Howard Hughes discovery and Hollywood’s leading film noir actress, Jane Greer (Bettejane Greer), died of complications from cancer on August 24th, two weeks short of her 77th birthday. Her films include Out of the Past, Dick Tracy (1945), The Falcon’s Alibi, Sinbad the Sailor (1946), Run for the Sun and the Lon Chaney Sr. biopic Man of a Thousand Faces. She was briefly married to actor/crooner Rudy Vallee, and her family was descended from the poet John Donne.
22-year-old American R&B singer and actress Aaliyah (Dana Haughton) was one of nine people killed on August 25th, when a ‘substantially overloaded’ light airplane crashed shortly after take-off in the Bahamas, where she had been filming a music video. The niece of Gladys Knight, she was rumoured to have married singer/producer R. Kelly when she was only fifteen. After appearing in Romeo Must Die, she starred in the Anne Rice adaptation Queen of the Damned and had just completed preproduction on the two Matrix sequels. Her parents subsequently launched a legal action against Virgin Records and several video production companies alleging negligence led to the plane crash.
75-year-old Spanish actor Francisco Rabal, who suffered from bronchitis, died of emphysema on August 29th on a flight from Montreal, where he had received a lifetime achievement award. His nearly 200 films include The Witches (1967), Umberto Lenzi’s City of the Walking Dead (aka Nightmare City), Treasure of the Four Crowns and Dagon.
American leading lady Julie Bishop (Jacqueline Brown, aka Jacqueline Wells) died on August 30th, her 87th birthday. After starting out as a child actress in silent films, she went on to appear in Alice in Wonderland (1933), Tarzan the Fearless (with Buster Crabbe), The Black Cat (with Karloff and Lugosi), Torture Ship and The Hidden Hand. Lionel Atwill was once her step father-in-law and her daughter is actress Pamela Shoop Sweeney.
Former American teen idol Troy Donahue (Merle Johnson, Jr.) died on September 2nd of a massive heart attack the 65-year-old had suffered while returning from a gym three days earlier. His film roles include The Man With a Thousand Faces, Monolith Monsters, Monster on the Campus, My Blood Runs Cold, Rocket to the Moon (aka Those Fantastic Flying Fools), Sweet Saviour, Seizure, The Love-Thrill Murders, Cyclone, Deadly Prey, Dr Alien, Bad Blood, The Chilling, Omega Cop, Shock ’em Dead, Cockroach Hotel and The Godfather Part II. Amongst four divorces, he was married to co-star Suzanne Pleshette for a year, and in the 1970s became addicted to drink and drugs, spending a summer homeless in New York’s Central Park. In later years he gave acting lessons to passengers on a cruise line.
53-year-old American actress and photographer Berry Berenson, the widow of actor Anthony Perkins and younger sister of actress Marisa Berenson, was one of the ninety-two passengers and crew on American Airlines Flight 11, en route from Boston to Los Angeles, that terrorists crashed into the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center on September 11th. She appeared in such movies as Cat People (1982) and Winter Kills.
Former TV reporter, Beat poet, Second City founding member and belated character actor, Victor [Keung] Wong died in his sleep on September 12th, aged 74. His nearly thirty films include Big Trouble in Little China, The Golden Child, Prince of Darkness and Tremors. He retired in 1998 after suffering two strokes.
46-year-old Lani O’Grady (Lanita Rose Agrati), best known for playing the eldest daughter in the TV series Eight is Enough (1977–81), was found dead at her California home on September 25th. The actress, whose other credits include Massacre at Central High (aka Blackboard Massacre), The Curious Case of the Campus Corpse and the TV movie The Kid With the Broken Halo, had suffered from panic attacks, agoraphobia and alcohol and drug abuse.
Actress Gloria Foster, who appeared as The Oracle in The Matrix, died of complications from diabetes in New York on September 29th, aged 64.
Early American TV sex symbol Dagmar (Virginia Ruth Egnor, aka Jennie Lewis) died on October 9th, aged 79. The buxom blonde appeared on Broadway with comedy duo Olsen and Johnson in the mid-1940s, and guested on TV alongside Jerry Lester, Morey Amsterdam and Milton Berle during the following decade. She retired in the 1970s.
American actor Otis Young died of a stroke on October 12th, aged 69. His films include The Clones, The Capture of Bigfoot and Blood Beach.
British actress Linden Travers (Florence Lindon-Travers), best remembered for her role as Mrs Todhunter in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, died on October 23rd, aged 88. Her other films include The Terror (1939), The Ghost Train (1940), The Bad Lord Byron and No Orchids For Miss Blandish, which was banned in Britain for several years. Her younger brother was actor Bill Travers.
British character actress Jenny Laird, who appeared in Village of the Damned (1960) and the TV movies A Place to Die and The Masks of Death (as Mrs Hudson, opposite Peter Cushing’s Sherlock Holmes), died on Halloween, aged 84. She also appeared in episodes of TV’s Doctor Who and Hammer House of Horror.
Actor and Tony award-winning composer Albert Hague, who played the cantankerous Mr Shorofsky in Fame and the spin-off TV series, died of lung cancer on November 12th, aged 81. In 1966 he scored the animated short Dr Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (narrated by Boris Karloff), and also appeared in Nightmares, Space Jam and TV’s Tales from the Darkside.
American actor Byron Sanders, who appeared in The Flesh Eaters and also modelled for Salvador Dali’s ‘Crucifixion’, died the same day, aged 76.
Veteran British comedienne and character actress Peggy Mount died on November 13th, aged 86.
33-year-old British actress Charlotte Coleman, best remembered as Hugh Grant’s room-mate in Four Weddings and a Funeral, died of a severe asthma attack in London on November 14th. She also appeared in The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale and TV’s Worzel Gummidge, as well as providing voices for the feature cartoon Faeries.
79-year-old Australian actor and screenwriter Michael St. Clair died of a brain aneurysm while driving to an audition on November 22nd. He appeared in Skullduggery and the TV movie The Hound of the Baskervilles (1972), and scripted Mission Mars and co-wrote The Body Stealers (aka Thin Air).
Actor and opera singer Norman Lumsden, best known as author J.R. Hartley looking for a copy of his own book on fly-fishing in the British Yellow Pages TV commercial, died on November 28th, aged 95. His first job was as a commercial artist for publisher Hodder & Stoughton, where he designed book covers for Leslie Charteris’s The Saint series and other titles. Benjamin Britten wrote the part of Peter Quince in his 1960 opera of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Lumsden in mind.
John Mitchum, the actor brother of Robert, died of a stroke on November 29th, aged 82. He appeared in Bigfoot, High Plains Drifter, Telefon and Escapes.
American character actress Pauline Moore, who played one of the bridesmaids in the 1931 Frankenstein, died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on December 7th, aged 87. Her other credits include Charlie Chan at the Olympics, Charlie Chan on Treasure Island and Charlie Chan in Reno.
Veteran Indian actor Ashok Kumar [Ganguli], who appeared in more than 300 films during a career that spanned over sixty years, died of a heart attack on December 10th, aged 90.
Singer Rufus Thomas, best known for his novelty hit ‘Do the Funky Chicken’, died of apparent heart failure in Memphis, Tennessee, on December 15th, aged 84. The Rolling Stones covered his ‘Walking the Dog’ on their first album in 1964.
72-year-old British actor Sir Nigel Hawthorne died of a heart attack on December 19th after a two-year battle against pancreatic cancer. He won a Tony Award for his stage performance as C.S. Lewis in the 1991 Broadway production of Shadowlands and was forced to pull out of playing Jack the Ripper in From Hell (2001) when potentially lethal blood clots were discovered on his lungs prior to filming. He also appeared in DreamChild, Demolition Man, Richard III, Memoirs of a Survivor, Firefox and the 1981 TV movie of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and contributed voice characterizations to Watership Down, The Plague Dogs and Disney’s The Black Cauldron and Tarzan.
American character actor Lance Fuller died in a Los Ange
les nursing home after a long illness on December 22nd, aged 73. He portrayed the Metaluna Mutant in the classic This Island Earth, and also appeared in The She Creature (1956), Voodoo Woman, The Bride and the Beast, The Andromeda Strain and episodes of TV’s Thriller and The Twilight Zone.
American character actress [Anna] Eileen Heckart died after a three-year battle with cancer on December 31st, aged 82. Among her many roles, she appeared in both the Broadway and film productions of The Bad Seed, gaining an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in the part of Mrs Daigle. Her other movies include No Way To Treat a Lady and Burnt Offerings. She retired from acting in 2000.
Swiss-born leading man Paul Hubschmid (aka Paul Christian) died in Berlin of a pulmonary embolism the same day, aged 84. He appeared in Bagdad, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Fritz Lang’s Tiger of Eschnapur (aka Journey to the Lost City), Funeral in Berlin, The Day the Sky Exploded and Skullduggery.
FILM/TV TECHNICIANS
British cartoon film-maker Alison de Vere died on January 2nd, aged 73. In 1967 she helped create the backgrounds for The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and made a cameo appearance as one of the photographed figures in the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sequence.
American independent film producer/director James Hill died of Alzheimer’s disease on January 11th, aged 84. After working as a contract screenwriter at MGM, he joined actor Burt Lancaster and agent Harold Hecht in a production partnership. In 1958, he became Rita Hayworth’s fifth and final husband. The marriage lasted two years.
Following years of poor health (his death was prematurely announced in 1996), Spanish writer/director Amando De Ossorio died on January 13th, aged 82. His many films include Malenka The Niece of the Vampire, Tombs of the Blind Dead, Return of the Evil Dead, Night of the Sorcerers, Horror of the Zombies (1974), Night of the Seagulls and The Sea Serpent.
Film exhibitor Ted Mann, who changed the name of Hollywood’s famed Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to his own in 1973, died of a stroke on January 15th, aged 84. He also produced the 1969 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man and Krull, and was married to actress Rhonda Fleming.
Sam Wiesenthal, who was production manager to Carl Laemmle, Jr’s vice-president at Universal Pictures, died on February 11th at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital, aged 92. With Laemmle, he was responsible for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and the studio’s Frankenstein and Dracula franchises. After Universal was sold in 1936, he moved on to other studios and later became an independent producer.
Screenwriter/director Burt Kennedy, best known for his comedy Westerns, died of cancer on February 15th, aged 78. He had undergone heart surgery the previous month, after which his kidneys had failed. Among his many credits are The Killer Inside Me, Suburban Commando and the TV movies The Wild Wild West Revisited and More Wild Wild West.
Former president of production at Paramount, producer Howard W. Koch reportedly died of Alzheimer’s disease on February 16th, aged 84. His credits include The Manchurian Candidate, The President’s Analyst, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Heaven Can Wait (1978), Dragonslayer, The Keep and Ghost. During the 1950s he was a partner with Aubrey Schenck in independent production company Bel-Air, which produced such low-budget chillers as The Black Sleep, Pharaoh’s Curse and Voodoo Island, and he directed Frankenstein 1970 starring Boris Karloff.
French film director Robert Enrico, whose early films include the Oscar-winning 1961 short La Rivière Du Hibou (Incident at Owl Creek), based on the story by Ambrose Bierce, died of cancer in Paris the same day, aged 69. In America, his short film was shown as part of The Twilight Zone TV series.
American producer/director Stanley [Earl] Kramer, whose classic films include High Noon, The Caine Mutiny and Judgment at Nuremberg, died of pneumonia on February 19th, aged 87. His other credits include The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T, On the Beach (1959), Inherit the Wind and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. During the 1950s he kept Lon Chaney, Jr. in high-profile films, while both Karloff and Lugosi were scrabbling for work.
German-born American cinematographer Ralf D. Bode, whose credits include Dressed to Kill, died of lung cancer on February 27th, aged 59.
The same day saw the death of film and TV producer Stan Margulies from cancer at the age of 80. His credits include Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Former actor, director and cinematographer John A. Alonzo died on March 13th, aged 66. After starring in The Hand of Death (1962), the Mexican-American cinematographer began as James Wong Howe’s camera operator on Seconds (1966) before working with such directors as Martin Ritt, Roger Corman, Roman Polanski, John Frankenheimer and Brian De Palma. He photographed parts of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, Blue Thunder, Terror in the Aisles, The Guardian, Meteor Man, Star Trek Generations and the live TV movie remake of Fail Safe (2000).
British film director Ralph Thomas, the older brother of the late Carry On director Gerald Thomas, died after a long illness on March 17th, aged 85. Best known for his series of Doctor comedies (1953–70), based on the novels by Richard Gordon, his other films include Helter Skelter (1948), The 39 Steps (1959), Hot Enough for June, Deadlier Than the Male, Some Girls Do, Percy, Percy’s Progress and Quest for Love (based on a story by John Wyndham). His son is producer Jeremy Thomas.
Motion picture designer and conceptual artist Mentor Huebner, who designed Robby the Robot for MGM’s Forbidden Planet, died on March 19th after several vascular bypass surgeries on his right leg. He was 83, and among his more than 250 other credits are many conceptual drawings for Alfred Hitchcock’s films, The Time Machine (1960), Planet of the Apes (1967), King Kong (1976), Flash Gordon (1980), Blade Runner, Dune (1984), Cat’s Eye, The Addams Family, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, So I Married an Ax Murderer, Total Recall and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Early in his career he had worked at Disney as an animator, drawing the ‘Heigh-Ho’ sequence for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Cartoon director and producer William [Denby] Hanna, who with partner Joseph Barbera founded Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1957, died on March 22nd, aged 90. He had been in declining health for several years. Among the many TV shows he helped to create were The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, Captain Caveman and Scooby-Doo, winning eight Emmys for his work. The duo began their collaboration in 1937 at MGM, where they won seven Oscars for Tom and Jerry before the studio closed down its animation department in 1957. They also combined cartoon sequences with live action for such films as Anchors Aweigh, Dangerous When Wet and Invitation to the Dance.
Lawrence M. Lansburgh, who joined Walt Disney in the mid-1940s and directed eighteen features and episodes of TV’s The Wonderful World of Disney, died on March 25th, aged 89.
Polish-born cinematographer Piotr Sobocinski was found dead in a Vancouver hotel room on March 26th, soon after completing the Stephen King adaptation Hearts in Atlantis.
67-year-old Larry Tucker who, with Paul Mazursky, co-developed, co-produced and scripted The Monkees TV series, died on April 1st of complications from multiple sclerosis and cancer. A former stand-up comedian, he appeared in Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor and produced and scripted Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland.
French film director Jean-Gabriel Albicocco, whose credits include the 1966 international hit Le Grand Meaulnes (The Wanderer), died forgotten and destitute in Brazil on April 10th. He was 65.
French-born Canadian film and TV producer Nicolas Clermont, who as co-founder of Filmline International was responsible for the long-running Highlander series and The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, died of cancer on April 11th, aged 59.
American visual effects artist Sean Dever died on April 13th, aged 32. His credits include such overblown blockbusters as Red Planet, Thirteen Days, The Sixth Day, Waterworld, Angels in the Outfield, True Lies, The Fifth Element, Flubber, My Favorite Martian, Sphere and Batman and Robin.
American film and television director Michael Ritchie died of complications from prostate cancer on
April 16th, aged 62. His credits include The Island, The Golden Child, A Simple Wish and TV’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Italian director Giacomo Gentilomo died the same day in Rome, aged 92. His films include Goliath and the Vampires and Hercules Against the Moon Men.
Director, producer and writer Jack Haley, Jr., the son of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, died on April 21st, aged 67. He created MGM’s That’s Entertainment! series and numerous award-winning TV specials and documentaries based around the Golden Age of Hollywood (The Making of the Wizard of Oz, etc.). He also directed the 1970, 1974 and 1979 Academy Award shows and was once married to Liza Minnelli.
British screenwriter and director Ken Hughes died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease in a California nursing home on April 28th, aged 79. A former cinema projectionist, his film credits include The Brain Machine, The Atomic Man (aka Time-slip), Joe Macbeth, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Casino Royale (both based on books by Ian Fleming), Sextette with an 86-year-old Mae West and the slasher film Night School (aka Terror Eyes).
Veteran animator Maurice J. Noble died on May 18th, aged 91. Co-director of the Oscar-winning short The Dot and the Line, he worked on such Disney classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Fantasia and Dumbo, and more than sixty Warner Bros. cartoons (including Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century). With business partner Chuck Jones he also produced many Dr Seuss (Ted Geisel) cartoons, including The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!.
83-year-old Herbert Wise Browar, former vice-president of production at Filmways Television, died of a cerebral haemorrhage on May 19th. He served as an associate producer on such popular TV shows as Mr Ed (1961–65) and The Addams Family (1964 – 66).
Italian director Alfonso Brescia died on June 6th, aged 71. He directed more than fifty films (often credited to ‘Al Bradley’), including The Conqueror of Atlantis, The Super Stooges vs. the Wonder Women, War in Space, Battle of the Stars, Iron Warriors and many more.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13 Page 67