Michael Cornelison, who starred in Frank Darabont’s 1983 short The Woman in the Room, based on the story by Stephen King, died of liver complications on 15 October, aged fifty-nine. He also appeared in Superstition, Timesweep, Mommy and Mommy’s Day, Haunting Villisca and Husk, along with two episodes of TV’s The Greatest American Hero.
Glamorous British actress Sue Lloyd (Susan Margery Jeaffreson Lloyd) died on 20 October, aged seventy-two. A former chorus girl, showgirl and model, she studied acting with Jeff Corey and appeared in Hammer’s Hysteria, Corruption (with Peter Cushing), Go For a Take, No.1 of the Secret Service and the 1993 Roy “Chubby” Brown comedy U.F.O. During the 1960s and ’70s, the actress was a regular on British TV in such series as The Avengers, Journey to the Unknown, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson and Super Gran. Lloyd starred in a short-lived stage version of The Avengers in 1971, and twenty years later she married actor Ronald Allen, six weeks before his death from lung cancer.
American character actor Leonard Stone (Leonard Steinbock) died of cancer on 2 November, the day before his eighty-eighth birthday. Best remembered as the father of the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), he also appeared in Shock Treatment (1964), Soylent Green and Once Upon a Spy (with Christopher Lee), along with episodes of TV’s The Outer Limits (1963), the “lost” pilot The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre, The Invaders, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, The Six Million Dollar Man, Gemini Man, The Next Step Beyond, Bigfoot and Wildboy and The Invisible Man (2001).
American actor and comedian Sid Melton (Sidney Meltzer) died of pneumonia on 3 November, aged ninety-four. His film credits include Lost Continent (1951) and The Atomic Submarine. Melton portrayed “Ichabod ‘Ikky’ Mudd” on TV’s Captain Midnight (1954–56), and he also appeared in episodes of Adventures of Superman, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Munsters and I Dream of Jeannie.
Cynthia [Jeanette] Myers, who posed as a Playboy “Playmate of the Month” when she was just seventeen, died on 4 November, aged sixty-one. She studied acting with Jeff Corey and was in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as well as playing an uncredited native girl in Hammer’s The Lost Continent (1968), based on the novel by Dennis Wheatley.
Former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion “Smokin’” Joe Frazier (Joseph William Frazier) died of liver cancer on 7 November, aged sixty-seven. He had a role in the 1987 horror-comedy Ghost Fever.
British actor Richard [Lindon Harvey] Morant, the nephew of Bill Travers and son-in-law of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. by his first marriage, died of an aneurysm on 9 November, aged sixty-six. He appeared in the films The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1976) and The Company of Wolves, as well as episodes of TV’s The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Bedtime Stories, The Mad Death, Jack the Ripper (1988) and The Legend of the Lost Keys. Morant also played the eponymous space hero in the second series of the 1984 children’s SF game show Captain Zep – Space Detective. As well as being an actor, he also sold bespoke carpets and rugs from his London gallery.
Malaysian-born British stage and screen actress Dulcie Gray CBE (Dulcie Winifred Catherine Bailey) died of bronchial pneumonia on 15 November, aged ninety-five. She made her film debut in the early 1940s and appeared in A Place of One’s Own, Wanted For Murder (aka A Voice in the Night) and an episode of TV’s Tales from the Crypt. As an author, she wrote twenty-four books (mostly theatrical crime novels) and contributed eight stories to Herbert van Thal’s The Pan Book of Horror Stories series. Her short fiction was collected in Stage Door Fright: A Collection of Horror and Other Stories (1977). Gray was married to fellow actor Michael Denison for fifty-nine years.
Ninety-three-year-old Austrian-Hungarian-born actor Karl Slover (Karl “Karchy” Kosiczky), one of the last surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz (1939), died the same day from cardiopulmonary arrest. The four-foot, four-inch Slover, whose father sold him to a troupe of vaudeville performers when he was nine, was the smallest Munchkin. He played four parts in the classic movie: the “Munchkin Herald #1”, “Sleepyhead”, a singing Munchkin and a soldier. He also appeared in Bringing Up Baby and The Terror of Tiny Town.
Distinguished British actor John Neville OBE died of Alzheimer’s disease in Toronto on 19 November, aged eighty-six. He emigrated to Canada in 1972, and his film credits include Unearthly Stranger, A Study in Terror (as “Sherlock Holmes”), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (in the title role), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1993), Shadow Zone: The Teacher Ate My Homework, The Fifth Element, Johnny 2.0, The X Files, Urban Legend and Spider. He also appeared in episodes of such TV series as Shadows of Fear, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (as Austin Freeman’s “Dr Thorndyke”), Star Trek: The Next Generation, Viper, The X Files (in a recurring role as “The Well-Manicured Man”), F/X: The Series, The Adventures of Shirley Holmes and the pilot for Odyssey 5.
Susan Palermo[-Piscitello] died of brain cancer on 23 November, aged fifty-nine. For many years she was Vice President of Operations for Sandy Frank Productions, and more recently she worked as an actress, musician, producer and/or special effects artist on such low budget horror films as Zombies! Zombies! Everywhere, Post Mortem America 2021 and Road Hell.
American character actor Bill McKinney (William Denison McKinney), best known for his role as a crazed Mountain Man in Deliverance, died of cancer of the oesophagus on 1 December, aged eighty. His many other credits include She Freak, Angel Unchained, Cleopatra Jones, The Strange and Deadly Occurrence, Strange New World, Back to the Future Part III, It Came from Outer Space II, The Green Mile, Hellborn (aka Asylum of the Damned), Looney Tunes: Back in Action, 2001 Maniacs and The Devil Wears Spurs, along with episodes of I Dream of Jeannie, Galactica 1980 and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. McKinney also voiced the role of “Jonah Hex” on an episode of the animated Batman TV series.
American comedy actor Alan [Grigsby] Sues, a regular on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In in the late 1960s and early 1970s, died of a heart attack the same day, aged eighty-five. He appeared in the movies Oh! Heavenly Dog and A Bucket of Blood (aka The Death Artist, 1995), while his other TV credits include episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Wild Wild West, Fantasy Island, Time Express (with Vincent Price), Misunderstood Monsters and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. On stage, Sues portrayed “Professor Moriarty” in the 1975 Broadway production of Sherlock Holmes.
Dependable American character actor and TV director Harry Morgan (Harry Bratsberg, aka “Henry Morgan”), best remembered for his Emmy Award-winning role as “Colonel Sherman T. Potter” in the long-running CBS-TV series M*A*S*H (1975– 83), died of pneumonia on 7 December, aged ninety-six. During his extensive career, Morgan appeared in The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe, Dragonwyck (with Vincent Price), Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt (scripted by Leigh Brackett), Disney’s Charlie and the Angel and The Cat from Outer Space, Exo-Man, Maneaters Are Loose!, The Wild Wild West Revisited and More Wild Wild West, and Dragnet (1987), along with episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Night Gallery, the revived The Twilight Zone and a recurring role on 3rd Rock from the Sun.
Child actress Susan Gordon, the daughter of producer/director Bert I. Gordon, died of cancer on 11 December, aged sixty-two. She appeared in her father’s films Attack of the Puppet People (aka Six Inches Tall), The Boy and the Pirates, Tormented and Picture Mommy Dead. Her other credits include a TV version of Miracle on 34th Street (1959) and episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and The Twilight Zone.
1930s American character actress Louise Henry (Jesse Louise Heiman) died on 12 December, aged 100. She appeared in Charlie Chan on Broadway and Charlie Chan in Reno. She retired from the screen in 1939.
Argentina-born actor Alberto de Mendoza (Alberto Manuel Rodríguez Gallego Gonzáles de Mendoza) died of respiratory failure in Spain the same day, aged eighty-eight. He began his film career in 1930, and his many credits include The Ghost Lady (1945), La bestia humana, Horror Express (with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing) and the 1974 version of And Then There Were None.
Jennifer Miro (Jennifer Anderson), vocalist and electric piano player with the 1970s San Francisco punk/new wave/goth band The Nuns, died in New York City on 14 December. She appeared in the movies Nightmare in Blood (uncredited), The Video Dead and Dr Caligari (1989).
Seventy-three-year-old Scottish actor Nicol Williamson, who portrayed Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and Merlin in Excalibur, died of oesophageal cancer on 16 December. His other film credits include Hamlet (1969), Venom, Macbeth (1983), Disney’s Return to Oz, The Exorcist III and Spawn. Williamson also appeared in an episode of the little-seen 1990 anthology TV show Chillers, hosted by Anthony Perkins. From 1971–77 he was married to actress Jill Townsend.
American character actor Robert Easton (Robert Burke, aka “Bob Easton”), regarded as “the Henry Higgins of Hollywood” for his later career as a respected dialect coach, died the same day, aged eighty-one. He appeared in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (uncredited), The Neanderthal Man, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Loved One, One of Our Spies is Missing, Johnny Got His Gun, The Touch of Satan, The Giant Spider Invasion, Mr Sycamore, Disney’s Pete’s Dragon, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Pet Sematary II, Needful Things, Spiritual Warriors and Horrorween, plus episodes of TV’s Adventures of Superman, The Munsters, Lost in Space, My Mother the Car, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, The Ghost Busters (1975), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (“Mr R.I.N.G.”) and The Bionic Woman. Easton was also the voice of co-pilot “Phones” and other characters in Gerry Anderson’s “supermarionation” series Stingray (1964–65).
A chimpanzee, whose owner claimed was the eighty-year-old Cheeta that appeared in the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films of the 1930s, died of kidney failure at a Florida primate sanctuary on 24 December. However, experts agreed that it was extremely unlikely that it was the original chimp.
Virtuoso violinist Israel Baker, who contributed the screeching violin chords to Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), died on Christmas Day, aged ninety-two. A highly paid session musician and acclaimed concert musician, Baker’s movie credits also include Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Mexican-born character actor Pedro Armendáriz, Jr. (Pedro Armendáriz Bohr) died of cancer in New York on 26 December, aged seventy-one. He began his career in the 1960s in such films as Las vampiras (with John Carradine), and he continued to work in both his native country and the US. Armendárez’s movie credits include Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973), Chosen Survivors, Earthquake, Licence to Kill, The Legend of the Mask, The Mask of Zorro (1998) and The Legend of Zorro, and he also appeared an episode of TV’s Knight Rider.
FILM & TV TECHNICIANS/PRODUCERS
American make-up artist and musician Verne Langdon died on 1 January, aged sixty-nine. Perhaps best remembered as creator of the Universal Monster “Calendar Masks” for Don Post Studios, he worked on such movies as The Haunted Palace, The Comedy of Terrors, Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, along with TV’s The Star Wars Holiday Special. Langdon also created and co-produced the 1967 Decca record album An Evening with Boris Karloff and His Friends, and co-created the 1980 “Castle Dracula” show at Universal Studios.
Spanish screenwriter, producer and director Juan Piquer Simón (aka “J. P. Simon”) died of lung cancer on 7 January, aged seventy-five. His many genre films include Where Time Began (based on the novel by Jules Verne), Satan’s Blood, Supersonic Man, Monster Island (with Peter Cushing and Paul Naschy), Pieces, Extraterrestrial Visitors, Slugs (based on the novel by Shaun Hutson), Cthulhu Mansion (which had absolutely nothing to do with H. P. Lovecraft), The Rift and La isla del diablo. Simón additionally scripted Beyond Terror (as “Alfredo Casado”), Nexus 2.431 (which was based on his unproduced screenplay) and El escarabajo de oro (a 1999 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug”). In 2008 he was the subject of Nacho Cerdà’s documentary Pieces of Juan (Piquer Simón).
Del Reisman, who was associate producer on the original TV series of The Twilight Zone and scripted episodes of Ghost Story and The Six Million Dollar Man, died on 8 January, aged eighty-six.
Peter Yates, the British film director probably best remembered for the iconic car chase movie Bullitt (1968) starring Steve McQueen, died after a long illness on 9 January, aged eighty-one. He began his career as a dubbing assistant, working his way up to assistant director on such films as the sleazy Cover Girl Killer before getting his break directing the classic Cliff Richard musical Summer Holiday. His varied other credits include The Deep and Krull, along with episodes of TV’s The Saint and Danger Man.
British production designer Peter (Edward Sidney Canton) Phillips, best known for his BAFTA Award-winning work on TV’s Brideshead Revisited (1981), died on 10 January, aged eighty-five. He worked as a production design assistant on the 1947 film Uncle Silas (aka The Inheritance, based on the novel by J. Sheridan Le Fanu) before joining Granada Television, where his credits include three episodes of 1980s series Shades of Darkness – “Bewitched”, based on the story by Edith Wharton; “The Demon Lover”, based on the story by Elizabeth Bowen, and “Agatha Christie’s The Last Séance”.
David [Oswald] Nelson, the real-life son of Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard, and the older brother of singer/actor Ricky Nelson, died of complications from colon cancer on 11 January, aged seventy-four. He was the last surviving star of the 1952–66 TV show The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, and in 1982 he directed the horror movie Death Screams (aka House of Death).
Dan Filie, who wrote and produced the 2009 horror comedy Frankenhood, died on 13 January, aged fifty-six. As Senior Vice President for Drama Development for Universal Television in the 1990s, he was instrumental in creating the TV series Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess.
American music producer and publisher Don (Donald) Kirshner died of heart failure on 17 January, aged seventy-six. During the 1960s, Kirshner helped launch the careers of such songwriters as Carole King, Neil Sedaka and Neil Diamond when he became music supervisor on NBC-TV’s The Monkees, before he was fired when the manufactured group demanded more control. Kirshner went on to work as a music consultant/supervisor on such TV series as Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, the animated Archie series (“Sugar Sugar” stayed at #1 in the US for four weeks in 1969), The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan and the 1976 TV movie The Savage Bees (which he also executive produced). He also produced the rarely-seen 1970 SF musical Toomorrow, directed by Val Guest and starring a young Olivia Newton-John.
Greek-born film and stage costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge (Theoni Athanasiou Vachliotis) died of a heart attack in Stamford, Connecticut, on 21 January, aged eighty-eight. Broadway dimmed its lights to mark her death. The Oscar-winning designer created costumes for such movies as No Way to Treat a Lady, The Fury, Eyes of Laura Mars, The First Deadly Sin, Ghostbusters, Addams Family Values and The Rage: Carrie 2.
Bernd Eichinger, Germany’s most successful movie producer, died of a heart attack while having dinner with family and friends at his home in Los Angeles on 24 January. He was sixty-one. Best known as the producer of Resident Evil and the sequels starring Milla Jovovich, his other film credits include The NeverEnding Story, The Name of the Rose, The Fantastic Four (both the 1994 and 2005 versions), Prince Valiant (1997), The Calling, The Mists of Avalon (based on the novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley), 666: In Bed with the Devil, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (which he also co-scripted from Patrick Süskind’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel) and 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
Richard Datin, who headed the team of model-makers that created the Starship USS Enterprise for the original Star Trek TV series (1966–69), died the same day.
American TV director Phil Bondelli died 31 January, aged eighty-three. He directed episodes of The Bionic Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, Fantasy Island, Blue Thunder and Outlaws.
Producer, director and author Charles E. Sellier, Jr.
, founder and president of Grizzly Adams Productions, Inc., died the same day, aged sixty-seven. From the early 1970s onwards he produced a string of paranormal documentaries, including The Mysterious Monsters, In Search of Noah’s Ark, The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, Beyond and Back, The Bermuda Triangle and Beyond Death’s Door, along with the TV series Encounters with the Unexplained. Sellier also executive produced The Time Machine (1978), The Fall of the House of Usher (1979), Hangar 18, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1980), Earthbound, The Boogens and Knight Rider 2000, and he directed the Christmas horror movie Silent Night Deadly Night (1984).
Walt Disney animator and director Bill (William) Justice, who joined the studio in 1937 and stayed there for forty-two years, died on 10 February, aged ninety-seven. He began his career as an “in-betweener” on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and went on to work as a full animator on such films as Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, The Three Caballeros, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (uncredited), Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, along with numerous shorts. Although a film of Roald Dahl’s first children’s story, “The Gremlins”, was developed by the studio during World War II, it was eventually abandoned. However, Justice’s concept illustrations were used in the book when it was published in 1943. He directed the opening title sequence for TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club, which premiered in October 1955, and with Disney colleagues T. Hee and Xavier Atencio he created stop-motions scenes for The Shaggy Dog, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones and Mary Poppins. Justice went on to help create the audio-animatronic figures for Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, Mission to Mars and Haunted Mansion attractions, and he also designed parades and costumes for the theme park. Justice retired in 1979, and his 1992 autobiography was entitled Justice for Disney. He was named a Disney Legend in 1996.
British TV producer and director Paul [Coryn Valentine] Lucas died of cancer on 13 February, aged fifty-five. Best known for his work on the award-winning Prime Suspect series, he also directed two episodes of the BBC’s Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes and the 2000 movie After Alice (aka Eye of the Killer).
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books) Page 63