Seventy-three-year-old Hank Reinhardt (Julius Henry Reinhardt), a mediaeval weapons expert who co-edited the 1979 anthology Heroic Fantasy with Gerald W. Page, died of an antibiotic-resistant infection developed during heart bypass surgery on 30 October. He was married to Baen Books publisher Toni Weisskopf.
German-born author and screenwriter Peter Viertel died of lymphoma in Marbella, Spain, on 4 November, aged 86. His wife, actress Deborah Kerr, died three weeks earlier at the same age. During the 1940s, he was involved with Val Lewton’s “B” movie unit at RKO, and co-scripted Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur. Along with books about his friends Ernest Hemingway and John Huston, Viertel worked on the screenplays for The African Queen, Beat the Devil and The Sun Also Rises, and wrote the 1953 novel White Hunter Black Hunter, filmed by Clint Eastwood in 1990.
British SF author and photo-journalist Roger Eldridge died on the same day, aged 63. His novels include The Shadow of the Gloom-World and The Fishers of Darksea.
Acclaimed American writer Norman [Kingsley] Mailer died of acute renal failure on 10 November, aged 84. His books include The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner’s Song, Ancient Evenings and Tough Guys Don’t Dance. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s final novel was The Castle in the Forest (2007), a psychic biography of Adolph Hitler’s early life narrated by one of Satan’s underlings. He was working on a sequel at the time of his death. Co-founder of the Village Voice, Mailer also wrote, produced and directed for the screen, as well as acting in a number of films. In 2005, the author received a gold medal for Lifetime Achievement at the National Book Awards.
Bestselling novelist and playwright Ira [Marvin] Levin died of a heart attack in his Manhattan apartment on 12 November, aged 78. Starting out as a TV writer (Lights Out; Alfred Hitchcock Presents), his debut book, A Kiss Before Dying, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1954 for best first novel and was filmed in 1956 and 1991. Rosemary’s Baby, his second novel, was not completed until fourteen years later and was filmed by director Roman Polanski in 1968. His other novels, The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil and Sliver, were adapted for the screen with less success. Levin’s flop macabre play Dr Crook’s Garden was filmed for TV in 1971 starring Bing Crosby, and his Edgar-winning Broadway hit Deathtrap was turned into movies in 1982 and 2007, both starring Michael Caine. He received a Life Achievement Award from The Horror Writers Association in 1997 and was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2003.
Hollywood screenwriter Lester Ziffren died of congestive heart failure the same day, aged 101. A former reporter for United Press during the Spanish Civil War, in the early 1940s he contributed to the scripts for Charlie Chan in Panama, Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise, Murder Over New York and Charlie Chan in Rio.
American theoretical physicist and SF fan Sidney [Richard] Coleman died on 18 November from diffuse Lewy Body disease, a rare form of dementia. He was aged 70. In 1956 Coleman co-founded the Chicago specialist press Advent: Publishers, and he contributed book reviews to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1970s.
Britain’s premier anthologist, Peter [Alexander] Haining (aka “Ric Alexander” and “Richard Peyton”), died of a heart attack while playing football on 19 November, aged 67. Described as “the most prolific anthologist of horror fiction in the world”, he compiled his first anthology, The Hell of Mirrors, in 1965. He went on to edit more than 130 volumes, including The Craft of Terror, Dr Caligari’s Black Book, The Evil People, The Midnight People, The Hollywood Nightmare, The Wild Night Company, Gothic Tales of Terror, The Nightmare Reader, The Ghouls, Christopher Lee’s New Chamber of Horrors, The Black Magic Omnibus (two volumes), Weird Tales: A Facsimile of the World’s Most Famous Fantasy Magazine, More Tales of Unknown Horror, Zombie, Supernatural Sleuths: Stories of Occult Investigators, Werewolf: Horror Stories of the Man-Beast, Mummy: Stories of the Living Corpse, Great Irish Stories of the Supernatural, Vampires at Midnight, The Armchair Horror Collection, Peter Gushing’s Monster Movies, The Vampire Omnibus, The Vampire Hunters’ Casebook, Scottish Ghost Stories, The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Ghost Stories, The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories and The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories, among numerous other compilations. A former journalist and editorial director at UK publishing house New English Library, Haining also wrote around ninety non-fiction books and media-related volumes, including Doctor Who A Celebration: Two Decades Through Time and Space, The Doctor Who File, The Nine Lives of Doctor Who, James Bond: A Celebration, The Invasion: Earth Companion, M. R. James – Book of the Supernatural, Witchcraft and Black Magic, The Monster Makers, Terror! History of Horror Illustrations from the Pulp Magazines, A Sherlock Holmes Compendium, The H G. Wells Scrapbook, Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook, The Dracula Scrapbook, Sweeney Todd: The Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street and The Un-dead: The Legend ofBram Stoker and Dracula (with Peter Tremayne). In 2001 he was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Special Award.
American writer Richard Leigh, co-author of the 1982 speculative history The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, died of a heart condition in London on 21 November, aged 64. Leigh and Michael Baigent, who unsuccessfully tried to sue Dan Brown’s publisher Random House for plagiarism over themes in The Da Vinci Code, also collaborated on The Messianic Legacy, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception and Secret Germany.
Avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who contributed original music to Adam Simon’s 2000 documentary about horror films, The American Nightmare, died on 5 December, aged 79. His work was acknowledged as influencing John Lennon, David Bowie and Frank Zappa.
Laura Huxley (Laura Archera), the Italian-born widow of writer Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), died of cancer in Los Angeles on 13 December. She was 96. In 1968, five years after her husband’s death, she published the memoir This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley.
Iconoclastic American author Jody Scott (Joann Margaret Huguelet/Jody Hugelot Scott Wood) died in Seattle on 24 December, aged 84. A former sardine packer, orthopaedist’s office assistant, Circle Magazine editor (she knew Henry Miller and Anais Nin), artist’s model, factory hand, cabbage-puller, softcore movie-maker, bookstore/art gallery owner and headline writer for the Monterey Herald, she lived in England and Guatemala for various periods. Her first book was the 1951 crime novel Cure it With Honey (aka I’ll Get Mine), written with George Thurston Leite and published under the pseudonym “Thurston Scott”. It was followed some years later by the feminist SF novel Passing for Human and its sequel, I, Vampire. She was also a contributor to the anthologies The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction Eleventh Series, Tales by Moonlight, Afterlives, Heroic Visions II, Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories and the poetry collection Now We Are Sick. Her erotic novel Kiss the Whip remains unpublished.
British SF bookseller Marion Van Der Voort (Marion Blanchard), who ran The Sign of the Dragon with her husband Richard for thirty-five years, died in Scotland of complications from double pneumonia on 26 December, aged 71.
Seventy-one-year-old screenwriter and advertising executive Philip B. “Phil” Dusenberry died of complications from lung cancer on 29 December. With Robert Towne he scripted the 1984 baseball fantasy The Natural, and he was also responsible for creating Pepsi’s “The Choice of a New Generation” ad campaign.
Scriptwriter and actor Bill (William) Idelson died of complications from a fall on 31 December, aged 87. He wrote for such TV shows as The Flintstones, The Twilight Zone (“Long Distance Call”, in collaboration with Charles Beaumont), Get Smart, Bewitched and The Ghost and Mrs Muir. His other writing credits include the 1963 movie The Crawling Hand. A former child actor, Idelson turned up in episodes of The Twilight Zone (his friend Richard Matheson’s “A World of Difference”), Thriller (“The Twisted Image”) and My Favorite Martian, and he did voice work for various Flintstones cartoons in the late 1970s.
PERFORMERS/PERSONALITIES
Nikki Bacharach, the only daughter of songwriter Burt Bacharach and actress An
gle Dickinson, committed suicide by suffocation on 4 January, aged 40. Born prematurely, she had spent many years battling the brain disorder Asperger’s syndrome.
Canadian-born Hollywood actress Yvonne De Carlo (Margaret “Peggy” Yvonne Middleton), who played the vampiric Lily, the long-suffering wife of Herman Munster in TV’s The Munsters (1964-66), died of heart failure on 8 January, aged 84. She appeared in the films This Gun for Hire (uncredited), Road to Morocco (uncredited), The Ten Commandments (1956, as Moses’ wife), Munster Go Home!, The Power, Blazing Stewardesses, La casa de las sombras, Satan’s Cheerleaders, Nocturna (as the bride of John Carradine’s Dracula), The Silent Scream, The Munster’s Revenge, Vultures, Play Dead, American Gothic, Cellar Dweller, Mirror Mirror, Here Come the Munsters and The Barefoot Executive (1995), along with such TV shows as The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Fantasy Island and Tales from the Crypt. In her 1987 book, Yvonne, An Autobiography, she claimed affairs with Howard Hughes, Billy Wilder, Burt Lancaster, Robert Stack and Robert Taylor, among others.
Denny Doherty, 66-year-old lead singer and one of the founding members of 1960s folk-pop group the Mamas and the Papas (“California Dreamin’”), died on 19 January in Ontario, Canada. He had been suffering from kidney problems following surgery in December 2006.
Twenty-five-year-old South Korean “K-Pop” superstar U Nee (Heo Yoon, aka “Lee Hye-Ryeon”) committed suicide by hanging on 21 January. She had been diagnosed with depression. The actress and teen pop star underwent plastic surgery to give her a more westernized appearance. However, when her album sales decreased, she was pushed towards appearing in men’s magazines.
Former stripper, showgirl and cult movie actress Liz Renay (Pearl Elizabeth Dobbins, aka “Melissa Morgan” and “Liz René”) died in Las Vegas of cardiopulmonary arrest and gastric bleeding on 22 January, aged 80. Having initially gained attention as a fashion model and Marilyn Monroe look-alike, her films include The Thrill Killers, The Nasty Rabbit, Day of the Nightmare (uncredited), Lady Godiva Rides, Blackenstein, John Waters’ Desperate Living, Dimension in Lear, The Corpse Grinders 2 and Mark of the Astro-Zombies. She toured as a stripper with her daughter Brenda (who committed suicide in 1982 on her 39th birthday) and streaked down Hollywood Boulevard at noon in 1974. Renay served a twenty-seven month term in federal prison in 1959 for perjuring herself during the tax evasion trial of her then-boyfriend, Hollywood mobster Mickey Cohen. Her 1992 autobiography was titled My Lirst 2,000 Men. She was married seven times, divorced five times and widowed twice.
American character actor Tige (Tiger) Andrews, who played “Captain Adam Greer” on TV’s The Mod Squad (1968-72), died of cardiac arrest on 27 January, aged 86. He portrayed the titular character in the 1975 TV movie The Werewolf of Woodstock, and also appeared in episodes of Inner Sanctum and Star Trek (as a Klingon in “Friday’s Child”). Andrews is also credited with introducing the song “Mack the Knife” in the original New York production of The Threepenny Opera.
TV actor Lee Bergere died on 31 January, aged 88. He portrayed Abraham Lincoln in the Star Trek episode “The Savage Curtain”, and his other credits include episodes of The Munsters, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Addams Lamily, My Lavorite Martian, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, The Wild Wild West, The Six Million Dollar Man and Wonder Woman, plus the 1989 movie Time Trackers.
Ninety-three-year-old American-Italian singer Frankie Laine (Francesco Paolo LoVecchio) died of heart failure on 6 February, following hip replacement surgery. He recorded the theme songs for a number of Western movies, including the spoof Blazing Saddles and TV’s Rawhide. During his career, Laine sold around 250 million record albums and performed his signature tune “Mule Train” at the 1950 Academy Awards.
Thirty-nine-year-old former topless dancer, 1993 Playboy Play-mate of the Year and reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith (Vickie Lynn Hogan), who was notoriously married to 89-year-old billionaire J. Howard Marshall for just fourteen months before his death in 1995, was found unconscious in a Florida hotel room on 8 February and died later that same day of a suspected prescription drug overdose. The self-styled Marilyn Monroe look-alike starred in a number of low-budget movies, including the 2006 SF comedy Illegal Aliens, which she also produced. Her 20-year-old son, Daniel Smith, died in similar circumstances in September 2006, while visiting his mother and her three-day-old baby daughter in hospital in the Bahamas. Four different men subsequently claimed to be the father of the girl, named Dannielynn.
Scottish-born stage and screen actor Ian [William] Richardson CBE died in his sleep on 9 February, aged 72. One of the great classical actors of his generation, he starred as Sherlock Holmes in two 1983 TV movies, The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and portrayed Dr Joseph Bell, who is said to have inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional character, in the 2000-01 TV series Murder Rooms: Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes. Richardson was one of the founding members of the Royal Shakespeare Company and his other credits include Marat/Sade, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968), Gawain and the Green Knight (as the uncredited narrator), The Woman in White (both the 1982 and 1997 versions as the same character, Frederick Fairlie), Brazil, Whoops Apocalypse, The Phantom of the Opera (1990), The Canterville Ghost (1997), Dark City, A Knight in Camelot (as Merlin), Alice Through the Looking Glass (1998), The Magician’s House, Gormenghast, 102 Dalmatians, From Hell, Daemos Rising and the miniseries of Terry Pratchett’s Hog father (as the voice of “Death”). Richardson also appeared in episodes of Chillers and Highlander, and he played the enigmatic Canon Adolphus Black in the 2003 BBC-TV series Strange. In addition to his many stage and screen roles, the actor also appeared in one of the American TV mustard commercials as the man in the Rolls-Royce who enquires, “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?”
The death from congestive heart failure (complicated by lung cancer and emphysema) of 77-year-old Canadian-born actor Lee Patterson was announced eight months after it happened on 14 February. Best known for his role as newsman “Joe Riley” on ABC-TV’s soap opera One Life to Live, Patterson appeared in the movies Meet Mr Lucifer (uncredited), The Spaniard’s Curse, Jack the Ripper (1959), The 3 Worlds of Gulliver and The Search for the Evil One, along with episodes of The Avengers, The Immortal, Jason King and Zorro (1991).
American character actor and voice artist Walker Edmiston died of cancer on 15 February, aged 81. Best known as the voice of “Ernie the Keebler Elf” in the American TV cookie commercials, his other voice credits include Time for Beany, Top Cat, The Flintstones, H. R. Pufnstuff (as “Dr Blinke” and “Orson the Vulture”), the live-action Star Trek, Pufnstuf, The Andromeda Strain, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Trilogy of Terror (as the voice of the Zuni doll), Wholly Moses! (as the voice of God), Transformers, Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective, Dick Tracy (1990) and various TV series of Spider-Man. He appeared in The Night That Panicked America, Scared to Death (1981) and episodes of Thriller, Get Smart, Batman, The Monkees, The Wild Wild West, The Lost Saucer, Shazam!., Fantasy Island, Land of the Lost (as “Enik” the Sleestak) and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Edmiston also dubbed the voice (uncredited) of German actor Giinter Meisner in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and he appeared in and wrote the song “There’s a Monster in the Surf” for the 1965 cult movie The Beach Girls and the Monster.
Tony Award-nominated stage and screen actor Daniel McDonald died in New York of brain cancer on the same day, aged 46. His credits include episodes of Shadow Chasers and Freddy’s Nightmares.
American actress Janet Blair (Martha Jean Lafferty) died of complications from pneumonia on 19 February, aged 85. After starting her movie career in the 1940s in a number of musicals and comedies, including the 1944 fantasy Once Upon a Time, she also appeared in a 1955 TV production of A Connecticut Yankee (with Boris Karloff as King Arthur) and Night of the Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn!, based on the novel Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber). Her other credits include episodes of TV’s The Outer Limits, Switch and Fantasy Island.
British TV and stage actor Derek
Waring (Derek Barton-Chappie) died of cancer on 20 February, aged 79. During the 1960s and ’70s he appeared in episodes of Sherlock Holmes, The New Avengers and Doctor Who. Waring was married to actress Dorothy Tutin from 1963 until her death in 2001, and the actor’s father, Wing Commander H. J. Barton-Chappie, helped John Logie Baird develop television.
Former 1928 Olympic shot-putting champion turned actor [Harold] Herman Brix (aka “Bruce Bennett”) died of complications from a broken hip of 24 February. He was 100. After narrowly missing out on the role of Tarazan in the 1930s MGM series, he was chosen by author Edgar Rice Burroughs himself to portray the King of the Jungle in the independent Guatemala-filmed serial The New Adventures ofTarzan (1935), which was subsequently reissued as the cut-down feature Tarzan and the Green Goddess. He went on to star in such serials as Shadow of Chinatown (with Bela Lugosi), Blake of Scotland Yard, The Lone Ranger (1938), The Fighting Devil Dogs and Daredevils of the Red Circle. After starring as the Tarzan-like “Kioga” in the 1938 Republic serial Hawk of the Wilderness, he took acting lessons and changed his name. Later credits include The Man With Nine Lives and Before I Hang (both with Boris Karloff), Island of Doomed Men (with Peter Lorre), The Spook Speaks (a short with Buster Keaton), The Treasure of Sierra Madre (with Humphrey Bogart), Angels in the Outfield (1951), Love Me Tender (with Elvis), The Cosmic Man (with John Carradine), The Alligator People (with Lon Chaney, Jr) and several episodes of TV’s Science Fiction Theatre. Brix retired from movies in 1961 after starring in and co-writing Fiend of Dope Island. He become a sales manager for a multi-million dollar vending machine company before returning some years later to make a few guest appearances in films and TV shows. His final screen credit was as a laboratory assistant in The Clones (1973).
Danish actor and singer Otto [Herman Max] Brandenburg died on 1 March, aged 72. His song “Journey to the Seventh Planet” was often cut from the American version of the 1963 film of the same title. He played “Hansen” in both TV miniseries of Lars von Trier’s Riget (aka The Kingdom).
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