Gone With or Without fanfare

[RedRiver]

Oh, my goodness! I'm so sad to learn of the passing of this very talented novelist. One of the best crime writers of his generation. "If it sounds like writing, re-write it." Did any author ever practice that principle to greater success? Now there's one less publication to look forward to. No longer will I rush to the store for the new Elmore Leonard book. But you can bet future generations will enjoy the old ones.

Another gifted writer named George V. Higgins said something like this: "People should stop comparing Elmore Leonard to me and compare me to him." This enormously popular author will be missed by numerous fans.

[Lzcutter]

Magnum Force director Ted Post has died. He was 95.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Ted Post, who directed Clint Eastwood on TV’s Rawhide and in the classic action films Hang ’Em High and Magnum Force before clashing with the actor, has died. He was 95.

Post, who also helmed 56 episodes of the venerable CBS Western Gunsmoke, 90 installments of the 1960s ABC primetime soap Peyton Place and the 1981 pilot episode for the famed CBS cop show Cagney & Lacey, died early Tuesday at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, a family friend told The Hollywood Reporter.

Post’s feature work also included the sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970); the horror film The Baby (1973); the sexually provocative The Harrad Experiment (1973); the Elliott Gould comedy Whiffs (1975); the Burt Lancaster starrer Go Tell the Spartans (1978); Good Guys Wear Black (1978), toplined by Chuck Norris; and Nightkill (1980) with Robert Mitchum.

For more details: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/m ... ies-609803

[Lzcutter]

Acclaimed cinematographer Gilbert Taylor (Star Wars, The Omen, A Hard Day's Night) has died. He was 99.

Gilbert Taylor, the famed British cinematographer who shot the first Star Wars film for George Lucas, Dr. Strangelove for Stanley Kubrick, Repulsion for Roman Polanski and The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, has died. He was 99.

Taylor died Friday at his home on the Isle of Wight, his wife, Dee, told the BBC.

During a career that began as assistant cameraman on 1930's Rookery Nook and lasted almost 65 years, Taylor also worked on the war drama Ice Cold in Alex (1958); The Bedford Incident (1965); Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film, Frenzy (1972); Richard Donner's horror classic The Omen (1976); the Frank Langella-starring Dracula (1979); and the fantasy Flash Gordon (1980).

Two films that he shot for Polanski -- the nightmarish black-and-white horror film Repulsion (1965), starring Catherine Deneuve, and Cul-de-Sac (1966) -- earned Taylor BAFTA nominations in consecutive years. He also shot the director's MacBeth (1971) and the Polanski-written A Day at the Beach (1972).

Taylor did special effects photography on war movie The Dam Busters (1955) and shot episodes of the 1960s TV series The Avengers. He retired from film work in 1994.

In an interview published in American Cinematographer magazine in 2006, when he was given the society's International Achievement Award, Taylor described his work on Star Wars (1977).

“George avoided all meetings and contact with me from day one, so I read the extra-long script many times and made my own decisions as to how I would shoot the picture,” he said. “I took it upon myself to experiment with photographing the lightsabers and other things onstage before we moved on to our two weeks of location work in Tunisia.

“I am most happy to be remembered as the man who set the look for Star Wars. I wanted to give it a unique visual style that would distinguish it from other films in the science fiction genre. I wanted Star Wars to have clarity, because I don’t think space is out of focus.”

For more detaisl, go here: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/s ... ies-613654

[clore]

NEW YORK (AP) — Julie Harris, one of Broadway's most honored performers, whose roles ranged from the flamboyant Sally Bowles in "I Am a Camera" to the reclusive Emily Dickinson in "The Belle of Amherst," died Saturday. She was 87.

Harris died at her West Chatham, Mass. home of congestive heart failure, actress and family friend Francesca James said.

Harris won a record five Tony Awards for best actress in a play, displaying a virtuosity that enabled her to portray an astonishing gallery of women during a theater career that spanned almost 60 years and included such plays as "The Member of the Wedding" (1950), "The Lark" (1955), "Forty Carats" (1968) and "The Last of Mrs. Lincoln" (1972).

She was honored again with a sixth Tony, a special lifetime achievement award in 2002. Only Angela Lansbury has neared her record, winning four Tonys in the best actress-musical category and one for best supporting actress in a play.

Harris had suffered a stroke in 2001 while she was in Chicago appearing in a production of Claudia Allen's "Fossils." She suffered another stroke in 2010, James said.

"I'm still in sort of a place of shock," said James, who appeared in daytime soap operas "All My Children" and "One Life to Live."

"She was, really, the greatest influence in my life," said James, who had known Harris for about 50 years.

Television viewers knew Harris as the free-spirited Lilimae Clements on the prime-time soap opera "Knots Landing." In the movies, she was James Dean's romantic co-star in "East of Eden" (1955), and had rolls in such films as "Requiem for a Heavyweight" (1962), "The Haunting" (1963) and "Reflections in a Golden Eye" (1967).

Yet Harris' biggest successes and most satisfying moments have been on stage. "The theater has been my church," the actress once said. "I don't hesitate to say that I found God in the theater."

The 5-foot-4 Harris, blue-eyed with delicate features and reddish-gold hair, made her Broadway debut in 1945 in a short-lived play called "It's a Gift." Five years later, at the age of 24, Harris was cast as Frankie, a lonely 12-year-old tomboy on the brink of adolescence, in "The Member of the Wedding," Carson McCullers' stage version of her wistful novel.

The critics raved about Harris, with Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times calling her performance "extraordinary — vibrant, full of anguish and elation."

"That play was really the beginning of everything big for me," Harris had said.

The actress appeared in the 1952 film version, too, with her original Broadway co-stars, Ethel Waters and Brandon De Wilde, and received an Academy Award nomination.

Harris won her first Tony Award for playing Sally Bowles, the confirmed hedonist in "I Am a Camera," adapted by John van Druten from Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories." The play later became the stage and screen musical "Cabaret." In her second Tony-winning performance, Harris played a much more spiritual character, Joan of Arc in Lillian Hellman's adaptation of Jean Anouilh's "The Lark." The play had a six-month run, primarily because of the notices for Harris.

The actress was something of a critics' darling, getting good reviews even when her plays were less-well received. These included such work as "Marathon '33," ''Ready When You Are, C.B.!" and even a musical, "Skyscraper," adapted from an Elmer Rice play, "Dream Girl."

Her third Tony came for her work in "Forty Carats," a frothy French comedy about an older woman and a younger man. It was a big hit, running nearly two years.

Harris won her last two Tonys for playing historical figures — Mary Todd Lincoln in "The Last of Mrs. Lincoln" and poet Emily Dickinson in "The Belle of Amherst" by William Luce. The latter, a one-woman show, became something of an annuity for Harris, a play she would take around the country at various times in her career.

The actress liked to tour, even going out on the road in such plays as "Driving Miss Daisy" and "Lettice & Lovage" after they had been done in New York with other stars.

Harris' last Broadway appearances were in revivals, playing the domineering mother in a Roundabout Theatre Company production of "The Glass Menagerie" (1994) and then "The Gin Game" with Charles Durning for the National Actors Theatre in 1997.

In 2005, she was one of five performers to receive Kennedy Center honors.

Harris was born on Dec. 2, 1925, in Grosse Pointe, Mich., the daughter of an investment banker. She grew up fascinated by movies, later saying she thought of herself as plain-looking and turned to acting as a way of becoming other persons.

She made her stage debut at the Grosse Pointe Country Day School in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" at age 14. In the years that followed, she studied drama in finishing school, prep school, Yale University and the Actor's Studio.

Before "Knots Landing," Harris made numerous guest-starring television appearances on dramas and was a regular on two quickly canceled series — "Thicker Than Water" in 1973 and "The Family Holvak" in 1975.

Her Emmys were for performances in two "Hallmark Hall of Fame" presentations: "Little Moon of Alban" in 1958 and "Victoria Regina" in 1961.

Harris was married three times, to lawyer Jay I. Julian, stage manager Manning Gurian and writer William Erwin Carroll. She had one son, Peter Alston Gurian.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[JackFavell]

I am really shocked and saddened by this. Julie Harris was one of two actresses (the other being Colleen Dewhurst) who served as an inspiration to me as a young girl, smitten with the theater and longing to go off to become...something special... something more than I am.

I saw Harris on TV in two plays on PBS at around age 13 or 14, and thought she was wonderful, especially as Emily Dickinson in THE BELLE OF AMHERST. Later on, I had the chance to perform this play myself, and I'll tell you, the hard part was NOT playing it like Julie Harris! She was incredibly funny, warm and wise as the poet, and I couldn't forget her performance. It was a tour de force.

I simply can't believe she was 87, she was always so vibrant, sometimes stridently so, but still, so alive. Later on, I saw her in East of Eden, and Member of the Wedding. At one point the bloom came off the rose, and I felt I had grown out of her, her shrillness sometimes bothered me. But recently, I found a copy of The Belle of Amherst, and the old spell went to work on me.

She taught me so much of the craft of acting - not being afraid to go to the places that others might fear, internally...the shrill, the ugly, or the hateful as well as the soft, the beautiful or the sublime. How to have an inner voice and an outer one that might be at odds with each other. To consider the audience as a co-conspirator in a great endeavor, or perhaps a practical joke. Through her work, I learned to communicate directly with an audience, and to share myself with them, to really see the way they communicate back in enormous waves of appreciation. I'll forever be grateful to her for the gift of truth, the gift of love of live theater that she gave me.

"A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit. Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see"

- Susan Dickinson

[RedRiver]

Good heavens. This is a loss. I say this based on what I've heard more than my own experience. Yes, I've seen her in movies. She's fine in THE HAUNTING, EAST OF EDEN. Of the outstanding cast of REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT, she just might be the best. But it's the New York theatre scene that knew her best. I've not been exposed to that. I suspect it's these fans who will mourn the most. Again, such a loss.

[sandykaypax]

Wendy--I am floored by the eloquence of your thoughts about what Julie Harris taught you about acting. Bravo!

I am saddened by her death. A great, great actress.

Sandy K

[JackFavell]

Sandy, thank you.

[Professional Tourist]

Here is an article that Julie Harris wrote some time ago for Guideposts magazine. Click here. Although it has a religious angle, it shows something of her experience as an actress, and that talent and self-confidence do not necessarily come together.

[JackFavell]

Thanks for the article PT. I guess we all have doubts or falter at times. Maybe artists are more familiar with those feelings, and that's why they become artists. That way they can reach us on those levels all the better.

[Rita Hayworth]

Same here ... PT. Good Reading Material.

[Nick]

Actress Maxine Stuart died on 6 June 2013 at the age of 94.

From the NY Times:

Maxine Stuart, 94, Dies; Acted on Stage, Film and TV

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: June 17, 2013

Maxine Stuart’s stage, film and television career spanned more than six decades, including a recurring role on the soap opera “The Edge of Night” and a guest spot on a memorable episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

But she was equally well known to readers of Helene Hanff’s nonfiction books “84, Charing Cross Road” and “Underfoot in Show Business” as Ms. Hanff’s deliciously dizzy sidekick in their attempts to make it on Broadway in the 1930s and ’40s.

Ms. Stuart, who died on June 6 at 94, makes several cameo appearances in “84,” as the book is known to its ardent fans. First published in 1970, it is an epistolary memoir of Ms. Hanff’s long correspondence with the staff of a London bookshop. (In the 1987 film version of the book, starring Anne Bancroft as Ms. Hanff, Ms. Stuart is played by Jean De Baer.)

In “Underfoot,” Ms. Stuart is a genuine co-star. That book, published in 1962, recounts Ms. Hanff’s years in New York as a struggling playwright in tandem with Ms. Stuart’s as a struggling actress.

The warm, adventurous, impecunious friendship of the two young women began in the late 1930s in the backstage ladies’ room of the Morosco Theater, after Ms. Hanff saw one of the many flops in which Ms. Stuart seemed condemned to appear.

Her description of Ms. Stuart’s daily life — the voice and diction lessons (which entailed screaming “Oh, NO!” at top volume in the bathroom of her parents’ apartment); the audition rounds; the elation of being cast; the deflation of closing — is a window onto the existence of a working, and sometimes out-of-work, actor in the years before television devoured Broadway.

The book is also a visitors’ manual to a vanished New York — the New York of Schrafft’s, the Automat and residential hotels for nice young women — in which it was actually possible to live by the young Ms. Stuart’s credo, “Nothing should cost anything.”

In Ms. Stuart’s resourceful hands, even Broadway cost nothing. Several nights a week, the two friends, wearing no coats, would arrive at a theater of their choice in time for the Act 1 intermission.

On the sidewalk, they mingled with audience members who had gone outside to smoke. (Even in the coldest weather, no self-respecting New York theatergoer on a cigarette break bothered with a coat.)

Drifting inside, the young women made for the best seats without coats on them and sat down. They saw many plays — minus the first acts — and caught many colds.

Maxine Shlivek was born on June 28, 1918, in Deal, N.J., and reared in Lawrence, on Long Island, and Manhattan.

Her film credits include “Days of Wine and Roses” (1962) and “Private Benjamin” (1980). On television, she portrayed the stenographer Grace O’Keefe on “The Edge of Night.”

Ms. Stuart was seen on dozens of other shows, including “Perry Mason,” “Dr. Kildare,” “Chicago Hope” and “The Wonder Years,” for which she received a 1989 Emmy nomination as Kevin’s piano teacher.

She had a pivotal guest role in “Eye of the Beholder,” a “Twilight Zone” episode first broadcast in 1960. Ms. Stuart played a hospital patient — her face, never seen, is swathed in bandages — who endures repeated failed operations in an attempt to correct her freakish appearance.

When the bandages are removed, doctors pronounce the latest operation a failure too. The patient’s face is disclosed to be that of a beautiful woman, from that point on played by Donna Douglas. The doctors and nurses are revealed to have hideous, porcine faces.

That Ms. Stuart was deemed not pretty enough to play the unveiled patient in a show about beauty as a socially constructed concept was an irony not lost on her, she said in interviews.

After a brief early marriage that ended in divorce, Ms. Stuart married Frank Maxwell, an actor. Their marriage ended in divorce; Ms. Stuart’s third husband, David Shaw, a playwright and screenwriter, died in 2007.

Ms. Stuart is survived by three daughters, Chris Ann Maxwell, who confirmed her mother’s death, at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif.; Ellen Shaw Agress; and Liz Shaw Baron; four grandchildren; and a great-grandchild. Ms. Hanff died in 1997, at 80.

Before moving to Los Angeles in the late 1950s, Ms. Stuart made repeated, if short-lived, outings on the New York stage.

“Maxine appeared in 11 Broadway plays, most of which opened on a Tuesday night,” Ms. Hanff wrote. “On Wednesday came the flop notices, on Thursday an empty house, on Friday the closing notice went up, on Saturday the show closed and on Sunday Maxine slept it off.”

“And so, on Monday,” Ms. Hanff continued, “she was once more to be found in her parents’ apartment on West End Avenue ready to resume the normal daily life of a glamorous young actress by screaming ‘Oh, NO!’ in the bathroom.”

[Nick]

Also, we can't forget Fran Warren, who died back in March 2013 at the age of 86.

From NY Times:

Fran Warren, Singer in Big-Band Era, Dies at 87

By PETER KEEPNEWS

Published: March 21, 2013

Fran Warren, one of the last surviving singing stars of the big-band era, died at her home in Brookfield, Conn., on March 4, her 87th birthday.

Her death was confirmed by a spokesman, Alan Eichler.

Best known for her hit 1947 recording of “A Sunday Kind of Love” with the Claude Thornhill band, Ms. Warren began singing as a teenager and maintained an active career into the late 1990s. Among the other bandleaders with whom she sang were Art Mooney, Charlie Barnet and — in the 1960s, when the appeal of big-band jazz had become mostly nostalgic — Harry James.

She made the move from band vocalist to solo act in the late 1940s and had a number of other hit records, including the whimsically titled “I Said My Pajamas (and Put On My Pray’rs),” a duet with Tony Martin, in 1950. After her popularity waned with the advent of rock ’n’ roll, she worked as an actress, starring in regional productions of “The Pajama Game” and other musicals.

She also appeared frequently on television, notably on “The Tonight Show” when first Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson were the hosts. Her only film credit of note was “Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd.”

Fran Warren was born Frances Wolfe in the Bronx on March 4, 1926. Interested in music from an early age, she began singing at clubs as a teenager and auditioned for Duke Ellington’s orchestra at 16. That audition was unsuccessful, but her career began in earnest shortly after that.

In later years Ms. Warren performed in cabarets and played the title role in a production of “Mame.” Reviewing her performance at Freddy’s Supper Club in Manhattan in 1984, Stephen Holden of The New York Times noted that she alternated “between aiming for torchy drama and being gregariously down-to-earth.”

Survivors include two daughters.

[Nick]

Nick, thank you for posting these obituaries. The story of Maxine Stuart certainly gives us a window into the life of an aspiring actress of the time.

Thanks. I'm working on a project that will try to bring more attention to all living actors/actresses that weren't super famous. I found out about the relatively forgotten Maxine Stuart as I was looking for names.

For my project, I've created Wikipedia articles for 5 classic performers that were active during the 30s, 40s & 50s.

Connie Sawyer (1912-)
Monica Lewis (1922-)
Jean Porter (1922-)
Noreen Nash (1924-)
Tommy Kelly (1925-)

We don't know how long we will have people from this era with us, so now is the time to let the world know they exist.