Gone With or Without fanfare

[CineMaven]

Aaaah yes Joe. Junior's. Took a slice home. Pineapple cheesecake. The lecture was inside Long Island University ( which is across the street from Junior's. ) After the lecture, I took my friend to LIU's gymnasium. Her jaw dropped when I showed her the remnants of the old Paramount. You could still see the proscenium arch way up up up...

[JackFavell]

How very sad this last month has been!

Favorite Celeste Holm scene:

Her hysterical laughter when Margo tells her she doesn't want the part in hubby's play in ALL ABOUT EVE. The tremendous relief and humor in that scene, and how natural Celeste is as she's laughing always makes me laugh too.

I too just love her performance in Gentleman's Agreement, Maven.

But probably this is how I will always remember her, as the Fairy Godmother from 1965's Cinderella:

[feaito]

How sad, rest in peace dear Celeste Holm.

Due to her passing the highlights of her career and bio were widely profiled in the newspaper I read every morning, which I found great. I did not know that she and Bette Davis' did not get along when they filmed All About Eve.

[RedRiver]

I bet that Ms. Holm would probably smile if she knew she was being remembered so fondly.

She shouldn't be surprised. She was a great talent, and as Theresa's story indicates, there are still fans who appreciate that. Gone. Not forgotten.

[moira finnie]

Here's a great story about feature writer Susan King's encounter with the late Celeste Holm from The Los Angeles Times. The actress recalled her own endearing and funny interactions with two of Britain's best in her youth: Flora Robson and Leslie Howard.

Celeste Holm wasn't afraid to speak her mind

By Susan King

July 15, 2012, 1:05 p.m.

Celeste Holm, who died Sunday in Manhattan at the age of 95, created the role of the sassy Ado Annie — "I Cain't Say No" — in the original 1943 Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's seminal musical "Oklahoma!"

Holm also won the supporting actress Oscar for 1947's "Gentleman's Agreement" for her role as the lonely and sympathetic secretary.

In person, she was someone who wasn't afraid to speak her mind.

Warm and gracious, she had been in the business for 60 years when I interviewed her in 1997. At the time, Holm was appearing in "Promised Land," a spinoff of "Touched by an Angel" in which she played Gerald McRaney's mother.

She took no prisoners when it came to her views on the business. Asked about the current state of Hollywood, she replied:

"I think we seem to be in the middle of a suicide on the part of the motion picture industry. I don't think the motion picture people realize the influence they have and they are making such nonsense!"...MORE at the LA Times

[Robert Regan]

Thanks for sharing that interview, Moira. Good stuff!

[mrsl]

.
The title of this thread is very apropos to the passing of Ms. Celeste Holmes. By that I mean she should have had more attention given to her passing. A lovely lady, a fine actress who did both comedy and drama on screen and on stage. We devote days to druggies and divorces but let the passing of a fine lady like Ms. Holmes just float by like a waft of sweet air.

Rest in Peace Celeste, those who fully appreciated you will remember.
.

[mongoII]

Anne, for your information the death of Celeste HOLM was all over the internet and on radio and TV, for two days now. Not to mention right here on the Oasis. We all adored her.
Add to that a wonderful memorial of clips currently on TCM.

[Professional Tourist]

Television and film director William Asher has died at age 90. Here is the notice at Variety:

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118056655

He is probably best known for his work on I Love Lucy and Bewitched.

RIP Mr. Asher.

[CineMaven]

WHAT?!!! Geezus! ( Married to Elizabeth Montgomery. )

[Professional Tourist]

Erin Murphy, who worked with William Asher on "Bewitched" and kept in contact with him over the years, has posted a touching remembrance to her blog: click here.

Sigh.

[moira finnie]

The Grim Reaper keeps working overtime this summer...unfortunately.

Angharad Rees (1949-2012): The lovely, impish waif vividly remembered by those who were charmed by her in Poldark has died after a lifetime that encompassed all the arts, not just acting.

From The Guardian:

The actor Angharad Rees, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 63, soared to fame in Poldark (1975-77), the BBC's dramatisation of Winston Graham's novels set in 18th-century Cornwall. Rees played the fiery servant Demelza, whose beautiful smile, wide-open eyes, flowing red locks and headstrong nature won over the brooding hero.

Robin Ellis starred as Ross Poldark, the British army officer returning home from the American war of independence to find his father dead, the family estate run down and their tin mines about to be sold. He seeks to reignite the flames with his fiancee, the aristocratic Elizabeth (Jill Townsend), but discovers she is set to marry his cousin. Poldark finds a soulmate in the miner's daughter Demelza after stopping a stallholder at Redruth fair from thrashing her for stealing. He offers her a job as his kitchen maid, and later marries her.

The costume drama, which ran for two series and attracted up to 15 million viewers in Britain and many more around the world, was particularly popular with women, who swooned over Ellis and admired the feistiness of Rees's character. The wild Cornish locations were also impressive at a time when the majority of costume dramas were almost entirely studio-bound.

Rees was born in London, the daughter of a distinguished Welsh psychiatrist, Linford Rees, and his wife, Catherine. When Angharad was a baby, her parents moved the family back to their homeland, to live in Cardiff.

In the mid-1960s she gained experience as an assistant stage manager and actor at the West Cliff theatre, in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. She made her screen debut in 1968, as the parlourmaid in a BBC television adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, and had one-off parts in TV dramas and comedies including The Avengers (1968) and Doctor in the House (1969).

Rees played Jack the Ripper's murderous daughter in the Hammer horror film Hands of the Ripper (1971) and appeared as Gossamer Beynon, alongside Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O'Toole, in Under Milk Wood (1972). Although she had few further film parts, Rees seemed ever-present on television throughout the 1970s. Some of her best roles included Sarah Churchill, the daughter of the wartime prime minister Winston Churchill (played by Burton) in The Gathering Storm (1974), and Celia in a 1978 production of As You Like It, opposite Helen Mirren. She also guest-starred in The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show (1977), an accolade in itself.

As Lady Evelyn Herbert, she teamed up with Ellis again in the television film The Curse of King Tut's Tomb (1980). Later, she starred as the remarried former wife of Paul Nicholas's vet in the sitcom Close to Home (1989-90) and joined the second series of Trainer (1992) as Caroline Farrell, coping with her drinking and gambling husband Freddie (Jeremy Sinden).

She appeared in the West End in It's a Two Feet Six Inches Above the Ground World (Wyndham's theatre, 1970) and The Millionairess (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 1978-79). In 1973, she married the actor Christopher Cazenove, with whom she had two sons. The couple divorced in 1994. Their eldest child, Linford, died in a car accident in 1999.

Rees subsequently gave up acting in order to concentrate on developing her own jewellery design business, including a shop in Knightsbridge. She described this new career as therapeutic, and some of her creations were featured in the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007).

Rees had a relationship with the actor Alan Bates, who had suffered the loss of his own son years earlier. However, she turned down his proposals of marriage and the couple eventually parted in 2002. "We were very close, but it was difficult because I had not yet given way to my grief over the loss of my son," she said in an interview in 2007.

Continuing to support the arts, Rees was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and was appointed CBE in 2004. The following year, she married David McAlpine. He survives her along with her younger son, Rhys.

• Angharad Mary Rees, actor and jewellery designer, born 16 July 1949; died 21 July 2012

Simon Ward (1941-2012) was handsome and talented, beginning his career in a plum role in Young Winston and went on to many more parts in films, television and the stage.


From The Telegraph:

Relatively unknown when he landed the role, Ward won high praise for his performance in Richard Attenborough’s film, in which he was supported by established names such as John Mills, Robert Shaw, Anne Bancroft and his friend Anthony Hopkins. Ward played Churchill between the ages of 17 and 27, and also supplied the voice-over narration. He was nominated for New Male Star of the Year by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

His success in Young Winston led to roles in Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973); as the Duke of Buckingham in Richard Lester’s The Four Musketeers (1974); Aces High (1976), in which he was a fighter pilot; and Zulu Dawn (1979), about the Battle of Isandlwana. He also played, in 1975, the vet James Herriot in a television film of All Creatures Great and Small.

But Ward never really capitalised on his success as Churchill: “I knew I wasn’t going to hack it in Hollywood because I didn’t look right for American movies,” he reflected in 2000. “I would have ended up playing depressed gay marquesses. I was too young for the butler. I was not craggy enough for the conventional leading man. My nose was not big enough — you need a big nose.”

More to the point, perhaps, Ward appeared to have no real appetite for stardom, admitting: “I’ve never desperately wanted anything, neither fame nor riches.” In the event, he earned his living mainly in the theatre and television, and worried constantly about money.

The son of a car salesman, Simon Ward was born at Beckenham, Kent, on October 19 1941 and educated at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich. Aged 13 he joined the National Youth Theatre, and he later trained at Rada, where he shared a room with Hopkins. His first professional stage appearance was in 1963 at Northampton Rep, as Freddy in Hobson’s Choice. In 1965 Ward joined Birmingham Rep, where his parts included Constantine Treplieff in The Seagull. At the Oxford Playhouse in 1965-66 he was Hippolytus in Racine’s Phèdre, but his break came in 1967 when he took the lead in Joe Orton’s play Loot.

More good theatre roles followed, including Laertes in the National Theatre’s Hamlet in 1975 (with Albert Finney in the title role), and Troilus in Troilus and Cressida at the Young Vic. In 1987, however, when he was appearing at the Savoy theatre in William Douglas-Home’s comedy Portraits, Ward was mysteriously struck on the head near his Hampstead home. At first he was unaware that he had suffered multiple skull fractures, and for three days continued to appear on stage. In his role as Field Marshal Montgomery, he noticed that his beret was getting tighter on his head. He realised: “If my beret isn’t smaller, my head must be bigger.”

He had a blood clot on the brain, and underwent major surgery at Charing Cross hospital. After the incident Ward, who could not recall what had happened, suggested he had been attacked: “It’s frightening to think there is a madman loose who tried to kill me and might just try again.” His altered sense of smell was the only legacy: “I could smell pig slurry from two miles off, but a gardenia was a closed book.”

In 1995, when Stephen Fry went missing from the cast of Cell Mates in the West End, Ward took his place as the spy George Blake; he had only six days to learn his part, which included Russian as well as English. Ward’s last stage role was in late 2010, as the king in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III, with the Original Theatre Company. Although in poor health, he toured all over England, never missing a performance.

He also continued to appear on television, in shows such as A Taste for Death (1988) and Around the World in 80 Days (1989), and in staples such as Lovejoy, Ruth Rendell Mysteries and Heartbeat. In recent years he had played Sir Monty Everard in Judge John Deed (2003-07) and Bishop Gardiner in The Tudors (2009-10).

In 1997 one of Ward’s daughters, the actress and former model Sophie Ward, who was married with two children, publicly announced that she was a lesbian. “The biggest surprise was that [my wife and I] didn’t know. If you have shocks in your life — and this was a shock — you have to decide how to cope. You say: this is our child whom we adore and admire ... The only response is: 'If this is what you say, darling, then that, of course, is how it must be’ ... Sophie is very lovely and a great woman, so we’re happy she’s happy.”

He is survived by his wife, Alexandra, whom he met at Rada, and their three daughters.

Simon Ward, born October 19 1941, died July 20 2012

Frank Pierson (1925-2012) may not be a familiar name, but you know the words and the films that this man crafted.


From The Deadline.com

Frank Pierson: Writer, Director & Industry Leader Never Had “Failure To Communicate”
By PETE HAMMOND Monday July 23, 2012 @ 2:38pm PDT

Frank Pierson had a magical way with words, so it is ironic that the most famous movie line he ever wrote is: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate”. Frank Pierson never suffered “failure to communicate”. That iconic phrase uttered by Strother Martin to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke (1967) – one of Newman’s greatest movies EVER — was even voted by the American Film Institute as the No. 11 greatest movie quote of all time. It’s even now part of a Guns N’ Roses song, “Civil War”. But Pierson, who died today at age 87 after a short illness, didn’t even know if he would be allowed to keep it in the script that also has Donn Pearce credited; he was author of the original book in which the line doesn’t exist. Isn’t that always the way with such immortal lines? Thank God it was left in. It’s hard to imagine this great film without it.

Pierson was nominated for an Oscar in the adapted screenplay category for Cool Hand Luke. It was his second nomination there: Two years earlier, his script for the classic comedy Western Cat Ballou landed him his first nomination, even though, as he said, he was the “11th writer” on the project. But he was the one (with inspiration from the film’s “10th writer”, Walter Newman) who finally cracked it. turning the dramatic Western into a comedy. It won Lee Marvin the Best Actor Oscar and made a star out of a drunken cross-legged horse to whom Marvin offered half his Oscar. It too contained another now-famous line said by a young Jane Fonda: “You won’t make me cry. You’ll never make me cry”. And of course his Oscar-winning original screenplay Dog Day Afternoon (1975) saw Al Pacino chanting another famous phrase, “Attica! Attica!” According to movie lore though, that may have been improvised on set, but there can be no doubt whenever Pierson’s name was on a script it was bound to contain immortal bits of dialogue to go with great screenplay structure and high-class writing.

His films as a screenwriter included some very fine underrated movies in his later career like Presumed Innocent (1990), which starred Harrison Ford, and In Country (1989) with Bruce Willis. But for me, a nifty little 1971 caper picture starring Sean Connery, The Anderson Tapes, has become a hidden gem in the filmography of both Pierson and its director Sidney Lumet. Of course, they would collaborate four years later on Dog Day Afternoon, but check out Anderson, like Dog Day a great crime/heist picture but one that almost seems forgotten 40 years later. It shouldn’t be.

Neither should Pierson. In addition to his many achievements as a writer, he was also a fine director, although his battles with Barbra Streisand during the making of the 1976 musical reboot of A Star Is Born are well-chronicled (by him). He didn’t mince words, did he? On top of that, the man who would become so identified with the Academy missed accepting his own one and only Oscar in person because he was stuck on location shooting the movie that caused him such misery on the set. He ended up celebrating with a quick drink and then it was back to the front lines of movie-making. That was Pierson. The sour experience didn’t seem to affect his later directorial efforts. His Emmy-nominated work as a director in television movies like Citizen Cohn, Truman, Conspiracy, Dirty Pictures and other memorable films he helmed in the last quarter century was especially significant.

But I will still always think of him first and foremost as a true writing pro. He had the kind of long-lasting career as a writer that doesn’t really seem possible anymore. Starting in the golden age of television on iconic shows like Playhouse 90, Alcoa-Goodyear Theatre, Naked City, Route 66 and particularly the great Richard Boone Western series Have Gun, Will Travel, he was really able to learn his craft on the job. It’s fitting that, after a stint on The Good Wife in 2010, he was able to finish his career in his mid-80s on the most celebrated TV series of its time, Mad Men, where he worked as a consulting producer for the last couple of seasons and even co-wrote one of Season 5′s best episodes – Signal 3 – with series creator/executive producer Matt Weiner, who brought Pierson in to add veteran seasoning to the writing staff. A smart move and an unusual one in television, where writers and producers of that age and experience are usually tossed aside. This morning I emailed Weiner to get his reaction and this is what he had to say about the man he hired to be a key part of the Mad Men staff: “Frank was a giant as a man and as an artist. We all feel so lucky that we got to work with him and share his wisdom, humor, empathy and limitless imagination. I cannot express how deep a loss this is for me and the people who knew this extraordinary man and the creative adventure that was his life. The whole show is in mourning.”

The whole town is in mourning too. Pierson was someone who really gave back to this industry. As a four-term president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences and current governor for the writing branch (17 years in total on the board), he was a significant innovator and constant presence at Academy events, where he will be missed. As a former two-time president of WGA West (1981-83; 1993-95) and the winner of every significant award that Guild can give, he was an inspiration to writers everywhere. There was also his great work with the American Film Institute — and on and on. Pierson was a creative force but also a man of service who always gave back, a communicator in the best sense of the word. No failure there.

You can read an interview with Frank Pierson here: http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=4600

[mongoII]

God Almighty, is there no end to the grim reaper? Astronaut Sally Ride also died at age 61.

[JackFavell]

Oh geez. Angharad Rees was one of the main reasons I watched Poldark. She was such fun to watch.

******
Frank Pierson wrote two of my favorite movies, and I never knew it. Thanks for two great films, Mr. Pierson, and many others.


From Dog Day Afternoon:

Sonny: It's your job, right? The guy who kills me... I hope he does it because he hates my guts, not because it's his job.

and Cool Hand Luke:

Dragline: Where'd the road go?
Luke: That's it. That's the end of it.
Convict: Man, there's still daylight.
Dragline: About two hours left.
Convict: What do we do now?
Luke: Nothin'.
Dragline: Oh Luke, you wild, beautiful thing. You crazy handful of nothin'.

[Sue Sue Applegate]

I adored Angharad Rees and Poldark, Simon Ward in The Three Musketeers and Young Winston, and have seen many of Frank Pierson's words acted out on television and film screens. So sorry to hear about these three today.