The Silver Screen Oasis

How sad. I loved his film "The Lady and the Duke" (2001).

Lynn, thanks for sharing the nice write-up on the creator of Gumby, Art Clokey. He certainly led an interesting life. I was a huge fan of Gumby and had Gumby and Pokey dolls. Okay, now I'm dating myself. Maybe they were handmedowns? Wonder whatever happened to them because I have a lot of toys from my childhood.
Birdy

I just checked and apparently Gumby shows, merchandise was introduced in the 50's but has continued off and on since so I really didn't have to 'splain myself at all. Full episodes can be seen on YouTube, if anyone's interested and videogames are available~ B

I know she's not a film star or director, but if I may be permitted to grieve over someone only distantly related to film: Miep Gies, one of the brave souls who helped to hide Anne Frank and her family and other Jewish people from the Nazis and who was instrumental in seeing that Anne's diary was preserved, died at 100 years old.

Stephen,
Thank you for drawing our attention to Miep Gies. Her life trying to help the Franks and bearing witness to the Holocaust was far more important than the world might acknowledge. Here is a link to the Washington Post obituary for her: Miep Gies Remembered

In a completely different vein than the long lives of Eric Rohmer and Miep Gies, Beverly E. Fisher has died at 67. If that name fails to ring a bell, her affair with Errol Flynn at age 15, when she was Beverly Aadland probably does remind you of a sordid past and Flynn's sometimes sorry last years. Married for forty years to Ronald Fisher, the housewife and mother reportedly told her husband that "if [Flynn] was still around, I'd be with him." You can read her obituary on the LA Times as well as an article from People magazine below:

Beverly Aadland Fisher Obituary

Beverly Aadland Fisher Interview in 1988 with People Magazine


Flynn and Aadland

Didn't see anything on the passing of Teddy Pendergrass. Too many great songs, but The Love I Lost always puts me in the back seat of my friend's mom's '69 Le Sabre, being driven home from school, singing along with Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes coming through that single dashboard speaker…

I'm not a big fan of his work, but the French director Eric Rohmer died this past week.

Moira, thanks for posting those articles about Beverley Aadland, I always wondered what happened to her after Errols' death. It's easy to think there was something amiss in their relationship because of the age difference but perhaps the simple fact is that she was young and hadn't become jaded by the world and by the 'In like Flynn' mythology that surrounded Flynn. Anyone reading her own words would know how deeply she loved him.

Robert Parker, Creator of Spenser for Hire has passed away.

Robert Parker, 77, the author of the popular "Spenser" novels about a hard-nosed Boston private investigator, has died in Cambridge, Mass.

A spokeswoman for the Cambridge Police Department says an ambulance was sent to Parker's home Monday morning after reports of a sudden death. The spokeswoman, Alexa Manocchio, says the death was of "natural causes" and is not considered suspicious.

A publicist for Parker's publisher confirmed the death but had no further details.

Parker wrote more than 50 novels, including 37 featuring Spenser. The character was the basis for the 1980s TV series "Spenser: For Hire," starring Robert Urich.

From the AP.

It's a shame about Robert B. Parker. I really enjoyed reading the Spenser novels.

There must be something about January and my favorite authors. Robert B. Parker died this January. John Mortimer (of the "Rumpole of the Bailey" novels) died last January. The January/late December before that George Macdonald Fraser (of the "Flashman" novels) died.

For those of us of a certain age, I thought you would want to know folk singer Kate McGarrigle has passed away.

TORONTO — Canadian folk singer and songwriter Kate McGarrigle, best known for performing with her sister Anna, has died of cancer. She was 63.

McGarrigle's brother-in-law, Dane Lanken, said the singer died at her Montreal home Monday night surrounded by her sisters, Jane and Anna, and her children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, also singers.

He said McGarrigle had been battling cancer since the summer of 2006. He said the cancer started in her small intestine and spread to her liver.

Kate and Anna, known as the McGarrigle Sisters, began their careers performing at Montreal coffeehouses in the 1960s with a group called the Mountain City Four. They got their break in the 1970s, when their songs were covered by numerous artists, including Linda Ronstadt, who used "Heart Like a Wheel" as the title song to one of her albums.

In 1975 they made their first record, "Kate and Anna McGarrigle," which brought them critical acclaim and additional famous covers by artists including Emmylou Harris, Judy Collins and Billy Bragg.

Their own well-known releases included "The Work Song," "Cool River" and "Lying Song."

Kate McGarrigle received the Order of Canada in 1994, one of the country's highest honors.

McGarrigle was once married to American singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Her son, Rufus Wainwright, recently canceled an upcoming tour, citing an illness in the family.

Born in Montreal, the famous singing duo grew up in the Laurentian Mountains village of Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts, Quebec. There, they learned the piano from the village nuns.

Sad times. I saw them in my first year in Montreal, completely in love with their music. (Bring a hankie if you watch this, by the way. TCM REMEMBERS, indeed.)

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"...and my love for you is like a sinking ship, and my heart is on that ship out in the ocean..."

What a line.

Love may mean never having to say your sorry but it won't keep you from passing away.

Erich Segal, the author of Love Story has passed away.

From the LA Times:

Erich Segal, a Yale University classics professor whose first novel, the weepy "Love Story," became a pop-culture phenomenon, selling more than 20 million copies in three dozen languages and spawning an iconic catchphrase of the 1970s, died Sunday in London. He was 72.

Segal had Parkinson's disease and died of a heart attack, his daughter, Francesca Segal, told the Associated Press.

"What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?" Segal wrote in the first line of the 1970 novel about star-crossed lovers, played in the blockbuster 1970 movie by Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal. The most famous line, uttered early in the film by McGraw's character and later by O'Neal's character, was "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

The sentimental romance provoked vales of tears and turned its author into a sensation practically overnight. His success unleashed "egotism bordering on megalomania," as Segal said of himself, that helped set off a backlash: He was denied tenure at Yale and "Love Story" was ignominiously bounced from the nomination slate of the National Book Awards after the fiction jury threatened to resign.

"It is a banal book which simply doesn't qualify as literature," said Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and fiction jurist William Styron.

The National Book Award for fiction that year went to Saul Bellow for "Mr. Sammler's Planet."

Segal nonetheless continued to write, operating on two planes. He produced eight more works of popular fiction, including "Oliver's Story" (1977), "The Class" (1985) and "Doctors" (1987). He also wrote the academic tomes "Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus" (1987) and "The Death of Comedy" (2001).

Segal taught at Princeton University, Dartmouth College and Brown University and was a visiting fellow at Wolfson College at Oxford University.

The son of a rabbi, Segal was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 16, 1937.

According to a 2008 essay by his daughter in Granta magazine, his early childhood was somewhat lonely: For the first six years of his life, he lived with his ailing grandmother and grandfather because his parents' apartment building did not allow children.

Left in the care of nannies, he wrote and performed his own plays, which, Francesca Segal wrote, "served the dual purpose of creating a cast of characters he cared about, and making the cast of his own life care more about him."

His father wanted him to become a rabbi, but Segal had other plans. He went to Harvard and graduated in 1958 with the dual honors of class poet and Latin salutatory orator.

While completing his doctorate at Harvard, he became a lecturer at Yale in 1964, earned his doctorate in 1965 and by 1968 had risen to associate professor of classics and comparative literature.

As a release from the academic grind, he co-wrote with Joe Raposo a musical comedy called "Sing, Muse!" which ran off-Broadway for 39 performances. The reviews brought Segal to the attention of an agent, who helped him secure film work.

Segal co-wrote the screenplay for the Beatles' movie "Yellow Submarine" (1968), which fulfilled a childhood dream of becoming a Hollywood writer. Segal found himself flying back and forth to London and hobnobbing with John Lennon.

He wrote "Love Story" as a screenplay but was persuaded by his agent to turn it into a novel. It went through 21 hardcover printings in the first 12 months, and the first paperback run of 4.3 million copies was said to be the largest initial print order in publishing history.

A slender 212 pages, "Love Story" revolves around the attraction between Oliver, a patrician Harvard hockey player, and Jenny, a working-class Radcliffe girl who ultimately dies of a mysterious disease.

It struck a chord that critics had difficulty deciphering. Nora Ephron, writing in Esquire, said the book's overwhelming popularity was "something of a mystery." But the chaste romance (it had no overt sex scenes) apparently had wide appeal in a culture that had lost its moorings in the wake of student protests, civil rights marches, assassinations, sexual revolutions and drug experimentation.

Segal himself may have offered the best explanation of its success. In a 1970 Time magazine interview, he said: "It's awfully short. It's unabashedly sentimental. But before the end I cried and cried and cried -- for 45 minutes. Then I washed my face and finished the book."

The author became the darling of talk shows. He appeared on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" four times in four weeks. He happily answered the clamor for interviews, offering statements that came back to bite him. He bragged about his popularity with his students, calling himself "kind of a folk hero at Yale." He compared himself to Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

His "never having to say you're sorry" line was so readily absorbed at the lower reaches of the culture that it inspired takeoffs, such as the Santa Barbara dry cleaner that advertised its services on a sign that said "Bringing your clothes to us means never having to say you're soily."

Even O'Neal, whose star had risen with the "Love Story" movie, mocked it in the 1972 comedy "What's Up, Doc?" with Barbra Streisand. When her character repeats the famous line, his character responds, "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard."

One of Segal's few defenders was novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who told a Harvard audience that bashing "Love Story" was like "criticizing a chocolate eclair."

After he was denied tenure at Yale, Segal moved to Europe. He married an English book editor, Karen James, in 1975. She survives him along with two daughters.

Segal grew more cautious of celebrity, choosing to live in London for most of the last three decades. His famous first novel, he told The Times some years ago, "shot me out of the box. Totally ruined me. . . .

"But I'm not going to say I'm sorry."

I love the Vonnegut quote. When I saw this article I thought "I wonder what Richard Bach is feeling right now."