Passages

[dadaistnun]

Jane Goodall

[Gregory]

It was just announced that actor Patrick Murray has died (68, lung cancer). He was known for his performances in Alan Clarke films, Quadrophenia, the series Only Fools and Horses in its over two-decade run, and more. Very sad news

[hearthesilence]

Jane Goodall

Quite an extensive filmography herself, she was even at the 2017 New York Film Festival for Brett Morgen's film on her. From what I can tell, she was in excellent physical and mental health up to the day she died (plenty of photos attest to this since she was on a speaking tour), so even though 91's a mighty impressive age, it's still a bit startling that she would suddenly pass.

Can't say the same for Chris Dreja, who just died and was in very poor health for quite a while now (at least going back to his forced retirement in 2013). He was a founding member of the Yardbirds, playing rhythm guitar for most of their existence (including their most enduring records), but he also played with other instruments and like the other band members was a co-writer on many of their originals, particularly on their greatest work, Yardbirds (aka Roger the Engineer) - he even drew the cover.

[colinr0380]

Paula Shaw at 84 years old on 10th September, as noted near to the end of the Red Letter Media review of Freddy vs. Jason.

Lots of TV series, but film-wise she appears in the supporting cast of two Tom DeSimone films, 1977's talking vagina movie Chatter-Box and 1984's Savage Streets as the murdered friend that sends Linda Blair on a Death Wish-style revenge spree.

She also briefly turns up as a coroner in Christopher Nolan's 2002 remake of Insomnia, but most notably of all replaces Betsy Palmer in the role of Jason's mother in 2003's Freddy vs Jason (which actually makes a kind of sense since "Mother" in those scenes is just Freddy playing a trick on Jason!)

[MichaelB]

In a bizarre "gosh, what a small world this is" coincidence, my wife's PhD supervisor is the author of The Vagina: A Cultural History, which my Kindle search informs me refers to Chatterbox no fewer than twenty times, and discusses the film in some detail. Although she doesn't mention Paula Shaw by name, possibly because that's not really relevant to the book's focus.

Interestingly, Chatterbox's obvious French model, Claude Mulot's Le Sexe qui parle (aka Pussy Talk) only gets mentioned four times.

(My wife has pretty much ordered me to say "yes" if I'm ever offered a commentary gig on a hardcore porn film; she could hardly be less of a cinephile – as far as she's concerned, we went to a Robert Redford tribute screening of All the President's Men last night for historical/political reasons – but anything graphically sexual is very much her area, as it were.)

[JSC]

Patricia Routledge, best known for Keeping up Appearances, though personally it's her performances in two
Alan Bennett television plays, A Woman of No Importance and Talking Heads: A Lady of Letters, that have
stuck with me.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czdjegvjz3do

[MichaelB]

She definitely seems to have been one of Bennett's favourite interpreters, along with Thora Hird and Maggie Smith.

I saw her on stage once in 1982, courtesy of the original run of Michael Frayn's Noises Off, which remains pretty much the funniest thing I've ever seen in the theatre. She was, of course, magnificent - I never saw the Peter Bogdanovich film, as I just couldn't envisage it working anywhere near as well without the high-tension live-performance element, but she created the part subsequently played by Carol Burnett.

[colinr0380]

Similarly the one segment of the recent return of the Talking Heads series that unfortunately did not really work for me was Imelda Staunton doing the remake of A Lady of Letters, just because Routledge really owned that role, doing a kind of proto-Hyacinth Bouquet with her busybody lady with time on her hands writing letters to various departments concerned about the behaviour of her neighbours, until the tables get turned and she ends up going to jail for her sustained campaign of harassment of the local community. Those final two scenes are really key to Routledge's performance, where we get the upbeat and sunny jail scene where she is finally in her element putting her managerial skills to use in organising everyone (and running typing classes!) and then the night time one of somehow feeling that she has found a place in the world, albeit behind bars! Its kind of Jeanne Dielman-like in that way.

EDIT: Here's a full version of A Lady of Letters.

[Wigs by Leonard]

Show queens of the world treasure Patricia Routledge for her absolutely indescribable starring role in the 1968 Broadway musical megaflop Darling of the Day, fka Married Alive!, in which she costarred with Vincent Price for a mere 32 performances and still won the Best Actress Tony. Her eleven-o'clock-number, "Not On Your Nellie," despite being on one level just a reinvigorated "Get Me to the Church On Time," is a tour de force and I believe every breathless reviewer writing her love letters while damning the musical around her. I was just thinking this week about how if I got the chance to time travel and watch one Golden Age leading lady performance, it'd be her over Barbra in Funny Girl, Merman in Gypsy, or even Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing.

[Mr. Deltoid]

Similarly the one segment of the recent return of the Talking Heads series that unfortunately did not really work for me was Imelda Staunton doing the remake of A Lady of Letters, just because Routledge really owned that role, doing a kind of proto-Hyacinth Bouquet with her busybody lady with time on her hands writing letters to various departments concerned about the behaviour of her neighbours, until the tables get turned and she ends up going to jail for her sustained campaign of harassment of the local community. Those final two scenes are really key to Routledge's performance, where we get the upbeat and sunny jail scene where she is finally in her element putting her managerial skills to use in organising everyone (and running typing classes!) and then the night time one of somehow feeling that she has found a place in the world, albeit behind bars! Its kind of Jeanne Dielman-like in that way.

It's really one of the great marriages of writer and performer, that monologue. Absolutely peerless!

[MichaelB]

Similarly the one segment of the recent return of the Talking Heads series that unfortunately did not really work for me was Imelda Staunton doing the remake of A Lady of Letters...

I originally assumed that the two Thora Hird Talking Heads weren't remade because Hird was so definitive that it would have been pointless, but it seems that it was for the rather more practical reason that it was a lockdown project and they didn't want to risk the health of an elderly actress who was statistically more vulnerable to catching the virus and dying from it.

[thirtyframesasecond]

KUA was such a staple of my 90s childhood and it seems to have travelled worldwide judging by some of the tributes I've seen today. The strongest British sitcoms are usually about the same thing; the man/woman with an overinflated sense of their own worth and their desperation to prove it to others usually has disastrous and hilarious consequences. Whether it's the correction of her surname, the naive conversations with Sheridan (and his 'friend' Tarquin), her intimidation of Elizabeth and Emmett, or her tall tales about what her sisters do/have - and then she was such a physical presence in the show too.

[Lemmy Caution]

I was in Tanzania back in February, and they were just preparing to open a Jane Goodall Museum in Arusha Tanzania, with Goodall presiding. So its nice she was able to see that legacy project completed. Too bad we were there two weeks before the opening. The Goodall Museum is fairly large scale, includes documentary films and interviews, along with exhibits and info on her remarkable career. Fortunately the museum has significant funding from the Arusha Cultural Heritage Centre. We had heard that Goodall was becoming frail, and I think she was aware that this speaking tour was her last and she might not finish it. Quite an impressive life.

I just casually started talking to a man in golf attire directing a worker at the Arusha Cultural Heritage Centre, and he turned out to be the owner of the large complex, wealthy from selling tanzanite to Tiffany. The complex is half large gift shop and half African art museum, with an impressive and extensive collection of sculptures, paintings, masks, religious items from all over the continent. There is also a case filed with small pieces of tanzanite, which they'd weigh and tell you small pieces might be in the $5K - $10K range, bigger ring size pieces in the $50K - $80K range. And now there's a 3rd part, a separate building housing the Goodall Museum.

[colinr0380]

Here's Patricia Routledge doing her Kitty character from Victoria Wood's series

[hearthesilence]

We lost a giant. Ken Jacobs.

[Never Cursed]

John Woodvine. Awful day for nonagenerians in film

[JSC]

Woodvine did a great bit as Sir Francis Drake in Elizabeth R.

[Aunt Peg]

William Wise, 84, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0936429/?re ... m%2520wise

I know this is rather belated as William Wise passed away just over a year ago according to imdb but it turns out he doesn't have a Wikipedia page and I could not find any internet news reports of his passing. I just happened upon this information because I looked at his imdb page.

He didn't have many credits but I remember being very impressed with his work in In the Bedroom (2001) as Celia Weston's husband, Matt's (Tom Wilkinson) best friend.

[colinr0380]

Chinese actor Yu Menglong at age 37 after a 'fall from a building', which is now having questions raised as to the nature of his death.

[hearthesilence]

We lost a giant. Ken Jacobs.

Lots of wonderful tributes on social media. Two favorites:

One from Andrew Lampert and one from M.M. Serra.

[thirtyframesasecond]

John Woodvine. Awful day for nonagenerians in film

Always remember him from An American Werewolf in London.

[jazzo]

What a wonderful actor he was. He’s great in so many things, although, like many of us North Americans, my first exposure to him was his starchy, dryly funny doctor in American Werewolf.

My favourite performance of his was as the conflicted father of a gay man who falls in love with a straight woman in Russell T Davies’ deeply moving limited series, Bob & Rose.

[Orlac]

John Woodvine. Awful day for nonagenerians in film

Always remember him from An American Werewolf in London.

He was terribly wasted in the Doctor Who serial "The Armageddon Factor" where he spends several episodes stuck in a time-loop with Pat Gorman repeating the same five seconds of dialogue adinfinitum.

I think, without checking, he is the dad of Mary Woodvine who was a weird 3-eyed psychic alien on Space Precinct.

[colinr0380]

He is also in a small role in The Devils, with the moment in the (major spoiler)

Spoiler

execution that completes one of the subplots of the people who have a vested interest in seeing Grandier die, in which he holds up Grandier's newborn baby, saying "Watch, bastard. See how your mother's honor was avenged."

And he appears in the BBC Shakespeare cycle too, in the adaptation of Pericles, Prince of Tyre as King Antiochus in the opening section. Who proves to be quite the baddie himself!

[GaryC]

I think, without checking, he is the dad of Mary Woodvine who was a weird 3-eyed psychic alien on Space Precinct.

He was. His last role was a small one in Enys Men, in which she played the lead.