Dependable British character actor Garfield Morgan died of cancer on December 5, aged seventy-eight. He appeared in the movies Digby the Biggest Dog in the World and 28 Weeks Later, plus episodes of Out of This World, three episodes of The Avengers, Out of the Unknown, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and The Tripods. Morgan also narrated four Rick Wakeman albums between the late 1980s and mid-1990s.
Rugged and debonair American leading man Gene Barry (Eugene Klass) died of congestive heart disease on December 9, aged ninety. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for the past five years. The star of such popular TV series as Bat Masterson (1958-61), Burke’s Law (1963-66 and 1994-95), The Name of the Game (1968-71) and The Adventurer (1972-73), Barry also appeared in War of the Worlds (both the 1953 and 2005 versions), The 27th Day, The Devil and Miss Sarah, The Girl, the Gold Watch and Dynamite and episodes of Science Fiction Theatre, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Fantasy Island and The Twilight Zone (1987).
Irish-born character actor Charles [Jessee] Davis died in California of a heart attack on December 12, aged eighty-four. He travelled to America in the 1940s to play Og the Leprechaun in the Broadway musical production of Finian’s Rainbow, making more than 1,000 appearances in the role. He went on to appear in the movies The Man from Planet X and Moonfleet, along with episodes of TV’s Rocky Jones Space Ranger, Shirley Temple’s Storybook, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Wild Wild West (in a recurring role), Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, Man from Atlantis, Knight Rider and Starman.
Tough guy character actor Val Avery (Sebouh Der Abrahamian) died the same day, aged eighty-five. The son of a revolutionary who founded the Republic of Armenia, Avery appeared in The Legend of Hillbilly John (based on Manly Wade Wellman’s “John the Balladeer” stories), The Amityville Horror (1979) and Too Scared to Scream, plus episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Munsters, Get Smart, The Wild Wild West, The Invaders, Man from Atlantis and Friday the 13th The Series.
The seventy-six-year-old American actor Conard Fowkes (aka “Conrad Fowkes”) died of pancreatic cancer on December 14. From 1966 to 1967 he was a regular on Dark Shadows as Frank Garner, and his other credits include an episode of Way Out before he was elected to American Equity’s Council in the early 1970s.
Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Jones (Phylis Lee Isley), who starred in the 1948 version of Robert Nathan’s romantic fantasy Portrait of Jennie, died on December 17, aged ninety. She also appeared in the serial Dick Tracy’s G-Men (under the name “Phyllis Isley”), Angel Angel Down We Go and The Towering Inferno. Her first marriage, to actor Robert Walker, ended when she began an affair with film producer David O. Selznick, who she eventually married in 1949.
American TV actress Connie Hines, who co-starred with Alan Young in CBS’ talking horse comedy series Mister Ed (1961– 66), died of complications from heart problems on December 18, aged seventy-eight. She retired from the screen in the early 1970s.
British character actor Donald [Ellis] Pickering, who played Dr Watson to Geoffrey Whitehead’s consulting detective in the rarely-seen Polish-shot series Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1980), died on December 19, aged seventy-six. Pickering appeared in Doctor Who opposite three different Doctors (William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Sylvester McCoy), and his numerous other appearances include the films Fahrenheit 451 (uncredited) and Scarab, a 1964 TV adaptation of John Buchan’s novel Witch Wood, and episodes of Out of the Unknown, The Champions, The Avengers, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes and Tales of the Unexpected.
American actress and singer Brittany [Anne] Murphy (Brittany Bertolotti) died of cardiac arrest in her Hollywood Hills home on December 20, aged thirty-two. The cause of death was later revealed to be pneumonia complicated by anaemia and an overdose of prescription drugs. The Los Angeles Coroner found that the actress had “elevated levels” of Vicodin and other over-the-counter cold medicine in her system. A former child actress whose TV credits include an episode of SeaQuest DSV, she appeared in such movies as Freeway, Drive, The Prophecy II, Cherry Falls, Sin City, Neverwas, Deadline, MegaFault, Abandoned and Something Wicked, and she voiced an animated penguin in Happy Feet. Her single “Faster Kill Pussycat” (with DJ Paul Oakenfold) reached #7 in the UK music charts in May 2006. Murphy was married to British screenwriter/producer Simon Monjack.
American comedy actor and voice artist Arnold Stang, best known as the voice of Herman the mouse in a series of 1950s Paramount cartoons and the feline star of Hanna-Barbera’s TV show Top Cat (1961–62), died of pneumonia the same day, aged ninety-one. He appeared in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Skidoo, Hercules in New York and Ghost Dad, along with episodes of Captain Video and His Video Rangers, Batman and Tales from the Dark Side. Stang also contributed voice characterizations to Pinocchio in Outer Space, Marco Polo Junior versus The Red Dragon and Pogo for President: “I Go Pogo”.
James Gurley, who was a guitarist with the 1960s rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, died of a heart attack on December 20, aged seventy. The group was one of a number that appeared at the influential Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
Incredibly prolific British character actress Marianne Stone (aka “Mary Stone”), who was the second wife of film critic/historian Peter Noble (who died in 1997), died on December 21, aged eighty-seven. She appeared, often uncredited, in Brighton Rock, Seven Days to Noon, Horrors of the Black Museum, Jack the Ripper (1959), The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Witchcraft (with Lon Chaney, Jr), A Hard Day’s Night, Devils of Darkness, The Night Caller (aka Blood Beast from Outer Space), Berserk, Twisted Nerve, Scrooge (1970), Incense for the Damned (aka Bloodsuckers), Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, Assault (aka Tower of Terror), Tower of Evil (aka Horror on Snape Island), The Creeping Flesh (with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing), The Vault of Horror and Craze (aka The Infernal Idol). Stone also had small roles in Hammer’s Spaceways, The Quatermass Experiment (aka The Creeping Unknown), Quatermass 2 (aka Enemy from Space), Paranoiac, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, Hysteria and Countess Dracula, plus nine Carry On films (including Carry On Screaming). Her scenes were cut from the mermaid comedy Mad About Men, and her credits also include episodes of TV’s Dead of Night and Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.
American character actor Michael Currie (Herman Christian Schwenk, Jr), who portrayed Sheriff Jonas Carter in five 1966 episodes of the daytime soap opera Dark Shadows, died on December 22, aged eighty-one. His other credits include four films with Clint Eastwood, plus Dead and Buried, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Starflight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land (aka Starflight One), The Philadelphia Experiment, and episodes of TV’s Voyagers! and Wizards and Warriors.
NWA and WCW professional wrestler Steve Williams (aka Dr Death) died of throat cancer on December 29, aged forty-nine.
Italian actor Glauco Onorato died of cancer on December 31, aged seventy-three. Best known as the Italian dubbing voice of actor Bud Spencer, he appeared in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (in “The Wurdalak” segment with Boris Karloff), Deep Red and an episode of Dario Argento’s Door Into Darkness TV series.
Adult film actress Erica Boyer (Amanda Margaret Jensen) was killed instantly while crossing the road the same day when she was struck by a car being driven by an off-duty Florida Highway Patrol officer. She was fifty-three. Known as “The Ultimate Goddess of Erotica”, Boyer began her porn career in the late 1970s and appeared under a number of pseudonyms, including “Carol Christy” and “Joanne McRay”. Her more than 180 credits include The Night of the Headhunter, Wet Science, The Devil in Miss Jones 4: The Final Outrage, Black to the Future, Backside to the Future, Robofox, Barbara the Barbarian, Amazing Tails 4 and Snatched to the Future. Having retired from the adult film industry in 1994, she made one further film in 2000.
FILM/TV TECHNICIANS AND PRODUCERS
American TV director Alvin Ganzer died in Hawaii on January 3, aged ninety-seven. He joined Paramount in 1932 casting extras and went on to work as an assistant director on a number of
movies during the 1940s and 1950s (including Road to Utopia). Ganzer also directed episodes of Science Fiction Theatre, The Twilight Zone, Men Into Space, Lost in Space, The Wild Wild West, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries.
Former Universal Pictures and Paramount president Ned [Stone] Tanen, the son-in-law of director Howard Hawks, died on January 5, aged seventy-seven. Among the box-office hits he presided over were E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Ghost. A former talent agent who worked with Elton John, Neil Diamond and Olivia Newton-John, Tanen also produced Mary Reilly, based on Valerie Martin’s novel about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The character Biff Tannen in Back to the Future (1985) was reportedly named after him.
Low-budget film-maker Ray Dennis Steckler died of a heart attack in Las Vegas (where he ran a video business) on January 7, aged seventy. His films as a director include the infamous The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, The Thrill Killers, Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo, Sinthia the Devil’s Doll, The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire, The Horny Vampire, Blood Shack, Sexorcist Devil, The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skidrow Slasher and Las Vegas Serial Killer, many of them starring his first wife, Carolyn Brandt (he produced a documentary about the actress in 1994). Steckler directed many of his softcore adult films under pseudonyms, including “Sven Christian” and “Sven Hellstrom”. He often also worked as editor, cinematographer, writer and producer, and he acted under the name “Cash Flagg”. One of his early jobs was as assistant cameraman on Eegah (1962), in which he also appeared.
Gary Goch (aka Gary Grotch), who worked in the film business in various capacities, often in collaboration with Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby, died on January 8. He was a camera assistant on The Female Bunch (featuring Lon Chaney, Jr), musical director on Pink Narcissus, edited and produced Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, did sound on Dead of Night (aka Deathdream), was a production assistant on Black Christmas (1974) and produced Popcorn.
American theatrical director Tom O’Horgan died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on January 11, aged eighty-four. Best remembered as the man who brought Hair to Broadway in 1968, he also composed the music for Alex in Wonderland, directed the 1974 movie version of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, and conceived the original stage production of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (filmed in 1978).
French film producer Jacques Bar (Jean Louis Alfred Bar) died on January 19, aged eighty-seven. His many films include the 1966 remake of The Man Who Laughs and The Mysterious Island (1973), based on the novel by Jules Verne.
American camera effects expert Bob (Robert C.) Broughton died of pneumonia the same day, aged ninety-one. He reportedly worked on almost every Walt Disney film from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to Tron (1982). He also created the visual effects for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Hollywood movie producer Charles H. (Hirsh) Schneer died in Florida after a long illness on January 21, aged eighty-eight. He was best known for his many collaborations with stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen – It Came from Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, 20 Million Miles to Earth, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, Mysterious Island (1961), Jason and the Argonauts, First Men in the Moon, The Valley of Gwangi, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Clash of the Titans.
American film and TV producer Arthur A. Jacobs died of congestive heart failure on January 25, aged eighty-six. In 1958 he teamed up with his friend and business partner Richard E. Cunha for the low-budget movies Giant from the Unknown and She Demons. As “Art Jacobs” he also produced the 1974 horror nudie The Beauties and the Beast featuring Uschi Digard.
Television producer and director Kim Manners died of lung cancer the same day, aged fifty-nine. He produced and executive produced The X Files and Supernatural, and directed episodes of both those shows, along with Automan, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, M.A.N.T.I.S. and Harsh Realm.
Actor turned television producer/director Peter Duguid (George Duguid) died of Parkinson’s disease on March 3, aged eighty-six. He directed the BBC’s 1982 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Tom Baker as Sherlock Holmes, and three episodes of Chocky’s Children (1985), based on the novel by John Wyndham. He was reportedly nearly cast as the first Doctor Who in 1963, but had already enrolled in a BBC training programme to become a director.
Sound-effects editor turned Emmy Award-winning TV director Harry Harris died of complications from myelodysplasia on March 19, aged eighty-six. His prolific credits include episodes of Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, Kung Fu, Man from Atlantis, MacGyver and the 1985 TV movie Alice in Wonderland.
Former United Artists (UA) executive Steven Bach, who was fired over the Heaven’s Gate debacle in 1980, died of lung cancer on March 25, aged seventy. While senior VP of worldwide production at UA, Bach presided over the making of Michael Cimino’s epic Western, which was budgeted at $7.5 million, cost anywhere from $36–44 million to make, and grossed just $2 million at the time. As a result, the film became synonymous with Hollywood excess. He later wrote a book about the experience, Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate.
American theatre designer and director John [Edward] Blankenchip, who since 1972 was resident designer for Ray Bradbury’s Pandemonium Theatre Company, died following a brief illness on April 1, aged eighty-nine. Among the productions he designed based on Bradbury’s work were Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Incredible Ice Cream Suit, and he was working on a stage adaptation of The Martian Chronicles at the time of his death.
British TV director and animator David Wheatley died after a long illness on April 5, aged fifty-nine. He directed the BBC Omnibus documentaries “The Illustrated Man” (about Ray Bradbury) and “The Brothers Grimm”, and the Arena documentary “Borges and I”, with Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. His other credits include the award-winning docudrama The Road to 1984 with James Fox as George Orwell, the 1987 adaptation of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, the apocalyptic The March, and episodes of the Canadian TV series Starhunter 2300.
Controversial Scottish pop group manager “Tam” Paton (Thomas Dougal Paton) died on April 8, aged seventy-one. The former manager of 1970s band The Bay City Rollers, Paton was accused of swindling the group out of their royalties, and in 1982 he went to prison for committing indecent acts with males under the age of consent. In 2004 he was fined £200,000 for dealing in cannabis. At the same time that he managed the Rollers, Paton also looked after another Scottish band, the J.R.R. Tolkien-inspired Bilbo Baggins. They had one hit as Bilbo in 1978, “She’s Gonna Win”, before splitting with their management.
American screenwriter and director Lee Madden died of complications from pneumonia on April 9, aged eighty-two. His credits include AIP’s Hell’s Angels ’69, Angel Unchained, The Night God Screamed, Night Creature (starring Donald Pleasence) and Ghost Fever (as Alan Smithee).
Japanese film producer Fumio Tanaka died of a brain haemorrhage on April 12, aged sixty-seven. He produced Toho’s vampire trilogy Bloodsucking Doll, Lake of Dracula and Evil of Dracula, plus Yog: Monster from Space, Esupai, Battle in Out Space 2, Murders in the Doll House, Bye Bye Jupiter and Godzilla 1985.
British producer Peter Rogers, best known for the series of thirty-one Carry On films from 1958 onwards, including Carry on Spying and Carry on Screaming, died on April 13, aged ninety-five. A former journalist, his other credits include The Cat Girl (starring Barbara Shelley), Revenge (aka Inn of the Frightened People) and Quest for Love (based on John Wyndham’s story “Random Quest”). His wife Betty Box OBE, who produced the rival Doctor film series, died in 1999.
Veteran British cinematographer and director, Jack Cardiff OBE, who was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2001, died on April 22, aged ninety-four. He worked in various capacities (usually uncredited) on The Ghost Train (1931
), The Ghost Goes West, Things to Come (1936), The Man Who Could Work Miracles and The Last Days of Pompeii, before becoming one of the screen’s most acclaimed cinematographers with such films as A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven), Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Awakening, Ghost Story, Conan the Destroyer, Cat’s Eye, the Showscan short Call from Space and a 2004 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. Cardiff also directed the first (and only) film in “Smell-o-Vision”, Scent of Mystery (aka Holiday in Spain) featuring Peter Lorre and scripted by Gerald Kersh, and the 1974 horror film The Mutations (aka The Freakmaker).
British-born film director, Ken Annakin OBE (Kenneth Cooper Annakin), died at his Beverly Hills home the same day, aged ninety-four. He had been in failing health since suffering a heart attack and a stroke two months earlier. Annakin’s credits include the 1948 mermaid comedy Miranda and Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson.
British record producer Ron Richards (Ronald Richard Pratley), who produced The Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Hollies and P.J. Proby during the 1960s, died on April 30, aged eighty. Among the memorable songs he worked on were “Love Me Do”, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, “He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother” and “The Air That I Breathe”. Along with fellow Parlephone producer George Martin, he was responsible for the decision to replace Beatles’ drummer Pete Best with Ringo Starr. Richards also did much of the administrative work on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine.
American cinematographer Irv (Irving/Irvin) Goodnoff died of a heart attack on May 3, aged sixty-one. He photographed the short The Tell-Tale Heart (1971) starring Sam Jaffe, Rattlers, Jennifer, Evilspeak, Dan O’Bannon’s The Resurrected (based on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward), The Dark Mist (aka Lord Protector), Jennifer is Dead, Planet Ibsen, The Cursed and Legend of the Red Reaper, along with two unsold TV pilots (1989 and 2002) for shows based on The Witches of Eastwick.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Page 55
