Hollywood actress Susanne Pleshette died of respiratory failure on January 17, aged 70. She had been battling lung cancer since 2006. Best known as Bob Newhart’s TV wife in several series, she appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, The Power, Oh God! Book II and Disney’s Blackbeard’s Ghost and The Shaggy D.A., while she contributed two voices to the English-language version of Spirited Away. Pleshette’s TV credits include One Step Beyond, Sunday Showcase (“Murder and the Android”), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Wild Wild West (“Night of the Inferno”), The Invaders and Fantasies (aka The Studio Murders). Her first and third husbands were actors Troy Donahue and Tom Poston.
Comedy actor and voice artist Allan Melvin died of cancer the same day, aged 84. Best remembered as Bilko’s sidekick “Corporal Steve Henshaw” in The Phil Silvers Show and Alice’s boyfriend “Sam Franklin” in The Brady Bunch, he guest-starred in such TV series as My Favorite Martian and Lost in Space. As a voice actor he contributed to The Magilla Gorilla Show (as the titular character), The Flintstones, The Banana Splits Adventure Hour (as the voice of “Drooper”), Pufnstuf, Kung Fu, The New Animated Adventures of Flash Gordon, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, Popeye and Son, Scooby-Doo in Arabian Nights and numerous other shows.
British stage and screen actress Carole Lynne (Helen Violet Carolyn Heyman, aka Lady Delfont) also died on January 17, aged 89. In 1941 Lynne co-starred with Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch in The Ghost Train. She was married to actor Derek Farr from 1939–45, and her second husband was entertainment impresario (Lord) Bernard Delfont.
Stage and screen actress Lois Nettleton (Lydia Scott) died of lung cancer on January 18, aged 80. A former Miss Chicago, she appeared in The Bamboo Saucer, Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing and Mirror Mirror II: Raven Dance, plus episodes of TV’s Captain Video, Dow Hour of Great Mysteries (“The Woman in White”), Great Ghost Tales, Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Night Gallery, The Flash and Babylon 5. The actress also contributed voice performances to the 1990s Spider-Man cartoon series and Mickey’s House of Villains from Disney.
California singer-songwriter John [Coburn] Stewart died of a brain haemorrhage on January 19, aged 68. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Stewart started out in the early 1960s as a member of the Cumberland Three and The Kingston Trio. His best-known composition was “Daydream Believer”, which The Monkees took to #1 in 1967, and his 1969 debut solo album, California Bloodlines, is now considered to be influential in launching the folk era of the early 1970s.
Veteran British TV character actor Kevin Stoney died on January 20, aged 86. His many credits include episodes of Hour of Mystery (“The Man in Half Moon Street” with Anton Diffring), The Indian Tales of Rudyard Kipling (“The Tomb of His Ancestors”), The Avengers (“Mission . . . Highly Improbable”), Out of the Unknown, Doctor Who (“The Invasion” and “Revenge of the Cybermen”), Doomwatch (“The Plastic Eaters”), Ace of Wands, The Tomorrow People, Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries, Space: 1999, The New Avengers, Quatermass, Hammer House of Horror (“The Thirteenth Reunion”) and Blakes 7. His infrequent film appearances include Shadow of the Cat and The Blood Beast Terror (aka The Vampire-Beast Craves Blood with Peter Cushing). Stoney retired from acting in the 1990s, but he continued to attend Doctor Who conventions.
Twenty-eight-year-old Oscar-nominated actor Heath Ledger (Heathcliff Andrew Ledger) was found dead in a New York apartment on January 22 of an apparent accidental overdose of six different types of prescription drugs, including painkillers, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication. The Australian-born Ledger starred in the shortlived heroic fantasy TV series Roar (1997) before appearing in such movies as A Knight’s Tale, The Order (aka The Sin Eater), The Brothers Grimm and The Dark Knight (as the Joker). At the time of his death he was working on Terry Gilliam’s fantasy movie The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
Sixty-year-old American character actor Christopher Allport (Alexander Wise Allport, Jr.) was killed with two other skiers in a freak Californian avalanche on January 25. His credits include Man on a Swing, Savage Weekend, Dead & Buried, Invaders from Mars (1986), Jack Frost and Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, along with episodes of the 1980s Twilight Zone, Quantum Leap, The X Files, Kindred: The Embraced, The Sentinel and The Invisible Man (2001).
Marlon Brando’s troubled eldest son, Christian Brando, died of pneumonia at a Los Angeles hospital on January 26. He was 49, and for many years had problems with alcohol, drugs and domestic violence. Brando had small roles in a few movies and, in the early 1990s, spent five years in prison for the manslaughter of his sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend, Dag Drollet. She later committed suicide. Brando was also the lover of Bonnie Lee Bakley, who later married actor Robert Blake and was shot to death in 2001.
Humphrey Bogart’s personal wig-maker, Verita Thompson (Verita Bouvaire), who claimed to have been the actor’s secret mistress for thirteen years in her autobiography Bogie and Me: A Love Story, died in New Orleans on February 1, aged 92.
British-born actor Barry Morse (Herbert Morse), best known as detective Lt Philip Gerard pursuing murder suspect Dr Richard Kimble (David Janssen) in the TV series The Fugitive (1963–67), died in London on February 2, aged 89. After appearing in such films as Thunder Rock and Daughter of Darkness, Morse emigrated to Canada in 1951. His subsequent film credits include Asylum, Welcome to Blood City, The Shape of Things to Come (1979), The Martian Chronicles, The Changeling, Funeral Home, Whoops Apocalypse, Murder by Phone, Covenant, The Return of Sherlock Holmes and Memory Run. On television he also appeared in the recurring role of “Prof. Victor Bergman” on the first season of Space: 1999 (1975–76). His other TV credits include episodes of The Unforeseen, Dow Hour of Great Mysteries (“The Inn of the Flying Dragon”), Way Out, Twilight Zone (1960s and 1980s versions), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Outer Limits, The Invaders, The Starlost, The Ray Bradbury Theater, Dracula: The Series, TekWar and Space Island One.
American character actor Charles (Fernley) Fawcett died on February 3, aged 92. A former wrestler, artists’ model, and adventurer who fought in several conflicts, he appeared in many European movies including I vampiri (aka The Devil’s Commandment), Face of Fire (uncredited), The Witch’s Curse, Captain Sinbad, The Secret of Dr Mabuse and Kaliman.
Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose teachings about Transcendental Meditation were adopted by the Beatles, Beach Boys and others in the 1960s, died in Holland on February 5, aged around 91.
Exotic German-born actress, singer and dancer Tamara Desni (Tamara Brodsky) died in France on February 7, aged 95. After making a few films in Germany in the early 1930s, she moved to England where she appeared in a number of movies over the next two decades, including Forbidden Territory (1934), based on a Dennis Wheatley novel. Her final credit was Hammer’s Dick Barton at Bay (1950). The fourth of her five husbands was Canadian-born actor Raymond Lovell.
Swedish actress and novelist Eva Dahlbeck died of Alzheimer’s disease on February 8, aged 87. Best known for her six collaborations with director Ingmar Bergman, she also appeared in Kvinna I vitt, a 1949 version of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. Her other film credits include Les Créatures (1966).
American character actor Robert DoQui (aka “Bob Do Qui”), who played Sgt Warren Reed in all three RoboCop movies, died on February 9, aged 74. His credits include Visions . . ., Cloak & Dagger, My Science Project, Miracle Mile, the short A Hollow Place, and episodes of The Outer Limits, I Dream of Jeannie, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Tarzan, Get Smart, The New Scooby-Doo Movies, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Tales of the Unexpected (1977), Blue Thunder, Starman, Batman: The Animated Series and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Dependable American stage and screen actor Roy [Richard] Scheider died in an Arkansas hospital on February 10, aged 75. For two years the two-time Oscar nominee had been treated for multiple myeloma in the hospital’s research centre. Best known for his role as Police Chief Martin Brody in the first two Jaws films (“You’re going to need a bigger boat
”), Scheider made his film debut in the low budget 1964 horror movie The Curse of the Living Corpse. His other credits include All That Jazz, Still of the Night, Blue Thunder, 2010, Naked Lunch, The Doorway, Dracula II: Ascension, The Punisher (2004) and Dracula III: Legacy. For two seasons he starred as Captain Nathan Bridger on the TV series SeaQuest DSV (1993–95).
American TV actor David [Lawrence] Groh died of kidney cancer on February 12, aged 68. Best remembered as Valerie Harper’s husband Joe on the 1970s sitcom Rhoda, he began his career playing a ghost in ABC’s Dark Shadows (1968) and his many other credits include episodes of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (“Planet of the Slave Girls”), Fantasy Island, Tales from the Darkside, M.A.N.T.I.S., The X Files, Black Scorpion (as regular “Lt Walker”) and the TV movie Last Exit to Earth.
American character actor Lionel Mark Smith, who often worked with playwright and director David Mamet, died of cancer on February 13, aged 62. His eclectic credits include Galaxina, King of the Ants and an episode of Batman: The Animated Series.
French singer and entertainer Henri [Gabriel] Salvador, credited with introducing his home country to rock ‘n’ roll under the name “Henry Cording”, died of an aneurysm the same day, aged 90. Best known for his novelty songs during the 1960s and ’70s, he was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1988.
American character actor Perry Lopez died of lung cancer on February 14, aged 78. Often cast in Hispanic or other ethnic roles, he appeared in Creature from the Black Lagoon (uncredited), along with episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Time Tunnel, Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Tarzan, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Wild Wild West.
American character actress Agnes Anderson (aka “Lynn Anders”), who appeared in Dracula’s Daughter (uncredited) and The Shadow Strikes, died on February 16, aged 94.
Six-foot, five-inch former dancer Ben Chapman (Benjamin F. Chapman, Jr.), who famously donned the Gill Man costume for the land scenes in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), died of congestive heart failure in Honolulu on February 21, aged 79. (Ricou Browning played the Creature underwater.) The cousin of actor Jon Hall, he recreated the role on TV’s The Colgate Comedy Hour with Abbott and Costello, and his only other genre credit is the Johnny Weissmuller adventure Jungle Moon Men. In recent years, Chapman was a regular at movie memorabilia fairs.
Drummer Buddy Miles, who played in Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys in the late 1960s, died of complications from heart disease on February 26, aged 60. During the 1980s he sang lead on the animated California Raisins ads on TV.
Right-wing American commentator and spy novelist William F. Buckley, Jr died of complications from emphysema and diabetes on February 27, aged 82. During the late 1960s, Buckley appeared in a series of televised debates with author Gore Vidal, and the two famously clashed over the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. He also participated in a heated live television debate with Carl Sagan following a screening of the 1983 TV movie The Day After.
Sixty-four-year-old Mike Smith, lead singer and keyboard player with British pop group Dave Clark Five, died of pneumonia in a London hospital on February 28, less than two weeks before the band was to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York City. Smith had suffered a spinal cord injury when he fell from a fence at his home in Spain in September 2003, and was left paralysed below the ribcage with limited use of his upper body. The Dave Clark Five had a string of hits in the 1960s, including “Glad All Over” and “I Like it Like That”, and the band starred in John Boorman’s debut movie Catch Us If You Can (aka Having a Wild Weekend), which featured a party guest dressed as the Frankenstein Monster.
Canadian jazz and blues guitarist and singer Jeff Healey (Norman Jeffrey Healey), who lost his sight to cancer when he was one-year-old, died of the disease on March 2, aged 41. His biggest hit was “Angel Eyes” in 1988.
Seventy-six-year-old American actor, director and producer Ivan [Nathaniel] Dixon [III], who portrayed radio technician Sgt James “Kinch” Kinchloe in Hogan’s Heroes, died of complications from kidney failure and haemorrhage in North Carolina on March 16. He was in the TV mini-series Amerika and episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Outer Limits. As a director, his credits include The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, The Greatest American Hero, Tales of the Gold Monkey and Quantum Leap.
British character actor John Hewer, who portrayed Captain Birds Eye in the UK TV commercials from 1967–98, died the same day, aged 86. In 1983 he was named the world’s most recognized skipper after Captain Cook. He appeared in an episode of the 1950s Boris Karloff TV series Colonel March of Scotland Yard (recycled for the “fix-up” movie Colonel March Investigates) and starred in the 1961 film Strip Tease Murder.
Swedish session musician Ola Brunkert also died on March 16 after falling through a glass door in his home in Majorca, Spain, and bleeding to death in his garden from a neck injury. The 62-year-old retired drummer was only one of two session musicians to work on all of Abba’s albums in the 1970s and ’80s.
Acclaimed British stage and screen actor Paul Scofield CBE died on March 19, aged 86. The Oscar, Emmy and Tony Award-winning performer appeared in the movies Mr Corbett’s Ghost, Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (as “The Ghost”) and The Crucible. He also narrated the TV movie The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb (1980) and voiced “Boxer” in the 1999 version of Animal Farm. After breaking his leg, Scofield was replaced by Richard Burton as “O’Brien” in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). The actor was made a Companion of Honour in 2001 after he reportedly turned down attempts to give him a knighthood.
British TV character actor Brian Wilde died on March 20, aged 86. A regular on such BBC comedy series as Porridge and Last of the Summer Wine, Wilde also appeared in episodes of The Avengers (“The Fear Merchants”), Doomwatch, Catweazle, Out of the Unknown, Ace of Wands, Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries, The Ghosts of Motley Hall and Shadows. His film credits include Night of the Demon (aka Curse of the Demon), Corridors of Blood (uncredited, with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee), the James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice (uncredited), Goodbye Gemini, and Hammer’s Rasputin the Mad Monk (uncredited) and To the Devil a Daughter (both also with Lee).
Hollywood tough-guy actor Richard Widmark died on March 24 of complications following a fall. He was 93. Best known for his Oscar-nominated debut as giggling psychopath Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947), his other films include Run for the Sun (based on the short story by Richard Connell), The Bedford Incident (which he also produced, uncredited), Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Coma (based on the novel by Robin Cook) and The Swarm. In 1976 he was miscast as occult novelist John Verney, battling Christopher Lee’s Satanist priest in Hammer’s To the Devil a Daughter, based on the novel by Dennis Wheatley.
Oscar-winning Hollywood star and former president of the National Rifle Association of America, Charlton Heston (John Charles Carter) died of Alzheimer’s disease on April 5, aged 84. Best known for the many Biblical and historical figures he portrayed in the movies, from Moses to Michelangelo, in a career that spanned more than sixty years his many films include The Ten Commandments, Touch of Evil, The War Lord, Planet of the Apes (both 1968 and 2001 versions), Beneath the Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man (based on the novel by Richard Matheson), Soylent Green (based on the novel by Harry Harrison), Earthquake, The Awakening (based on the novel by Bram Stoker), the Showscan short Call from Space, Solar Crisis, The Crucifer of Blood (as an unlikely Sherlock Holmes), John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, The Dark Mist, Hamlet (1996), Disney’s Hercules, Armageddon and Cats & Dogs. On TV he portrayed Heathcliffe in a 1950 version of “Wuthering Heights” on Studio One and The Beast in a 1958 version of “Beauty and the Beast” on Shirley Temple’s Storybook. Heston also appeared in episodes of SeaQuest DSV and The Outer Limits (2000).
Busy TV character actor Stanley Kamel, who played psychiatrist Dr Charles Kroger on the USA TV series Monk, was found dead of a heart attack in his Holly
wood home on April 8. He was 65. Kamel also appeared in Captain America II: Death Too Soon (with Christopher Lee), Automatic and Ravager, along with episodes of The Sixth Sense, Switch, The Incredible Hulk, The Phoenix, Mork & Mindy, Knight Rider, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Probe, The Highwayman, Beauty and the Beast, Dark Skies and Dark Angel.
Australian-born Lloyd Lamble, the last surviving actor to have played The Shadow during the golden age of radio, died on April 9, aged 94. He moved to Britain in the early 1950s, where he often portrayed police inspectors and doctors in such films as Hammer’s Quatermass 2 (aka Enemy from Space), Night of the Demon (aka Curse of the Demon), Behemoth the Sea Monster (aka The Giant Behemoth) and —And Now the Screaming Starts!, based on the story by David Case. Lamble also appeared in episodes of TV’s Colonel March of Scotland Yard (starring Boris Karloff), The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, Invisible Man (1959), The Avengers, The Prisoner, Journey to the Unknown and The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.
German-born character actor [Heinz] Dieter Eppler, a regular in Rialto’s Edgar Wallace krimis films of the 1960s, died in Stuttgart on April 12, aged 81. He appeared in many European movies, including The Head, The Fellowship of the Frog, The Terrible People, Slaughter of the Vampires (aka Curse of the Blood Ghouls, as the “Vampire”), The White Spider, The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle, The Secret of Dr Mabuse, Lana: Queen of the Amazons, The Sinister Monk, Jess Franco’s Lucky the Inscrutable and The Blood Demon (aka The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism, with Christopher Lee).
Hollywood contract player June Travis (June Dorothea Grabiner), who only spent three years in films before retiring to concentrate on her marriage, died of complications from a stroke on April 14, aged 93. Between 1934–37 she made thirty movies, including the old dark house mystery The Case of the Black Cat (playing secretary Delia Street opposite Ricardo Cortez’s Perry Mason). In later years she concentrated on stage work and appeared in two more films, her final credit being Bill Rebane’s Monster A Go-Go (1965).
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20 Page 65
