line.

Did we ever find out Johan Johansson's cause of death?

dda1996a wrote:Did we ever find out Johan Johansson's cause of death?

Full toxicity screens take time. It's going to be a couple more weeks I would guess. If it wasn't drugs I would assume it was a heart condition. People who die young tend to have less complications available as culprits.

Ribs wrote:Stephen Hawking

This is an unbelievable loss. And to think he outlived doctor's expectations by decades. A remarkable human being by all accounts.

What was most remarkable to me, he was a late bloomer. I don’t think he read till 10? He wasn’t the greatest student...but most of all, his disability wasn’t an inability.

Errol Morris's fine documentary on Hawking is certainly a good introduction (and far more preferable to The Theory of Everything). And to make it to 76 with ALS is indeed remarkable.

Also, Matt Dike, who was actually a third 'brother' of the Dust Brothers when they produced one of the great albums of all-time, the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. (Nearly everything was recorded in Dike's own living room.) He also produced some of hip-hop's biggest crossover hits like "Bust a Move" and Tone-Loc's "Wild Thing" but honestly, those feel like footnotes to something like Paul's Boutique, an album that was under-appreciated in its time but is now widely recognized as a landmark masterpiece.

Ribs wrote:Stephen Hawking

Died on Pi Day and Einstein's birthday.

Danish director Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt (1931-2018)
His best known feature film - also outside of Denmark - is no doubt Once There Was a War (1966), of which Time Out Film Guide wrote "A calm, doggily funny study of a young boy growing up in the suburbs of Copenhagen during WWII. [...] Beautifully shot on location...it's a strangely haunted and haunting film, all the more effective for its insouciant air of being miles removed from the realities of war".

I also quite like Weekend (1962), a film influenced by the French new wave.

On Stephen Hawking in pop culture, he was good in the Simpsons but truly great in Futurama, especially in that "Anthology of Interest" episode (the equivalent of The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror episodes) where he, Nichelle Nicholls, Al Gore and Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax team up to stop Fry from destroying the universe! Though while Hawking has some great lines ("Yes, shove him in the tube", "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?"), Nichelle Nicholls has the best line of that episode with: "Something's wrong. Murder isn't working, and that's all we're good at"!

(Of course Al Gore's best moment in Futurama came later on in the series!)

___

Jim Bowen, famous in the 1980s as host of the gameshow involving a dart playing component, Bullseye. Which is probably most notorious for all of the "Look at what you could have won" moments, rubbing the losing contestant's faces in the fact that they failed to win that Vauxhall Nova, caravan, or speedboat! (The speedboat was actually one of my first memorable life lessons, where I asked my father why the heck people would pretend to be happy when they won a practically useless speedboat. Only for my dad to say that you just smile and say thank you on the show itself, then quietly sell it off when you are out of the limelight!)

Charlie Quintana of the Plugz

colinr0380 wrote:On Stephen Hawking in pop culture, he was good in the Simpsons but truly great in Futurama, especially in that "Anthology of Interest" episode (the equivalent of The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror episodes) where he, Nichelle Nicholls, Al Gore and Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax team up to stop Fry from destroying the universe! Though while Hawking has some great lines ("Yes, stuff him in the tube", "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?"), Nichelle Nicholls has the best line of that episode with: "Something's wrong. Murder isn't working, and that's all we're good at"!

(Of course Al Gore's best moment in Futurama came later on in the series!)

His appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation, playing poker with Data, Einstein and Newton on the holodeck, was also memorable.