Gone With or Without fanfare

[Lzcutter]

Producer Bernard Glasser, best known for his sci-fi films, has passed away.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Bernard Glasser, a substitute teacher at Beverly Hills High School who went on to produce such films as the sci-fi classics Return of the Fly and The Day of the Triffids, died Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 89.

In 1950, Glasser borrowed money from his landlord, invested in the now-defunct Key West Studios lot in Hollywood and produced Gold Raiders (1951), a Western starring George O'Brien and the Three Stooges. The rarely seen film shot in five days and had a budget of $50,000. He also leased the facility to such producers as Burt Lancaster and Roger Corman.

When Glasser's studio lease expired, he and Gold Raiders director Edward Bernds teamed on several features for Robert L. Lippert's Regal Films, including Space Master X-7 (1958) and the sequel Return of the Fly (1959), once again starring Vincent Price. For the former's fungal special effects, Glasser hired Norman Maurer, the son-in-law of Stooges' ringleader Mo Howard.

The Chicago native later partnered with producer Philip Yordan for the 1960-62 TV adventure series Assignment: Underwater and such sci-fi films as the chilling The Day of the Triffids (1963), about killer plants on the loose, and Crack in the World (1965), starring Dana Andrews as a scientist who warns against deploying an atomic bomb underground.

Glasser kept his name off Triffids so that the project could qualify for a subsidy as a British production, he told author Tim Weaver in the book Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes: The Mutant Melding of Two Volumes of Classic Interviews.

Glasser's credits also include the war films The Thin Red Line (1964) and Battle of the Bulge (1965) and the comedy Bikini Paradise (1967). He directed the drama Triangle (1970), then left the industry after 20 years to go into real estate.

Glasser was a graduate of Indiana State University, which honored him with a distinguished alumni award in 2012.

Survivors include four children and eight grandchildren. His son Richard, who worked in international film sales for many years, died in 2010.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/p ... ges-668497

[Lzcutter]

Today three deaths were announced:

Producer Run Run Shaw passed away at 106. He backed Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, Quentin Tarentino's Kill Bill and The Matrix.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/r ... -at-668752

The voice of Yukon Cornelius from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, among his many roles, character actor Larry D. Mann passed away at 91:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/l ... -at-668742

And character actress Carmen Zapata, best known, perhaps, for her television work and her work in the Los Angeles community passed away at 86:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/a ... act-668740

[moira finnie]

All this recent news from all over makes me wonder: Is this winter the busy season for The Grim Reaper, or what?

[Sue Sue Applegate]

He has definitely been busy with the members of the "greatest generation" and classic film movers and shakers.

[JackFavell]

Oh geez, I LOVE Larry D. Mann, one of my very first character actors. ALWAYS on TV, so much so that he and select few others felt like members of my family when I would see them. I can remember going to movies and being happy I could recognize him. I'm sure you will too:

[Sue Sue Applegate]

Yukon Cornelius! As long as Rudolph will be rented, bought or sold, Mann will be remembered.

[RedRiver]

Wah-hoo!

[Nick]

Ted Richmond, Producer of ‘Papillon,’ Dies at 103

Producer Ted Richmond, who produced more than 60 movies from the 1940s through the 1970s including 1973 thriller “Papillon” (pictured), died in Paris on Dec. 23. He was 103.

The 1973 hit “Papillon,” starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, was one of Richmond’s most successful films.

For 40 years, working for Columbia Pictures and then Universal Intl., he produced movies in a variety of genres. There were Westerns such as “The Cimarron Kid,” starring Audie Murphy, and “Return of the Seven,” as well as comedies such as “Francis Joins the WACS,” starring Donald O’Connor. Richmond was also an uncredited producer on the Elvis Presley pic “It Happened at the World’s Fair.”

In the 1950s he partnered with his close friend Tyrone Power to form Copa Prods. The company’s first movie, “Count Three and Pray,” introduced Joanne Woodward to films. In 1959, during the filming of “Solomon and Sheba,” Richmond was devastated when Power, who was playing Solomon, suffered a fatal heart attack. Yul Brynner ultimately played the part opposite Gina Lollobrigida.

Richmond also worked with such stars as Buster Crabbe, Gale Storm, Joan Davis, Nina Foch, Mel Torme, Penny Singleton, Desi Arnaz, Piper Laurie, Jeff Chandler, Beau Bridges, Cornel Wilde, Charles Laughton, Boris Karloff, Tony Curtis, Alan Ladd, Janet Leigh, Anne Bancroft, Rock Hudson, Raymond Burr, Aldo Ray, Lana Turner, Charles Bronson and Bob Hope.

The producer’s last film was 1979′s “The Fifth Musketeer.”

Born in New Bedford, Mass., Richmond first worked in the movie business as an usher at a local theater. In 1939 he wrote the screen story for “Six Gun Rhythm and Trigger Pals.” In 1941, he produced his first movie, “South of Panama.” (In his early films he was credited as T.H. Richmond.)

He spent the past 30 years in Paris with his wife, Asuko. Richmond is also survived by four nieces and one nephew in the U.S.

[Lzcutter]

Veteran character actor Frank Marth has passed away.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Frank Marth, a veteran character actor and member of Jackie Gleason's stock company on The Honeymooners, died Sunday of congestive heart failure and Alzheimer’s disease in Rancho Mirage, Calif., a family friend told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 91.

Often cast as an authority figure, Marth appeared on scores of TV shows and in many films during his more than 50 years in show business. He played a detective in Madame X (1966) opposite Lana Turner, a police lieutenant working with Richard Widmark in Madigan (1968), an Air Force man in the Gregory Peck film Marooned (1969) and a Nazi officer on the sitcom Hogan's Heroes.

The tall and slender Marth, though, is probably best remembered for his assortment of background roles on The Honeymooners, which starred Gleason and Audrey Meadows as Ralph and Alice Kramden, with Art Carney as their upstairs neighbor, Ed Norton.

Marth played Harvey Wohlstetter, who hires Alice to babysit his son, Harvey Jr., as Ralph jumps to conclusions and thinks his wife is having an affair. He was one of the hoods who holds the Kramdens and Norton hostage after Ralph witnesses a bank robbery, the newsman who gets Ralph in trouble at home after he quotes the bus driver in the paper boasting that he's the "head of the household," and the off-screen narrator of Norton's favorite TV show, Captain Video. Other "classic 39" episodes had him as Ralph's co-worker or pool-room buddy.

Before and after The Honeymooners in the mid-1950s, Marth worked with Gleason on the comedian's variety shows Cavalcade of Stars and American Scene Magazine, the latter beamed from Miami Beach, Fla.

In Meadows' 1994 book Love, Alice: My Life as a Honeymooner, Marth noted that Gleason always called him Francis. On the show, "I always felt like I was going to a party, instead of work," he recalled. "It was such a blast."

Born and raised in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, Marth began his career on the stage and made his first TV appearance in 1949 on the series Mama.

Marth later appeared on such primetime shows as The Fugitive, Combat! The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Wild Wild West, The Big Valley, Mission: Impossible, The F.B.I., Cannon, M*A*S*H, The Streets of San Francisco, Quincy M.E., Dirty Dozen: The Series and Airwolf; on the soap operas From These Roots and The Young and the Restless; and in the 1976 telefilm The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case.

He portrayed an escaped murderer in Fright (1956) and was in such other films as Pendulum (1969), The Lost Man (1969), Telefon (1977) and Loving Deadly (1994), his final credit.

Survivors include his wife of 45 years, actress Hope Holiday, who shared a memorable night of self-pity (and quite a few drinks) with Jack Lemmon on Christmas Eve in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960).

Services will be private.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/h ... ies-670416

[moira finnie]

I knew the face more readily than the name, though Frank Marth sure was in a ton of stuff! Good actor, too.

[moira finnie]

Russell Johnson, most often recalled as The Professor on Gilligan's Island, has died at age 89.



Here is his obituary from The New York Times:

Russell Johnson, an actor who made a living by mostly playing villains in westerns until he was cast as the Professor, the brains of a bunch of sweetly clueless, self-involved, hopelessly naïve island castaways, on the hit sitcom “Gilligan’s Island,” died on Thursday at his home in Bainbridge Island, Wash. He was 89.

His agent, Michael Eisenstadt, confirmed the death.

“Gilligan’s Island,” which was seen on CBS from 1964 to 1967 and still lives on in reruns, starred Bob Denver as Gilligan, the witless first mate of the S.S. Minnow, a small touring boat that runs aground on an uncharted island after a storm.

Besides Gilligan and the Professor, five others were on board: the Skipper (Alan Hale Jr.); Ginger, a va-va-voom movie star (Tina Louise); the snobbish wealthy couple Thurston Howell III (Jim Backus) and his wife, known as Lovey (Natalie Schafer); and Mary Ann, a girl-next-door type (Dawn Wells).

In the show’s first season, Mr. Johnson and Ms. Wells were left out of the opening credits and their characters were ignored in the theme song, which named the other castaways but dismissed the two of them with the phrase “and the rest.” The snub was rectified for the second season, at the same time that the show went from black-and-white to color.

The Professor was a good-looking but nerdy academic, an exaggerated stereotype of the man of capacious intelligence with little or no social awareness. Occasionally approached romantically by Ginger (and guest stars, including Zsa Zsa Gabor), he remained chaste and unaffected.

But he was pretty much the only character on the show who possessed anything resembling actual knowledge, and he was forever inventing methods to increase the castaways’ chance of rescue. Still, among the show’s many lapses of logic was the fact — often noted by Mr. Johnson in interviews — that although the Professor could build a shortwave radio out of a coconut shell, he couldn’t figure out how to patch a hole in a boat hull.

Avid fans — very avid — are probably the only ones to remember that the character’s name was actually Dr. Roy Hinkley, or that his academic résumé was explicitly spelled out.

“Professor, what exactly are your degrees?” Mr. Howell asked once.

“Well,” the Professor replied, “I have a B.A. from U.S.C., a B.S. from U.C.L.A., an M.A. from S.M.U. and a Ph.D. from T.C.U.”

Mr. Howell clucked in return: “Well, I don’t know much about your education, but it sounds like a marvelous recipe for alphabet soup.”

Russell David Johnson was born on Nov. 10, 1924, near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., the oldest of six children. His father died when Russell was not yet 10, and his mother sent him and two brothers to Girard College, then a school for poor orphan boys, in Philadelphia, where he finished high school. He served in the Army Air Forces during World War II, winning a Purple Heart, and after his discharge studied on the G.I. Bill at the Actors’ Laboratory in Hollywood.

His first film role was in a 1952 drama about fraternity hazing, “For Men Only,” in which he played a sadistic fraternity leader; that led to a contract with Universal-International, which led to roles in a series of movies, mostly westerns (including “Law and Order,” in which he played Ronald Reagan’s no-good brother) and science fiction films, including “It Came From Outer Space.”

Later in the decade he began appearing frequently on television, often in western shows in the role of the black hat, even though he was a poor horseman. (When he played a marshal in the series “Black Saddle,” he suggested to the producer — “semi-seriously,” he said in an interview in 2004 — that the character be seen walking his horse into town and that he chase down the bad guys on foot.)

He also appeared in two episodes of “The Twilight Zone” involving time travel. In one, he tries to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; in the other, about a time machine that accidentally rescues a 19th-century murderer from a hanging, he plays the inventor, a professor.

Mr. Johnson’s survivors include his wife, Connie; a daughter, Kim; a stepson, Court Dane; and a grandson.

Ms. Louise and Ms. Wells are the only surviving “Gilligan’s Island” cast members.

After “Gilligan’s Island,” Mr. Johnson made a career guest-starring in television series, including the dramas “Mannix,” “Cannon” and “Lou Grant” and the comedies “Bosom Buddies” and “The Jeffersons,” usually as an upright character with smarts.

He also reprised the Professor role in the 1970s and 1980s in the cartoon series “The New Adventures of Gilligan” and “Gilligan’s Planet” and in three made-for-television “Gilligan” movies.

“ ‘Gunsmoke,’ ‘Wagon Train,’ ‘The Dakotas,’ you name a western, I did it,” he said of his career before “Gilligan.” He added: “I was always the bad guy in westerns. I played more bad guys than you can shake a stick at until I played the Professor. Then I couldn’t get a job being a bad guy.”

[Rita Hayworth]

Frank Marth is a fabulous actor and I loved Russell Johnson on Gilligans Island and he always is a big favorite of mine - even bigger than Bob Denver who played Gilligan.

One more thing about Frank ... he is a gifted actor and does his work on Television quite seriously and he is one of the best character actor around and I consider him one of my personal favorites ... I always adore him.

[Lzcutter]

Dave Madden, who co-starred on The Partridge Family as the Partridge Family's manager, has passed away.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Dave Madden, whose comedic roles include turns on The Partridge Family and later on Alice, has died. He was 82.

His niece, Mary Frances Miller, told The Associated Press he died Thursday at a hospice center near his home in the Jacksonville area.
His resume spans over three decades in television. For four seasons beginning in 1970, he portrayed the manager of the musical group, Reuben Kincaid. In 1978, he joined the cast of Alice, a comedy set in a diner, starring Linda Lavin.

Former Partridge Family castmember Danny Bonaduce remembered the comedian. "Dave Madden was a great guy & like family to me. He taught me to drive a car when I was 10. One of many great memories. I'll truly miss him," Bonaduce wrote on Twitter.

Other television credits include Camp Runamuck, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Bewitched, Happy Days and, in the 1990's, appearances on Boy Meets World and Married With Children. In film, he was featured in 1976's Eat My Dust, which starred Ron Howard.

In 2007, he published a memoir with his second wife, Sandra, titled Reuben on Wry: The Memoirs of Dave Madden.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/p ... den-671699

[Lzcutter]

The last surviving female munchkin who was in The Wizard of Oz, Ruth Duccini, has passed away.

From the NY Times:

Ruth Robinson Duccini, 95, one of the two surviving Munchkins from the legendary 1939 MGM film "The Wizard of Oz," died early Thursday in Las Vegas.

Author of the book "The Munchkins of Oz," Stephen Cox, of Los Angeles, a longtime friend of Duccini, confirmed her death and said she died of natural causes at the Solari Hospice Care Center in Las Vegas, Nev. following a brief illness.

Born Ruth Robinson July 23, 1918 in Rush City, Minn., Cox said she stood 4-feet tall in adulthood, and In 1938, at age 20, traveled to Culver City, Calif. with a troupe of performing midgets to appear in film classic "The Wizard of Oz" as a Munchkin townswoman.

"Ruth was a sweetheart of a lady, feisty, independent, and a loving mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother," Cox said Thursday.

"She'll be missed greatly."

Duccini was the last surviving female little person from "The Wizard of Oz." Of the original 124 "little people" cast as Munchkins, the final surviving little person from the movie about Dorothy's trip "over the rainbow" is now Jerry Maren, who played a Lollipop Guild Munchkin. He is 93, and lives in a retirement home in Los Angeles.

Duccini was also a favorite guest each year at the annual Wizard of Oz Festival in Chesterton.

For more of the obit: please go here: http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/port ... 3086d.html

[Rita Hayworth]

Unbelievable about David Madden - a dear friend of mine about 5 months shared candid pictures of him and I just could not believe that he was gone too. He is only a year older than my own Dad.