Gone With or Without fanfare

[knitwit45]

Maxine Stuart



Fran Warren

[JackFavell]

That's a great idea, Nick. Too often we celebrate our stars and supporting actors only after they are gone.

[Nick]

It appears that Mike Road died back in 14 April 2013. No obituary is found, since he was a very private person (according to an IMDb user who knew him). He was born on 18 March 1918, so his final age was 95. So who was he? Well, I'll just paste the info from Wikipedia:

Mike Road was a voice actor and a Warner Bros. television series contract player whose television career dates back to the 1950s and in films to the 1940s.

As an actor, Road was a regular the ABC/Warner Brothers detective series, Surfside 6, as well as the company's The Roaring 20s. He portrayed Marshal Tom Sellers on the 1958-1959 NBC western series, Buckskin, co-starring with Sally Brophy and Tom Nolan. Road guest starred twice on Maverick as Bart Maverick's rival Pearly Gates. He appeared too on the ABC/WB western series, The Alaskans and Lawman and in other venues, Sea Hunt, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, The Wild, Wild West, and Alias Smith and Jones.

In two appearances on the ABC/WB western series, Colt .45, Road played Jesse James in "Alias Mr. Howard". He was also cast as a bandit-turned-storekeeper in the segment "Arizona Anderson", which aired on February 14, 1960. In the story line, Sam Colt, Jr., played by series character Donald May, goes undercover as a gambler in a bid to force Arizona Anderson, the owner of a general store, to reveal the location of stolen government money taken in a robbery in which Anderson had been a participant. Meanwhile, two former partners in crime appear intent on collecting their share of the loot. Catherine McLeod, Don "Red" Barry, and Arthur Space appear with Road in this episode in the roles of Kate Anderson, Yakel, and Sheriff Len Jennings, respectively.

As a cartoon voice actor, Road remains best known as the voice of Race Bannon on ABC's Jonny Quest. He was also the voice of Zandor on The Herculoids, "Ugh the giant caveman" on the Dino Boy cartoons of the Space Ghost and Dino Boy series, and Reed Richards on The New Fantastic Four cartoon series. Road retired from voice acting in 1981.

http://www.tvrage.com/person/id-8574/Mike+Road

[RedRiver]

Fascinating! I had a vague feeling I had heard the name before. You can bet I remember Race Bannon! BUCKSKIN? That one slipped by me. Of course, I was only four!

[Nick]

Wow, must be awesome to have experienced the 60s! Anyways, here's another one that died without a mention here (perhaps because she was never in Hollywood).

Rona Anderson (1926-2013), Scottish actress. Here's what Daily Telegraph had to say on 18 August 2013:

Rona Anderson, the Scottish actress, who has died aged 86, regularly starred in films throughout the 1950s, and had a stage career for more than half a century.

She was also notable for marrying her fellow Scots actor, Gordon Jackson, both on- and off-screen. Their marriage endured happily and meant that, after 1960, she took fewer roles in order to raise their two sons.

She had first met Jackson when making Floodtide (1949), a shipyard drama with some location shooting in Glasgow, made for Rank, to which she was under contract. The plot saw their two characters fall in love and two years later, in 1951, the actors married for real.

Rona Anderson acted with her husband again in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (1969); and in a BBC2 version of Somerset Maugham’s Rain (1970), with Carroll Baker as Sadie Thompson. A 1983 episode of the action series The Professionals, in which Jackson starred as the head of the unorthodox law enforcement agency CI5, featured Anderson as the mother of a stalking victim; her casting was kept secret from Jackson until the first day of shooting.

Often out on loan from Rank in the early part of her career, Rona Anderson was a sympathetic heroine in monochrome crime thrillers throughout the 1950s . In Scrooge (1951) she was cast as the sweetheart of the young Ebenezer (played by Alastair Sim’s protégé George Cole) who rejects him for his increased avariciousness. Another role founded on a character’s emerging conscience came in Soho Incident (1956), when she played the sister of a murdered boxer.

Among her genre outings, two credits stand out. The Twenty Questions Murder Mystery (1950) was set around the long-running radio quiz, with Richard Dimbleby and ITMA stalwart Jack Train appearing as themselves. And Little Red Monkey (1954) was a very early example of a television spin-off, being a reworking of a BBC thriller serial from the previous year, where the female lead had been played by Anderson’s fellow Rank contract artiste Honor Blackman.

Rona Anderson was born in Edinburgh on August 3 1926 . Following education in her home city and in Ottawa, where she was evacuated in the Second World War, she joined the Ardrossan Amateur Dramatic Society. Her training was at the Glover Turner-Robertson School of Drama, in Edinburgh’s George Street.

She joined the company of the Citizens’ Theatre Glasgow in 1945, first attracting attention in the title role of Cornelia (1946), playing a teenage force of nature. Another title role, opposite Citizens’ stalwart Duncan Macrae, was Bunty Pulls The Strings (1948), which she performed again five years later in her home city, for the Edinburgh Gateway Company.

Her West End debut was in a comedy, The White Sheep Of The Family (Piccadilly, 1951), starring Jack Hulbert. A rural comedy, A Month Of Sundays (Cambridge, 1957), in which she supported AE Matthews in his 500th role, was an early production of Michael Codron.

The well-constructed thriller Sleeping Car To Trieste (1948) gave her a screen debut, in a supporting role. For the BBC she played Robert Burns’s near-lover Nancie Maclehose in The Other Dear Charmer (1959), made for Burns’s bicentenary, with Tom Fleming as the poet.

She played the wife of Paul Scofield’s kidnapped diplomat in Christopher Hampton’s Savages (Royal Court, 1973); was in the original production of Whose Life Is It Anyway? (Mermaid, 1978); and was Lady Saltburn in a Liverpool Playhouse revival of Present Laughter (1993). All of these were alongside Tom Conti, who revelled in what he called Rona Anderson’s “sparkling personality” and became, with his wife, a close friend.

Popular within the profession, Rona Anderson was even numbered among the close friends of the temperamental Kenneth Williams. Williams made frequent visits to her Hampstead home, particularly on New Year’s Eve.

Gordon Jackson died in 1990, and she is survived by two sons.

Rona Anderson, born August 3 1926, died July 23 2013.

[knitwit45]

The lovely lady in lScrooge

[RedRiver]

That is SO one of my favorite movies. I don't think I've ever seen a bad version of the story. But this one is the big winner.

[CharlieT]

Yeah, I kinda like Scrooge, too. Right, Nancy?

[knitwit45]

Yep, Charlie T and I always fight over the aisle seat on this one!!!!

[moira finnie]

Another link in the chain connecting us to past film history has broken with the passing of A.C. Lyles. This guy knew everybody. More here:

http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-et ... 6641.story

[Lzcutter]

A.C. was a terrific guy and I always enjoyed talking with him. I was really hoping he would be at the TCM Film Festival next year. RIP, A.C.

[Sue Sue Applegate]

He was so sweet! I had so much fun talking to him at the TCM Film Festival in 2012 at Grauman's.
Rest in Peace, A.C. Lyles.

[mongoII]

I've always enjoyed watching and listening to Mr. Lyles since he was such an expert on the Golden Age of Hollywood. A dapper gent indeed, I will miss him.

[Western Guy]

Ninety-five is a great age to reach especially when you seem to retain all your faculties as, apparently, did Mr. Lyles.

Still, one of those fellas you expected to see go on forever - so this comes as a shock.

RIP Sir.

[Vecchiolarry]

Hi,

Very sad news. I knew him as Uncle Andy and he and I had tea with Adolph Zukor 'Uncle Sugar' about 3 times in the 50's at paramount.
We have lost a gentleman and a really knowledgeable man about Classic Hollywood and the many stars he actually knew personally.
He escorted Pola Negri to a couple of events during her last visit to Hollywood in 1985; and arranged her burial 2 years later. I will always love him for that...

He had had a major operation last May and remained clear-headed still at 95; I had not heard from him after that.
His wife, Martha, is still with us... My condolences to her.

R.I.P. dear man

Larry