British film poster illustrator Tom (Thomas) ‘Chan’ [William] Chantrell died on July 15th, aged 84. From The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse in 1938 to Star Wars in the late 1970s, he produced around 7,000 poster designs, averaging three posters a week. Hammer Films’ James Carreras would often commission his posters before the films were made, and Chantrell painted himself as the Count on Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, while his second wife Shirley appears as a radio operator on The Bermuda Triangle and as a cannibal victim on Eaten Alive!
43-year-old author James H. Hatfield, whose book Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President was recalled and pulped by St. Martin’s Press in 1999 after it was discovered that he had lied about his credentials, was found dead of a drug overdose on July 18th. His earlier books include a number of unauthorized trivia challenges, biographies and encyclopedias (many co-written with George Burt) based around such movies and TV shows as Star Wars, Deep Space Nine, Lost in Space, The X Files and Star Trek The Next Generation. Hatfield had been found guilty in 1988 of plotting to kill his bosses at a Dallas real-estate firm in a failed car bombing and in 1992 of forging a signature to cash $22,000 in Federal cheques.
Norman Hall Wright, the last surviving writer of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (‘The Nutcracker Suite’ sequence), died on July 21st, aged 91. He also worked on various cartoon shorts and was a sequence director on Bambi.
Lynrd Sknyrd bassist Leon Wilkeson died on July 27th, aged 49. The cause of death was under investigation.
Children’s author Elizabeth Yates died on July 29th, aged 95. In 1949 she ghost-edited the anthology Spooks and Spirits and Shadowy Shapes and included one of her own stories.
Science fiction and fantasy author Poul [William] Anderson died of prostate cancer around midnight on July 31st, aged 74. He had returned home that day after a month in hospital to await the end with his close family. After making his debut in Astounding in 1947, he wrote more than 100 books, including Vault of the Ages (1952), Three Hearts and Three Lions, The High Crusade, A Midsummer Tempest, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, Tau Zero and two collaborations with Gordon R. Dickson (who died in January), Star Prince Charlie and Hokas Hokas Hokas. A winner of three Nebula and seven Hugo awards, his penultimate novel, Genesis, won the 2000 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
Robert H. (Henry) Rimmer, author of the 1966 free-love novel The Harrad Experiment (filmed in 1973) and several volumes of The X-Rated Videotape Guide, died on August 1st, aged 84. His other books include The Zolotov Affair, Love Me Tomorrow and The Resurrection of Ann Hutchinson.
68-year-old Ron Townsend, co-founder and one of the lead singers of 1960s group 5th Dimension, died of renal failure on August 2nd after a four-year battle with kidney disease. The Grammy-winning group’s greatest hits include ‘Up Up and Away’ and ‘Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In’.
Author Frederick A. Raborg, Jr., who was a regular contributor to Marvin Kaye’s anthologies under the pseudonym ‘Dick Baldwin’, died on August 13th, aged 67. His stories appeared in Brother Theodore’s Chamber of Horrors, Ghosts, Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural and Devils & Demons, amongst other titles.
HarperCollins editor Robert S. Jones, whose authors included Clive Barker, died of cancer in New York on the same day, aged 47.
American composer Jack Elliott, who wrote the music for Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat and other 1970s TV shows, died of a brain tumour on August 18th, aged 74. His film credits include Oh, God!, and the series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was loosely based on Elliott’s family.
Controversial British astrophysicist and SF author Sir Fred Hoyle, who coined the term ‘Big Bang’ to describe the creation of the Universe (a theory he always personally disputed), died on August 20th after suffering a severe stroke in July. He was 86. Founder of the Institute for Astronomy at Cambridge University and fellow of the Royal Society, Hoyle’s novels include The Black Cloud and Ossian’s Ride, and he co-wrote the BBC TV series A for Andromeda and its sequel, Andromeda Breakthrough, with John Elliott.
Comics artist Chuck Cuidera, who created Blackhawk at Quality Comics in 1941, died on August 25th, aged 86. He also created Blue Beetle and continued to ink Blackhawk after the title was sold to DC Comics until 1967. He worked on several other DC titles before leaving the field in 1970.
Philanthropist and publisher Paul Hamlyn (Paul Bertrand Hamburger), who became a multi-millionaire with his eponymous mass-market imprint, died on August 31st, aged 75. Among the books he published are Supernatural Stories for Boys, The Best Ghost Stories, The Best Horror Stories and Spinechilling Tales for the Dead of Night. He reissued Algernon Blackwood’s Tales of the Uncanny and the Supernatural and Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre under his Spring Books imprint, and was also chairman of the Octopus Publishing Group from 1971–97.
Pauline Kael, the influential film critic of the New Yorker magazine, died of Parkinson’s disease on September 2nd, aged 82. Her collected essays were published as I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Going Steady, Deeper Into Movies (winner of the National Book Award), Reeling and For Keeps.
54-year-old Douglas J. Stone, vice-president of Odyssey Press, which prints and mails The New York Review of Science Fiction, was aboard the doomed American Airlines Flight 11, which was crashed by terrorists into New York’s World Trade Center on September 11th.
Long-time fan and former president and co-founder of the Southern Fandom Confederation, Meade Frierson, III died of cancer on September 24th, aged 61. With his wife Penny he edited the influential H.P. Lovecraft fanzine HPL in the early 1970s.
George Gately [Gallagher], creator of the Heathcliff newspaper comic strip, died of a heart attack on September 30th, aged 72. From 1973 until he retired in the late 1990s, he drew the eponymous cartoon cat, before which he created the Hapless Harry strip.
E.C. comics artist Johnny Craig also died in September, aged 75. After entering the industry in the late 1930s, he joined E.C. in 1950 where he contributed to Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, Two-Fisted Tales and other titles. His other credits include Warren Publishing’s Creepy and Eerie and various titles for Marvel and DC.
69-year-old Gregory [Hancock] Hemingway, the youngest son of Ernest, died of hypertension and cardiovascular disease on October 1st while being held at a women’s detention centre in Florida (he had apparently had a sex-change operation late in life and called himself ‘Gloria’). Hemingway had been arrested five days earlier for being naked in public and was charged with indecent exposure and resisting arrest. His book about his father, Papa: A Personal Memoir, was published in 1976.
Scottish illustrator Charles William Stewart died on October 3rd, aged 85. As well as producing artwork for Beckford’s Vathek and Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, he also edited Ghost Stories and Other Horrid Tales for the Folio Society, to which he contributed twenty watercolour plates.
Nuclear physicist, author and SF fan Milton A. Rothman died of heart failure on October 6th, aged 81. One of the hosts for the first SF convention in America, he chaired three Worldcons (including the one in 1953 that introduced the Hugo Award) and published fiction in Astounding under the pseudonym ‘Lee Gregor’.
British-born composer and songwriter Joel Lubin, best known for such songs as ‘Move Over, Darling’ and ‘Glass Bottom Boat’ for Doris Day, died of heart failure on October 9th, aged 84. During the 1960s he developed a number of music artists, including Jan and Dean, and he co-wrote ‘Tutti Frutti’ with Little Richard.
Poet, editor and literary critic Anne Ridler O.B.E. (Anne Barbara Bradby), who edited Best Ghost Stories for Faber & Faber in 1945, died in Oxford on October 15th, aged 89.
Oscar-winning American songwriter Jay Livingston, who with Ray Evans wrote such classics as ‘Buttons and Bows’, ‘Mona Lisa’ and ‘Que Sera Sera’, died of pneumonia on October 17th, aged 86. The duo’s first big hit was ‘G’bye Now’ from Olsen and Johnson’s 1941 revue Hellzapoppin’, which led to a ten-year contract with
Paramount. Their TV themes include Bonanza and Mister Ed (which featured Livingston’s voice). Livingston also worked on the scores for When Worlds Collide and The Mole People.
90-year-old TV writer Norman Lessing, whose credits include episodes of Shirley Temple Storybook (which he associate produced) and Lost in Space, died on October 22nd of congestive heart failure and complications from Parkinson’s disease.
Best known for his depictions of Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ on book covers, calendars and other media since 1984, British artist Josh (Ronald William) Kirby died unexpectedly in his sleep on October 23rd, aged 72. In a career that spanned fifty years, he produced more than 400 paintings, some of the best of which are collected in The Josh Kirby Poster Book, In the Garden of Unearthly Delights, The Josh Kirby Discworld Portfolio and A Cosmic Cornucopia. Beginning in 1956 with a paperback cover for Ian Fleming’s Moonraker, he illustrated such authors as Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alfred Hitchcock. Kirby won the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist in 1996, and amongst his other work he also produced film posters for Star-flight One, The Beastmaster, Krull, Morons from Outer Space, Return of the Jedi and an unused design for Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Irish storyteller and stage actor Éamon Kelly died on October 24th, aged 87. His stories were collected by the Mercier Press.
American author Richard Martin Stern, whose novel The Tower helped inspire the 1974 movie The Towering Inferno, died on Halloween, aged 86.
British screenwriter and playwright Anthony Shaffer died of a heart attack in London on November 6th, aged 75. The twin brother of playwright Peter Shaffer, he is best known for his stage success Sleuth (filmed in 1971). His other screenplays include Hitchcock’s Frenzy, Absolution, a trio of Agatha Christie adaptations (Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun and Appointment with Death) and the cult classic The Wicker Man (which he novelized in 1979).
Comics artist Gray (Dwight Graydon) Morrow died the same day, aged 67. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for several years and according to some reports took his own life. While illustrating various SF digest magazines and paperback book covers in the 1960s (including more than 100 covers for the Perry Rhodan series), he began contributing comic strips to Warren Publishing’s Creepy and Eerie. In 1978 he adapted several stories for The Illustrated Roger Zelazny, and a retrospective volume entitled Gray Morrow: Visionary appeared in 2001. He also worked on a number of newspaper strips, including Secret Agent X-9, Rip Kirby, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and was the longest-running artist on Tarzan, which he illustrated for eighteen years. He was reportedly despondent over his recent replacement on the strip by a new artist.
Ken (Kenneth) [Elton] Kesey, best known as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (filmed in 1975) and the man who coined the term ‘acid’, died of complications from surgery for liver cancer on November 10th, aged 66. In 1966 Kesey fled to Mexico to avoid going to trial for marijuana possession and was eventually sentenced to six months in jail. He and his fellow ‘Merry Pranksters’ were the heroes of Tom Wolfe’s influential 1968 book about psychedelia, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
60-year-old horror author and film-maker Michael O’Rourke died unexpectedly on November 14th, possibly as a result of toxic mould poisoning. Two years earlier O’Rourke and his wife were evacuated from their home and a lawsuit is ongoing. His books include Darkling, The Bad Thing, The Undine and The Poison Tree (under the byline ‘F.M. O’Rourke’), and he scripted the films Deadly Love (which he also directed), Hellgate and MoonStalker.
TV writer Peggy Chantler Dick, whose credits include Bewitched, died of heart failure on November 20th, aged 78.
Author and illustrator Seymour [Victory] Reit, who created Casper the Friendly Ghost with animator Joe Oriolo, died on November 21st, aged 83. Reit and Oriolo sold all rights to the cartoon character to Famous Studios for just $200 in the mid-1940s, since when the franchise has generated millions through film shorts, TV series, movies and Harvey’s on-going comic book series. Reit also worked on such cartoons as Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and the Popeye and Betty Boop series, and he created the early 1940s comic strip characters Auro, Cosmo Corrigan and Super American, as well as drawing for Archie, Little Lulu and Mad Magazine.
Self-appointed busybody Mary Whitehouse, who formed the Viewers and Listeners Association in an attempt to censor films and television in Britain, died on November 23rd, aged 91. She won’t be missed by many.
TV scriptwriter and producer William Read Woodfield, whose credits include The Hypnotic Eye and the TV movies Earth II and Satan’s Triangle, died of a heart attack on November 24th, aged 73.
Former Beatles guitarist George Harrison died of cancer on November 29th, aged 58. His film appearances include Help!, Yellow Submarine, A Magical Mystery Tour and Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and he produced the latter along with The Time Bandits and other movies under his production company Hand-Made Films, which he co-founded. At the time of his death the singer/songwriter was reportedly worth £120 million, and his 1970 single ‘My Sweet Lord’ briefly topped the UK charts again, replacing the late Aaliyah’s ‘More Than a Woman’. It was the first time that a posthumous No.1 hit was replaced by another.
75-year-old comic-strip artist Dave Graue, who took over the syndicated strip Alley Oop from its creator Vincent T. Hamlin in 1973, was killed in a car crash near his home in North Carolina on December 10th.
British TV writer Alan Fennell died of cancer on December 11th, aged 65. After teaming up with Gerry Anderson on the comic strip adaptations of the puppet series Four Feather Falls and Supercar, he began scripting many of Anderson’s TV series, including Fireball XL5, Stingray, Joe 90, Thunderbirds and U.F.O. Fennell edited the children’s magazine Look-In from 1971–74 and in 1991 he became editor of Fleetway’s Thunderbirds comics.
Archie Comics artist Dan DeCarlo, who created Sabrina the Teenage Witch, died on December 18th, aged 82.
Writer and editor Keith Allen Daniels died of cancer the same day, aged 45. His SF and fantasy poetry appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Weird Tales and other magazines, and he founded Anamnesis Press in 1990.
British ghost story author and former television scriptwriter and playwright Sheila Hodgson died of a stroke on Christmas Day, just three days after her 80th birthday. During the late 1970s she wrote a series of supernatural plays, three of which were based upon ideas suggested by M.R. James in his essay ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write’. These were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and subsequently published as stories in such periodicals as Blackwood’s Magazine and Ghosts & Scholars, as well as being reprinted in Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories XI and XVI, and Ramsey Campbell’s anthology Meddling With Ghosts. In 1998, Ash-Tree Press collected twelve of her tales featuring James as the central character in a volume entitled The Fellow Travellers and Other Ghost Stories.
Composer Florian Fricke, whose credits include Herzog’s Nosferatu, died of a stroke on December 29th, aged 57.
British author Victor [Joseph] Hanson died of complications from a stroke in mid-December, aged 81. Best known for his hard-boiled crime and Western novels, in the early 1960s he published The Twisters, Creatures of the Mist, Claws of the Night and The Grip of Fear under the pseudonym ‘Vern Hansen’.
ACTORS/ACTRESSES
American character actor Ray Walston, best known as TV’s My Favorite Martian (1963–66) and the Devil in Damn Yankees (on Broadway and in the 1958 film), died on January 1st, aged 86. His numerous other credits include The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, Popeye, The Fall of the House of Usher (1980), Galaxy of Terror, O’Hara’s Wife, Blood Relations, Saturday the 14th Strikes Back, Blood Salvage, Popcorn, Addams Family Values, the 1999 My Favorite Martian movie, the Stephen King mini-series The Stand and a recurring role in Star Trek Voyager. He also narrated the title sequence of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories TV series (1985–87).
Character actress Nancy Parsons died after a long illness on January 5th, aged 58. She ap
peared in Motel Hell and on TV’s Nightmare Classics: Eyes of the Panther.
Film and TV character actor Scott Marlowe died of a heart attack on January 6th, aged 68. He appeared in The Subterraneans and the TV movie Night Slaves along with episodes of The Outer Limits, Thriller, The Wild Wild West and many other shows.
65-year-old British stage and television actor Michael Williams, the husband of Dame Judi Dench, died of cancer on January 11th after a seventeen-month battle against the disease. He appeared in the RSC’s 1966 movie Marat/Sade, and between 1989 and 1998 he portrayed Dr Watson to Clive Merrison’s Sherlock Holmes for the entire canon of Sir Arthur Conan’s Doyle’s fifty-six short stories and four novels broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Canadian character actor Al Waxman died during heart surgery on January 17th, aged 65. His many credits include When Michael Calls, I Still Dream of Jeannie, Heavy Metal, Spasms (aka Death Bite), Millennium and Bogus.
Hollywood musical comedy star Virginia [Lee] O’Brien died on January 18th, aged 79. Related to Civil War General Robert E. Lee, she appeared in sixteen movies between 1940 and 1947 and in 1955 had a small role in Francis in the Navy. She was married to Superman star Kirk Alyn (who died in 1999) from 1942–55.
Veteran Shakespearean actor Joseph O’Conor died in London on January 21st, aged 84. His films include Gorgo, Hammer’s The Gorgon and Devil Ship Pirates, and Doomwatch, and he appeared on TV in the 1973 adaptation of M.R. James’s A Ghost Story for Christmas: Lost Hearts and the recent children’s series The Belfry Witches.
American actress Sally Mansfield, who portrayed Vena Ray on the 1950s TV series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, died of lung cancer on January 28th, aged 77.
French leading man Jean-Pierre Aumont (Jean-Pierre Salomons) died on January 29th, aged 92. His many films include Siren of Atlantis, Cauldron of Blood (with Boris Karloff), Castle Keep, The Happy Hooker and Don’t Look in the Attic. One of his three wives was Maria Montez, whom he married in 1946 and with whom he had a daughter, actress Tina Aumont.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13 Page 65