FROM WIKIPEDIA In 1947 she played her first leading role in Slave Girl and then in 1949 had her biggest success. As the female lead opposite Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross, she played a femme fatale, and her career began to ascend. The 1957 film Band of Angels featured her opposite Clark Gable in an American Civil War story, along with Sidney Poitier and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. For the next several years, she was constantly working although many of the films failed to advance her career. Cast in The Ten Commandments (1956) in a leading role (as Zipporah, Moses’ wife), […]
AND THEN THERE WAS ONE: Death Of PREZ FORD Leaves ARLEN SPECTER The Last Man Standing
AP: “He took office minutes after Nixon flew off into exile and declared “our long national nightmare is over.” But he revived the debate a month later by granting Nixon a pardon for all crimes he committed as president. That single act, it was widely believed, cost Ford election to a term of his own in 1976, but it won praise in later years as a courageous act that allowed the nation to move on. The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the U.S. during his presidency with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. In a speech as the […]
Yogi Bear Creator Met His Maker; Says Heaven Is A Lot Like Jellystone Park, Great Pie & Rangers Can’t Do Shit
LOS ANGELES – Joe Barbera, half of the Hanna-Barbera animation team that produced such beloved cartoon characters as Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear and the Flintstones, died Monday, a Warner Bros. spokesman said. He was 95. Barbera died of natural causes at his home with his wife Sheila at his side, Warner Bros. spokesman Gary Miereanu said. With his longtime partner, Bill Hanna, Barbera first found success creating the highly successful Tom and Jerry cartoons. The partners, who teamed up while working at MGM in the 1930s, then went on to a whole new realm of success in the 1960s […]
TRIBUTE: Goodnight Mr. Ertegun, Wherever You Are
Somebody Hip: Ahmet Ertegun, 1923-2006 ED KING REMEMBERS: Growing up in love with rock ‘n roll and its extended family, images of Atlantic Records founders Ahmet and Neshui Ertegun and their team of hipster producers, such as Jerry Wexler, were burned into my impressionable brain. I never learned exactly what this group of hitmakers did beside put together the right people in the right places and then get photographed having cocktails with the Beautiful People of the 1970s pop culture scene, but the Erteguns were there in the grooves with every record I loved by The Coasters, Aretha Franklin, Otis […]
OBIT: Mister, We Could Use A Man Like Ahmet Ertegun Again, Number One Zep-Head Dead At 83
Ahmet Ertegun, the music magnate who founded Atlantic Records and shaped the careers of John Coltrane, Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and many others, died today in Manhattan. He was 83. A spokesman for Atlantic Records said the death was the result of a brain injury suffered when Mr. Ertegun fell backstage at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on Oct. 29 as the Rolling Stones prepared to play a concert to mark former President Bill Clinton?s 60th birthday. He had been in a coma since then. […] Mr. Ertegun was the dapper son of a Turkish diplomatic family. […]
TRIBUTE: Peter Boyle Has Exited The Monster’s Ball
Actor, Emmy winner, Philly native, LaSalle College alumnus and former seminarian Peter Boyle, 71, died Tuesday night. DAN BUSKIRK REMEMBERS: Peter Boyle didn’t look good bald. Actually, he didn’t look good with hair either, and perhaps you should put aside your warm memories of the recently departed actor and take a good look at his picture. His eyes are partly unreadable because of his natural squint, his lips are thin and seem to rest in a perpetual smartass smirk, and that forehead! With its thickened brow leading up to that bulbous dome, Boyle’s swollen head seemed to suggest both the […]
BREAKING: Peter Boyle Dead at 71
Dec. 13, 2006 — Peter Boyle, who gained fame playing everything from a tap-dancing monster in “Young Frankenstein” to the curmudgeonly father in the long-running TV sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” has died. He was 71. Boyle died Tuesday evening at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma and heart disease, according to his publicist, Jennifer Plante. Boyle was beginning to gain notoriety playing hard-bitten, angry characters when he took the role of the hulking, lab-created monster in Mel Brooks’ 1974 horror film sendup. The movie’s defining moment came when Gene Wilder, as scientist Frederick Frankenstein, introduced his […]
TRIBUTE: Nobody Will Love You Like Robert Altman Loved You
BY DAN BUSKIRK Last year I was teaching a summer film appreciation class to a bunch of middle-schoolers. You know what it\’s like if you?’re trying to pick out a film for any group, it’s impossible to come up with anything that somebody in the crowd isn’t going to roll their eyes at, but I’ve been doing this for a few years and I’ve come up with a batch of movies that really seem to work with kids. Still, I always want to try out something I haven’t shown before so last summer I decided to try out Robert Altman’s […]
LAST CALL: Crowd Pleaser Nate Wiley Dead At 82, End Of ‘Longest Job Goin’
Nate Wiley and the Crowd Pleasers Bob and Barbara’s, 1509 South St. Last call. This is the house that Pabst Blue Ribbon built. The walls are covered floor to ceiling with Pabst memorabilia spanning several decades–from the corny caucasoid ’50s when Danny Kaye shilled for the brew, to the blaxsploitation ’70s when he was replaced with a Foxy Brown lookalike. The one constant in all those ads over the years is this catchphrase: “Now at Popular Prices.” That’s the asking price for Nate Wiley and the Crowd Pleasers, which has been cranking out no-cover-charge soul-powered organ jazz at Bob and […]
BREAKING: Robert Altman, AMERICAN MASTER, Dead At 81
“THE DEATH OF AN OLD MAN IS NOT A TRAGEDY.” –ROBERT ALTMAN, 1925-2006 FROM THE SF CHRONICLE: Garrison Keillor, who starred in Altman’s last movie — this year’s “A Prairie Home Companion” — said Tuesday that love of film clearly came through on the set. “Mr. Altman loved making movies. He loved the chaos of shooting and the sociability of the crew and actors — he adored actors — and he loved the editing room and he especially loved sitting in a screening room and watching the thing over and over with other people,” Keillor said in a statement e-mailed […]
IN MEMORIAM: Andre Waters 1962-2006
Waters, 44, died early yesterday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He took with him the answer to the only question — Why, Andre, why? — worth asking. He may have given at least part of an answer in that nearly three-hour phone conversation in April. He wasn’t just frustrated and bitter about his inability to find a job with an NFL team. He was personally hurt by a system he believed used players up and spit them back out. But then, everything was personal with Waters. That seems surprising, since he was the most violent and reckless […]
TRIBUTE: Jack Palance, Up From The Mines Of Pennsyltucky To Best of The Bad Guys Oscar Immortality, RIP ‘Curly’
When reporters asked him what he thought about most of his films, he tended to dismiss them as “garbage.” Still, his part as a homicidal husband stalking Joan Crawford in “Sudden Fear” (1952) also won him an Oscar nomination, and his role as a robber with a heart in “I Died a Thousand Times” (1955), a remake of Humphrey Bogart’s “High Sierra,” earned Mr. Palance better reviews than the movie received. Walter Jack Palance was born Feb. 18, 1920 or 1918, in Lattimer Mines, Pa., the third child of Vladimir Palahnuik, a coal miner, and the former Anna Gramiak, both […]