The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22

by Stephen Jones

  Oscar-winning Hollywood actress Patricia Neal (Patsy Louise Neal) died of lung cancer on August 8, aged 84. She appeared in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and its British “remake” Stranger from Venus, The Night Digger, Happy Mother’s Day Love George, Ghost Story (based on the novel by Peter Straub) and an episode of TV’s Ghost Story/Circle of Fear scripted by Jimmy Sangster. In 1965, Neal suffered a series of debilitating strokes that put her in a coma for twenty-one days before she managed her own rehabilitation. She famously had a secret three-year affair with the older and married Gary Cooper, her co-star in The Fountainhead (1949), before marrying British author Roald Dahl from 1953 until their divorce in 1983. Glenda Jackson portrayed the actress in the 1981 TV movie The Patricia Neal Story.

  British drummer and bandleader Jack [Russell] Parnell died of cancer the same day, aged 87. He had also been suffering from the lung disorder chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As musical director for ATV (then run by his uncle, Val) he orchestrated such TV programmes as The Muppet Show and a 1976 version of Peter Pan starring Mia Farrow, Danny Kaye and Sir John Gielgud. He also apparently worked on the soundtracks for the films Eye of the Devil (aka 13) and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive.

  70-year-old American character actor and voice artist George [Ralph] DiCenzo died of sepsis after a long illness on August 9. He began his career as an associate producer on the TV series Dark Shadows and an assistant to the producer on the spin-off movie, House of Dark Shadows (in which he also had an uncredited role). Switching to acting, he appeared in The Invasion of Carol Enders, The Night Strangler, The Norliss Tapes, Helter Skelter (1976), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Ninth Configuration, Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land (aka Starflight One), The Tom Swift and Linda Craig Mystery Hour, Back to the Future, 18 Again! (1988) and The Exorcist III, along with episodes of TV’s Kung Fu, Space Academy, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985) and M.A.N.T.I.S. As a voice actor, DiCenzo contributed to Space Sentinels, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (as “Captain America”), Blackstar (as “John Blackstar”), Challenge of the GoBots, Galtar and the Golden Lance, Batman (1994), She-Ra Princess of Power (as the villain, “Hordak”) and the spin-off movies The Secret of the Sword and He-Man: A Christmas Special. On Broadway, he appeared opposite Nathan Lane in George C. Scott’s 1991 revival of On Borrowed Time.

  German actor, painter and musician Bruno S (Bruno Schleinstein) died of heart failure on August 11, aged 78. After spending more than twenty years in various institutions, he was cast by Werner Herzog in the title role of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974).

  Hungarian-born actress Ahna Capri (Anna Marie Nanasi) died in Los Angeles on August 19 from injuries sustained in a car crash eleven days earlier. The 66-year-old had been in a coma ever since her car collided with a five-ton truck. Best remembered for her role as “Tania” in Enter the Dragon, the buxom blonde also appeared in One of Our Spies is Missing, The Brotherhood of Satan and Piranha (1972), along with episodes of The Wild Wild West, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Invaders, Matt Helm and Man from Atlantis. She retired from acting at the end of the 1970s.

  American child actor Christopher [Dylan] Shea, the voice of “Linus van Pelt” in the Peanuts animated specials A Boy Named Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Charlie Brown’s All-Stars, It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, You’re in Love Charlie Brown and He’s Your Dog Charlie Brown, died the same day, aged 52. He also appeared in two episodes of The Invaders.

  American comedian Robert Schimmel died on September 3 of complications from a car accident eight days earlier, when his daughter swerved to avoid another vehicle and crashed into the side of the freeway. The 60-year-old appeared in the movies Blankman and Scary Movie 2.

  62-year-old Mike Edwards (aka “Dev Pramada”), a founding member of 1970s British rock group ELO (Electric Light Orchestra), was killed instantly in a freak accident the same day, when the van he was driving on a Devon road was crushed by a giant bale of hay that rolled out of a field. The cellist was identified by police using photographs and YouTube footage. Edwards was with the Birmingham band from 1972 to 1975.

  Portly American character actor [William] Glenn Shadix, who appeared as the interior decorator in Tim Burton’s Beetle Juice, died following a fall at home on September 7. He was 58 and had been using a wheelchair due to mobility problems. Shadix also had roles in Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (as the “Mayor”) and Planet of the Apes remake, and his other credits include Heathers, Nightlife, Meet the Applegates, Sleepwalkers, Demolition Man, Multiplicity, Bartok the Magnificent, and episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Carnivàle. He also voiced “Lonnie the Shark” in four episodes of the cartoon series The Mask, and contributed voice work to numerous other TV cartoon shows and video games.

  Canadian voice actress Billie Mae Richards (Billie Mae Dinsmore, aka “Billy/Billie Richards”) died after suffering several strokes on September 10, aged 88. Her many credits include Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Willy McBean and His Magic Machine, The Daydreamer, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July, The Trolls and the Christmas Express, The Care Bears Movie, Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation and episodes of TV’s King Kong (1966), Spider-Man, The Undersea Adventures of Captain Nemo and The Care Bears. Richards also appeared in such shows as War of the Worlds, My Secret Identity and The Hidden Room, along with the movie Shadow Builder.

  Veteran American leading man Kevin McCarthy died on September 11, aged 96. Best remembered for warning the world that “They’re here already!” in the 1956 version of Jack Finny’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, he also appeared in the 1978 remake, plus Between Time and Timbuktu, Exo-Man, Piranha (1978), Hero at Large, The Howling, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Invitation to Hell, The Midnight Hour, Dark Tower, Innerspace, The Sleeping Car, Eve of Destruction (uncredited), Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College, Duplicates, Matinee (uncredited), Mommy, Addams Family Reunion, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Fallen Angels, Slipstream (2007), Trail of the Screaming Forehead and Her Morbid Desires. McCarthy also turned up in numerous TV shows, including episodes of Lights Out, Inner Sanctum, The Twilight Zone, Way Out, Great Ghost Stories, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the pilot Ghostbreakers, The Invaders, The Wild Wild West, Fantasy Island, Tales from the Crypt and Early Edition.

  Busy American character actor Harold Gould (Harold V. Goldstein) died of prostate cancer the same day, aged 86. His credits include The Couch (based on a story by Robert Bloch), The Satan Bug, William Castle’s Project X, The Man in the Santa Claus Suit, Get Smart Again!, Stuart Little and Disney’s The Strongest Man in the World, the 1997 remake of The Love Bug, and the 2003 remake of Freaky Friday, along with episodes of TV’s The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Twilight Zone, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mister Ed, Get Smart, The Green Hornet, The Invaders, The Flying Nun, The Wild Wild West, I Dream of Jeannie, Dinosaurs, The Ray Bradbury Theatre, The New Adventures of Superman, The Outer Limits (1996) and Touched by an Angel.

  British character actor Nicholas Selby [James Ivor Selby], who was orginally offered the role of “Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart” in the 1968 Doctor Who serial “The Web of Fear”, died on September 14, aged 85. He appeared in a 1960 TV adaptation of Night of the Big Heat, based on the SF novel by John Lymington, along with episodes of The Avengers, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Strange Report, Doomwatch, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Storyteller and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. A member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Selby also portrayed “Egeus” in Peter Hall’s 1968 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and “Duncan” in Roman Polanski’s 1971 version of Macbeth, and his stage appearances include the Bell, Book and Candle in 1957 and the 1974 play Sherlock Holmes.

  British character actor Frank Jarvis, who was usually cast as crooks or policemen in films and on TV, died on September 15, aged 69. His credits include the first episode of Adam Adamant Lives! and three series of Doctor Who.

  Rugged American
character actor John Crawford (Alfred Crawford Richardson) died of complications from a stroke on September 21, aged 90. His many appearances include The Phantom of 42nd Street, The Time of Their Lives (with Abbott and Costello as ghosts), the serials G-Men Never Forget, Dangers of the Canadian Mounted, Ghost of Zorro, Radar Patrol vs. Sky King, The Invisible Monster, Zombies of the Stratosphere, Blackhawk and Commado Cody: Sky Marshall of the Universe, Invasion USA, Captain Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, I Saw What You Did (1965), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Severed Arm, The Towering Inferno and The Boogens. On TV Crawford appeared in episodes of Adventures of Superman (1952–53), Matinee Theatre (“Wuthering Heights”, 1953), 13 Demon Street (hosted by Lon Chaney, Jr), The Twilight Zone, Batman, Star Trek, The Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Tarzan, Lost in Space, The Wild Wild West, Land of the Giants, The Invisible Man (1975), The Bionic Woman, The Incredible Hulk, The Amazing Spider-Man, Salvage 1, The Powers of Matthew Star, Matt Houston, Knight Rider and the unaired 1967 pilot The Man from the 25th Century.

  Hollywood “B” movie actress Grace Bradley died the same day, her birthday, aged 97. After appearing in a number of films during the 1930s and early ’40s, including The Invisible Killer, she became the fifth and final wife of cowboy actor William Boyd, best known for his long portrayal of “Hopalong Cassidy” in movies and on TV. He was 42 and she was 23 at the time, and they remained married for thirty-five years, until his death in 1972.

  English-born Canadian character actress Jackie Burroughs died of cancer on September 22, aged 71. She moved with her family to Toronto when she was 13, and her credits include Heavy Metal, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (based on John Varley’s story), Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1983), The Care Bears Movie, Carnival of Shadows, Food of the Gods II, Whispers (based on the novel by Dean R. Koontz), Bleeders (aka Hemoglobin, based on “The Lurking Fear” by H.P. Lovecraft), Willard (2003), RE-Generation (aka The Limb Salesman), Into the Labyrinth and episodes of The All New Ewoks, the 1980s Twilight Zone, Smallville and Dead Like Me. During the 1960s, Burroughs was married to lead guitarist and singer Zal Yanovsky, a founding member of the rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful.

  Five-times married singer and actor Eddie Fisher (Edwin John Fisher), who famously married and divorced Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor and Connie Stevens, died of complications from hip surgery the same day, aged 82. One of the biggest pop idols of the 1950s (“Thinking of You”) and the father of Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher, he also made an uncredited appearance in Taylor’s 1959 movie Suddenly, Last Summer, based on the play by Tennessee Williams.

  Former Argentinian professional basketball player and WWF wrestler Jorge “Giant” Gonzáles died of complications from diabetes and giantism on September 22, aged 44. He was seven foot, six inches tall and appeared in the 1994 TV movie Hercules in the Underworld.

  Art Gilmore (Arthur Wells Gilmore), whose crisp tones introduced numerous TV series and narrated around 3,000 movie trailers from the 1940s to the 1960s, died on September 25, aged 98. Gilmore’s voice introduced such shows as Climax! and Highway Patrol, while his distinctive pitch helped sell the trailers for Disney’s Dumbo, It’s a Wonderful Life, The War of the Worlds, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Fahrenheit 451, amongst many others. Gilmore also turned up in small roles in When Worlds Collide, Francis in the Navy and an episode of Captain Midnight, and his voice can be heard in The Reluctant Dragon, The Unsuspected, King of the Rocket Men, Rear Window, Tobor the Great, Around the World in Eighty Days, Rodan! The Flying Monster and The Nutty Professor.

  Veteran Hollywood actress Gloria Stuart (Gloria Frances Stewart), best known by modern audiences for her Oscar-nominated role as the centenarian survivor in James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster Titanic, died of respiratory failure on September 26, aged 100. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer five years earlier. A founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, the actress made her movie debut in 1932, and she starred in James Whale’s The Old Dark House (opposite Boris Karloff) and The Invisible Man (with Claude Rains), along with Secret of the Blue Room, Roman Scandals, Gift of Gab (with cameos by Karloff and Bela Lugosi) and William Castle’s The Whistler. Disillusioned with the types of parts she was getting, Stuart retired from the screen in 1946, but returned to TV in 1975 with supporting roles in The Legend of Lizzie Borden, The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan and episodes of Manimal, The Invisible Man (2001) and Touched by an Angel.

  Oscar-nominated American character actor Joe Mantell (Joseph Mantel), who played the travelling salesman in the diner sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), died on September 29, aged 94. He also appeared in episodes of TV’s Suspense, Lights Out, Inner Sanctum, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond, The Twilight Zone (including Richard Matheson’s “Steel”), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Fantasy Island. Mantell is probably best remembered for uttering the final line in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

  Hollywood star Tony Curtis (Bernard Schwartz) died of cardiac arrest at his home in Las Vegas on September 30, aged 85. One of the actor’s earliest film roles was in Universal’s 1950 talking mule comedy Francis (billed as “Anthony Curtis”), and he went on to appear in Son of Ali Baba, Houdini (1953), The Vikings, The List of Adrian Messenger, Chamber of Horrors (uncredited), The Boston Strangler, The Manitou (based on the novel by Graham Masterton), BrainWaves, Lobster Man from Mars, Tarzan in Manhattan, Midnight, The Mummy Lives, Stargames and Reflections of Evil. His other credits include episodes of TV’s The Flintstones (as “Stony Curtis”) and The New Adventures of Superman, and his voice was also heard (uncredited) in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Curtis was also an avid painter. He was married five times, most notably to Psycho star Janet Leigh, with whom he had two daughters, actresses Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis.

  British character actress Brenda [Rose] Cowling died of a stroke on October 2, aged 85. She made her (uncredited) film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright and went on to appear in the 1972 short The Man and the Snake (based on the story by Ambrose Bierce), Jabberwocky, Pink Floyd The Wall, Leon Garfield’s The Ghost Downstairs, the James Bond film Octopussy and Dream Lover, along with episodes of The Avengers, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Shadows (“Time Out of Mind”), Hammer House of Horror (“The Two Faces of Evil”), Goodnight Sweetheart and Jonathan Creek on TV.

  British slapstick comedian Sir Norman Wisdom died in an Isle of Man nursing home on October 4, aged 95. He had suffered a series of strokes over the preceding six months that had led to a deterioration in his mental and physical health. Best known for his series of “little man” comedy films during the 1950s and ’60s (you either love ’em or hate ’em), in later years Wisdom appeared in Five Children & It (as a character named “Nesbitt”, after the story’s author, E. Nesbit) and the 2008 direct-to-video release Evil Calls. In 1998 he shot scenes for a yet-to-be-completed SF comedy, Cosmic! Lost and Found, which also apparently involved John Landis and Ray Harryhausen. Wisdom was the national comedy hero of Albania. Christopher Fowler’s story, “Norman Wisdom and the Angel of Death”, appeared in Best New Horror 4 and The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror.

  The “King of Rock and Soul”, Grammy Award-winning American singer/composer Solomon Burke (James Solomon Burke) died on October 10 at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport after arriving on a flight from Los Angeles. He was 70. Burke co-wrote the song “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” and had a hit with “Cry to Me” in the early 1960s and again twenty years later when it was featured on the soundtrack of Dirty Dancing. An undertaker with his own mortuary business in LA, Burke fathered twenty-one children. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

  British leading man Simon MacCorkindale died of bowel and lung cancer on October 14, aged 58. He had been battling the disease for four years. MacCorkindale starred as the shape-changing “Professor Jonathan Chase” in the short-lived NBC-TV series Manimal (1983), and reprised the role in a 1998 episode of Night Man. T
he actor’s other credits include Quatermass/The Quatermass Conclusion (1979), The Sword and the Sorcerer, Jaws 3-D (co-scripted by Richard Matheson), Wing Commander and 13hrs, plus episodes of Beasts (created by Nigel Kneale), Hammer House of Horror, Fantasy Island, Earth: Final Conflict, Dark Realm, Relic Hunter and Poltergeist: The Legacy (in the recurring role of “Reed Horton”). MacCorkindale co-scripted and directed the TV movie The House That Mary Built starring his second wife, Susan George, and he also co-produced the TV series Adventure Inc. His first marriage to actress Fiona Fullerton ended in divorce in 1982.

  Johnny Sheffield (John Matthew Sheffied Cassan, aka “John Sheffield”), the child actor who portrayed Tarzan’s adopted son in eight films, died of a heart attack after falling off a ladder on October 15, aged 79. Following a stint at the age of seven in the original Broadway stage production of On Borrowed Time, he was cast by MGM as “Boy” opposite Johnny Weissmuller’s Ape Man and Maureen O’Sullivan’s Jane in Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939). He went on to reprise the role in Tarzan’s Secret Treasure, Tarzan’s New York Adventure, and the cheaper RKO series Tarzan Triumphs, Tarazan’s Desert Mystery (with dinosaurs!), Tarzan and the Amazons, Tarzan and the Leopard Woman and Tarzan and the Huntress, before outgrowing the role. Monogram Pictures then starred him in a series of twelve low-budget Bomba, the Jungle Boy adventures from 1949–55. Following the final film in the series, Lord of the Jungle, Sheffield left showbusiness and worked in real estate, lobster importing and building restoration.