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Makavejev and Legrand? Shit. I'd love to watch Manifesto but can't find it for love nor money. Simon Callow's book about it is great fun.

Dylan wrote: Sat Jan 26, 2019 7:46 am Michel Legrand. My heart is broken.

Embarrassed to say I never heard his famed jazz album until now - how did that one slip me by? He was apparently performing live as late as last spring. Terribly sad but what a long and fruitful life.

Goddamn, I love me some James Ingram. RIP...a tremendous voice.

I know chart position isn't always an indicator of quality but I'm still a little surprised that Just Once and One Hundred Ways didn't make the top ten. Those songs got a ton of airplay at the time and they stand up beautifully to this day.

The inimitable and irreplaceable Dick Miller, whose passing has reminded me that his mentor Roger Corman is himself now well into his nineties.

A Bucket of Blood is a masterpiece, RIP

Dick Miller is without a doubt my all-time favorite character actor, and has been since I was a little kid. I always wanted to meet him. He was such a wonderful presence and to this day I get extremely giddy when I see him in a movie. R.I.P.

While A Bucket of Blood is his biggest acting role, it is the numerous supporting performances dotted throughout films (especially in Joe Dante's work, where he was a kind of touchstone figure) that did so much to add extra life and vibrancy to them. Such as the gun shop owner in The Terminator (Criterion-wise, he appears in White Dog and the upcoming I Wanna Hold Your Hand). That little arc of his supporting character with Gremlins and Gremlins 2 almost perfectly encapsulates the tonal shift between those films, as in the darker and scarier first film he gets terrorised (and really implied to have been killed, as well as suggested to be just another grumpy townsperson lacking in Christmas spirit who are kind of deserving of their fate, like the lady on the malfunctioning chairlift) by the gremlins driving the bulldozer through his house, and then in the lighter, more goofy Gremlins 2 he gets to publicly fight the bat mutated gremlin, which in some ways is the act that lets him re-face and overcome his trauma in a way that few people ever have the chance to do!

He's also the equivalent of the slimy mayor from Jaws in Dante's Piranha, who is part of the classic exchange as shown in the trailer: "The piranhas...", "What about the goddamn piranhas?" "They're eating the guests, sir."

He also had an incredibly distinctive voice. You could always tell when Dick Miller appeared even if only in that form in The Aftermath!

There is a great retrospective video devoted to his appearances here and here

MichaelB that’s very nicely said...

Great post colinr0380!

Jeremy Hardy Best known as a left-wing stand-up and as frequent guest on Radio 4 shows, especially The News Quiz and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue (his terrible singing being one of many long running jokes on the latter), he also appeared in the documentary Jeremy Hardy vs The Israeli Army. He was always good value, very funny but equally self aware as a middle-class socialist with the result that his humour was pointed and his anger (almost) always tempered with good humour.

I quoted him only the other day when mock-disparaging my daughter's current taste in music: "In my young day we listened to something nice with a catchy tune, like the Sex Pistols."

That's terrible news. I was just today longing for the end to Brexit one way or the other so that stand up comedians could be allowed to be funny again (just for their sake really, as most sound very depressed at the moment) and for Hardy to come back to the News Quiz. He was by far my favourite contributor, especially for his amusing rants and digressions. He was especially good at tackling posh people, which I thought was a parody until Jacob Rees-Mogg appeared. A particularly memorable recent one was when he digressed into a holiday in which he was walking along a beach and a rather red-faced exhausted lady passed by, chasing after her dog. At least he assumed she had a dog, as she was carrying a little bag of shit...But strangely no dog in sight!

He is not in many films, so it was a surprise to see that on imdb he apparently has small roles in Mona Lisa and Mike Figgis' star-filled ensemble drama Hotel (NSFW) as the "Flamenco Troop Administrator"!

Some great tributes from Hardy's colleagues. I particularly like Jack Dee's comment:

Jack Dee wrote:Politics was central to Jeremy’s character but what made him unique was that he could be compassionate without being right-on, caring without being pious, and satirical without being a smartarse. He was 100% filled with mirth and that gave him licence to bring political topics into his comedy without ever seeming didactic or preachy. That’s a lesson to so many of us. He could get so much content past you while he was making you laugh – then on the way home you’d really start thinking about it.

And Clive Swift, probably best known as the longsuffering husband to Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced "Bouquet"!) in the BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, but he has a number of supporting roles in some great films: in Hitchock's Frenzy and a police inspector in Death Line; in The National Health; the adoptive father of Arthur in John Boorman's Excalibur (he was also in Boorman's first film Having A Wild Weekend), and a number of roles in televised Shakespeare adaptations (he turns up in Pericles, Prince of Tyre in the BBC Shakespeare series)

Andrew McCullough An early TV director.

Sad to hear of Jeremy Hardy's death as I'm just finding out about it now thanks to this thread. I hadn't been aware of him before but I personally discovered I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue over Christmas as someone had been uploading episodes on a daily basis (and has since had their account terminated) and actually didn't think his singing was as bad as made out to be by the other panelists!

Australian actress Carmen Duncan, aged 76. Before the 1980s her career was mostly on television, though her debut was in one of the very few NZ local productions of the time, Don't Let It Get You from 1966.

No obit yet, but her friends on Facebook have confirmed that actress Julie Adams has passed. Though she did lots of film and television work, she is probably best remembered as the star of The Creature From the Black Lagoon. I always liked her.

Dylan wrote: Sun Feb 03, 2019 11:53 pm No obit yet, but her friends on Facebook have confirmed that actress Julie Adams has passed. Though she did lots of film and television work, she is probably best remembered as the star of The Creature From the Black Lagoon. I always liked her.

One of the most appealing actresses at Universal in the 1950s. A nice write-up in the NYTimes has just been posted.

Czech fantasy specialist Václav Vorlíček, probably best known for Three Wishes for Cinderella (one of central Europe's best-loved films of all time), but whose filmography also includes such splendid titles as Who Wants to Kill Jessie?, You Are a Widow, Sir! and a TV series called Hamster in a Nightshirt.

Baltimore Orioles Hall of Famer Frank Robinson

More coverage from the Los Angeles Times.

There’s some good stuff on MLB Network today...god I love those old baseball stories.

Opening Day as player/manager for the Cleveland Indians Robinson initially chose not to put himself in the lineup. The general manager for the Indians implored Robinson to play that day, maintaining, "Frank, this is your day." So Robinson changed his mind and wrote his own name in at the No. 2 spot in the batting order. In his first at-bat that day, he fell behind in the count, 0-2.

"Then they throw me this bastard slider just off the outside part of the plate," Robinson said. "I thought, 'This SOB is trying to strike me out on three pitches ... on my day! He's trying to embarrass me ... on my day. No one does that to me.'"

On the next pitch, Robinson hit a home run to left center field.

As a kid, the Frank Robinson Orioles was the great team of baseball at the start of my baseball fandom journey in the late sixties. They were on The Game of the Week quite often and I became so familiar with their entire team. They were fun to watch as Frank Robinson was the cornerstone of that team. I can still name every starting position player from that team. I'm sorry to see him go. The only player to win an MVP in both leagues.