CAUSE: Three days after filming ended on Jailhouse Rock Judy and her husband were involved in a car accident outside Billy The Kid, Wyoming. He died instantly and she succumbed to her injuries the next day.
U
Stanley Unwin
Born June 7, 1911
Died January 12, 2002
‘The Professor’. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, he moved to England with his widowed mother, when he was three. One day his mother tripped and fell heavily, explaining to the little boy that she had “falloloped over and grazed her kneeclapper”. Due to a change in circumstances Unwin was placed in an orphanage and then he worked in a variety of menial jobs until he went to sea. In 1940 a case of mal de mer wrecked Unwin’s career in the Merchant Navy and he became a sound engineer with the BBC. To entertain his colleagues Unwin began telling them the stories he told his children at bedtime. “Are you all sitting comfity-bold, two-square on your botties?” he would ask them. “Then I’ll begin. Once a-ponny tight-o …” He would tell them with his own spin. The Pied Piper Of Hamlyn became The Pidey Pipeload of Hamling and Goldilocks was transformed into Goldyloppers and the Three Bearloaders, which began, “Goldyloppers trittly-how in the early mordy, and she falloped down the steps. Oh unfortunate for the cracking of the eggers and the sheebs and buttery full-falollop and graze the knee-clappers. So she had a vaselubrious, rub it on and a quick healy huff and that was that.” While working for BBC Midlands, he was given his own show, in which he reduced sports commentating to gibberish, “There’s a great gathering round one goal mode as the net is folloped flat: what a clean groyle there as they kicking it on the bocus and the mable … all these people doing a very fine suffery in the cause of sport.” Soon he was popping up all over the radio and accepting “after-dinner speaklode”. He received fan letters from the likes of J.B. Priestley, Joyce Grenfell and Sean O’Casey. On television Unwin appeared on Eric Sykes’ shows, Tell Tarby (1973), The David Nixon Show, The Dickie Henderson Show, Lunch Box, and his own starring series Unwin Time. In l958 he was teamed with Kenneth Horne, Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams in Beyond Our Ken, but he left after the first series to work in television. He appeared in Cardew Robinson’s school spoof Fun At St Fanny’s (1956), and in Inn For Trouble (1960). He said his favourite film role was as the landlord in Carry On Regardless (1961), because it gave him the chance to appear with Kenneth Williams. In one scene, Williams speaks to him in fluent Unwinese, and “Kenny got the rhythm perfectly”. He was also in Press For Time (l966) with Norman Wisdom and was the Chancellor of Vulgaria in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). In 1967, he conducted a hilarious interview with Alan Abel, the American hoaxer who had written the book, Yours For Decency, prompting a spoof organisation called the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, which believed that all animals should wear clothes. Only Abel remained unaware that his leg was being pulled. Unwin narrated the Small Faces’ record Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake in 1968. He was also Father Stanley Unwin, a genial lookalike priest in Gerry Anderson’s puppet series The Secret Service (1968–1969). Unwin wrote several books, the first of which was The Miscillian Manuscript (1961), a beautifully illustrated study of a fictitious island. Other literary efforts included House And Garbidge (1962), Rock-A-Bye Babel And Two Fairly Stories (1966) and, in 1984, his autobiography, Deep Joy. He answered the telephone with the greeting, “Who calls?” Acquaintances were met with “Deep Joy”. Stanley Unwin was married to Frances for more than 50 years until her death in 1993. They had one son and two daughters.
CAUSE: Stanley Unwin died in hospital in Daventry, Northamptonshire, aged 90 from natural causes. Once asked if there was to be a suitable epitaph for him, he replied simply: “Professor Unlow recitely kindly. Delivering joyfull roundness on all gathering (sitting quietly-softly), hanging roundlow. Deep Joy. Goodly byelode.”
Mary Ure
Born February 18, 1933
Died April 3, 1975
Sensitive actress. Mary Eileen Ure was born in Glasgow and educated at the Mount School in York (and like many actresses was sensitive about her age, omitting it from directories even in her thirties) and then trained at the Central School of Speech & Drama. Her first stage appearance was at the Opera House, Manchester, on August 30, 1954, with her London début coming four months later on December 2. She made ten films, beginning in 1955 with Storm Over The Nile. She was nominated for an Oscar for Sons And Lovers (1960) in which she played Clara Dawes. Her first husband (in 1957) was playwright John James Osborne, from whom she was divorced. Husband number two, by whom she had two sons and two daughters from 1963, was Robert Shaw, who survived her.
CAUSE: She died in London aged 42 from an accidental drug and booze overdose.
Robert Urich
Born December 16, 1946
Died April 16, 2002
Suave television actor. Born in Toronto, Ohio, the son of Slovak immigrants, Robert Urich was educated by the Sisters of St Cyril and Methodius and considered becoming a priest. “I used to sit outside,” he recalled, “watching the barges float by, and dream about being an actor or an artist. But that wasn’t something you told your boilermaker father.” A keen sportsman, Urich’s athletic skill led to a four-year football scholarship at Florida State University. There he studied for a BA in Radio and Television Communications and later moved to Michigan State University where he earned an MA in Broadcast Research and Management. He then worked for WGN radio in Chicago as a salesman and briefly became a TV weatherman. His big break came in 1972 when he appeared alongside his fellow Florida State graduate Burt Reynolds as his younger brother in a stage production of The Rainmaker. It was also Reynolds’ influence that persuaded Urich to move to Los Angeles. Urich’s television début came in the short-lived (September 26–November 7, 1973) sitcom Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. In the same year, 1973, he made his first big-screen appearance as vigilante motorcycle policeman Officer Mike Grimes in Magnum Force, the sequel to Dirty Harry. Thanks to an economy with the actualite, 6́ 2˝ Urich didn’t tell the producers he had never ridden a motorbike. The end result was that in one scene he zoomed off a garage ramp and drove straight onto the other actors’ bikes. He then appeared in S.W.A.T. as Officer Jim Sweet for 34 episodes from February 24, 1975 until June 29, 1976. He holds the US record for starring in 15 television shows, more than any other actor. They include Soap, Tabitha, Gavilan, American Dreamer, The Lazarus Man, It Had To Be You, Love Boat: The Next Wave and Emeril. His best known roles were as Las Vegas’ suave, no-nonsense private detective Dan Tanna in Vega$ (September 20, 1978–June 3, 1981), and later as Boston’s equally smooth, but much more cultured, private investigator in Spenser: For Hire (September 20, 1985–September 3, 1988). Urich was twice married. His first wife (in 1968) was Barbara Rucker, the actress. They divorced in 1974. On November 21, 1975, he married the actress Heather Menzies (b. Toronto, Ontario, December 3, 1949) who played Louise von Trapp in the film The Sound Of Music. They adopted three children: Ryan (b. 1979), Emily (b. 1980) and Allison Grady (b. April 18, 1998).
CAUSE: In 1996 Robert Urich announced he was suffering from synovial cell sarcoma, a rare soft tissue cancer that attacks the body’s joints. Then he became active in cancer research, establishing the Heather and Robert Urich Foundation for Sarcoma Research at the University of Michigan. Urich died of cancer in Thousand Oaks, California, aged 55. His wife has suffered from ovarian cancer.
Sir Peter Ustinov
Born April 16, 1921
Died March 28, 2004
Renaissance polyglot. Although he was born at 11am, an only child, in a nursing home in Adelaide Road, Swiss Cottage, London, Peter Alexander Ustinov was conceived in Leningrad and boasted of Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, French and Ethiopian blood in his veins. His great-great-great-grandfather had made a fortune at the end of the seventeenth century from Siberian salt. His grandfather, Platon Grigorievich, sold his Russian estates and moved to Württemberg, where he became Baron Plato Von Ustinow. The Württemberg connection resulted in his four sons, includi
ng Peter’s father, Jona (b. December 2, 1892, d. December 1, 1962), fighting on the German side in the First World War. Peter’s uncle, after whom he was named, joined the German air force and was shot down and killed on July 13, 1917. Peter’s father, by all accounts, was a bigot and a snob as well as a compulsive womaniser, despite standing just 5́ 2˝. He often sported a monocle and married Nadezhda Leontievna Benois, the designer daughter of Alexandre Benois, whose family had descended from Jules-César Benois (b. January 20, 1770 at 9am), a French pastry chef who fled to St Petersburg after the French Revolution, and became mâitre de bouche to Tsar Paul I. Ustinov recalled that “to be mâitre de bouche to Paul I was a little like being accredited food-taster to Nero. Both emperors spent their lives hovering on the edge of lunacy, yet were sane enough to be in constant fear of assassination, a fate which attended them both.” Her father, Albert (d. 1928), was the St Petersburg designer of the first big Diaghilev ballets. Jona Ustinov who was nicknamed ‘Klop’ (Bedbug) bribed Ivan Maisky (later Soviet ambassador in London) to issue a passport to allow them to leave Russia. At the time of his son’s birth Jona was the London representative of the German News Agency. He was to become press attaché at the German News Agency, the Wolff Büro, until 1935 when, disgusted by the Nazi regime, he took out British nationality and joined MI5. A precocious child, in 1924 at the age of three Peter performed his repertoire of impressions at a dinner for the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. It sent the emperor to sleep. At Gibbs’ Preparatory School at 134 Sloane Street, where he was named Peter von Ustinov, he made his stage début in the role of a pig. The headmaster wrote in his report, “He shows great originality which must be curbed at all costs.” He then went to Westminster School but at 16 his mother enrolled him in La Compagnie Quinze, an avant-garde French troupe run by Michel Saint-Denis. It was there on July 18, 1938 that Ustinov made his début before a paying audience. He played Waffles in Chekhov’s Wood Demon at the Barn Theatre, Shere. He played a variety of roles before joining Leonard Sachs (the future host of The Good Old Days) and his Players’ Theatre, where the company included Bernard Miles and Alec Clunes (father of Men Behaving Badly star Martin). With the Players’ Theatre Ustinov made his London début on August 30, 1939 and began to appear in revue before moving to Aylesbury Repertory Theatre. In May 1940 he appeared in another revue, Swinging The Gate, at the Gate Theatre. In October 1940 and January 1941 during the blitz he appeared respectively in the revues Diversion and Diversion No 2 at Wyndham’s Theatre. In 1940 he married for the first time and began appearing in films. He played Van de Lubbe, the Dutchman blamed for the burning of the Reichstag, in Mein Kampf – My Crimes, a Dutch priest in Michael Powell’s One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1941), a cameo role as an elderly Czechoslovak professor in J.B. Priestley’s Let The People Sing (1942), and Krauss, a star pupil of a Nazi spy school, in Will Hay’s and Basil Dearden’s The Goose Steps Out (1942). Ustinov’s first play, House Of Regrets, opened at the Arts Theatre in London to favourable reviews on October 6, 1942. Nine months earlier, on January 16, 1942, Ustinov was called up and posted to the Royal Sussex Regiment, which sent him to defend St Margaret’s Bay, near Dover. Then he was seconded to the Directorate of Army Psychiatry in Glasgow where he worked with the director Carol Reed and the writer Eric Ambler. Ustinov suggested making a film for those who had just entered the Army and The New Lot (1943) was a success. Ustinov was appointed batman to Colonel David Niven, who issued him with a pass which announced that “This man may go anywhere, and do anything at his discretion in the course of duty.” His next film The Way Ahead (1944), starred Niven and, written by Ambler and Ustinov (who also appeared in the film), was a worthy successor to The New Lot. In 1944 Ustinov suffered a nervous breakdown, and was placed under observation in a military hospital. On his release, he joined Army entertainments and directed Edith Evans as Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals at Salisbury; he himself took the part of Sir Anthony Absolute. In 1945 Ustinov’s play The Tragedy Of Good Intentions, about the First Crusade, was performed by the Old Vic company at the Liverpool Playhouse. Shortly before his demob in 1946 Ustinov wrote and directed School For Secrets (1946) starring Ralph Richardson and Richard Attenborough, about the development of radar. From June 26, 1946, at the New Theatre, Ustinov appeared as Porfiry Petrovich, the police chief who tracks down Raskolnikov, in Rodney Ackland’s version of Crime And Punishment. Despite starring John Gielgud and Edith Evans, Ustinov stole the show. He wrote and directed a film version of F. Anstey’s Vice-Versa (1948) which gave James Robertson-Justice his first break. On the small screen in America, Ustinov won an Emmy for his performance in The Life Of Samuel Johnson (1957). He would repeat the achievement as Socrates in Barefoot In Athens (November 11, 1966) and as Herman Washington, a Jewish merchant who becomes a reluctant foster father to a black child, in Buzz Kulik’s A Storm In Summer (February 6, 1970). He also played Herod the Great in the all-star television series Jesus Of Nazareth (April 3 and 10, 1977). Ustinov made a number of television documentary series although they were not always well received. The critic Noel Malcolm said that Peter Ustinov’s Russia (1987) showed “all the investigative inclinations of an Intourist guide with a coach party and a lobotomy”. In the book My Russia (1983) his comment that Stalin had caused suffering “to thousands” could be seen as a touch naïve. In 1962 Ustinov directed three operas at Covent Garden (Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole and Schoenberg’s Erwartung). Six years later he went to Hamburg to direct The Magic Flute. His version of Massanet’s Don Quixote at the Paris Opera in 1973 was greeted with prolonged booing. In films Ustinov played a wide range of characters. He achieved international acclaim – and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination – as a gloating Nero in Quo Vadis (1951). He lost to Karl Malden in A Streetcar Named Desire. He was a petulant Prince Regent to Stewart Granger’s Beau Brummel (1954); Jules, an escaped convict, in We’re No Angels (1954); a ring master in Max Ophüls’ Lola Montez (1955); Lentulus Batiatus, a slave-trader, in Spartacus (1960) for which he won his first Best Supporting Actor Oscar; he was the adaptor, director and played the ineffective humanitarian Captain Vere in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (1962), which many believed was his best film; the lecherous Middle Eastern King Fawz in John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1964); Arthur Simon Simpson, a tourist guide who gets mixed up with gangsters, in Topkapi (1964) for which he won his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar; and Pineda, a Latin American ambassador, in The Comedians (1968). Ustinov’s script for Hot Millions (1968) was nominated for an Oscar but lost out to Mel Brooks’ The Producers. Ustinov played Marcus Pendleton, alias Caesar Smith, a crook who is caught out by a computer that he then co-opted to build his crooked empire. He played the Mexican general Maximilian Rodrigues de Santos in Viva Max (1969), the villainous oriental Hnup Wan in One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1974), the sadistic Foreign Legion sergeant Markov in Let’s Remake Beau Geste (1977), Suleiman the caliph in Ashanti (1979), the Chinese detective in the disappointing Charlie Chan And The Curse Of The Dragon Queen (1981) and Professor Gus Nikolais in Lorenzo’s Oil (1992). He played Belgium’s celebrated detective Hercule Poirot several times: in Death On The Nile (1978), Evil Under The Sun (1981) and the television movies Thirteen At Dinner (1985), Dead Man’s Folly (1986) and Appointment With Death (1988). He was often in demand for voice-over work in films and television and worked on Clochemerle (1972), Robin Hood (1973), The Mouse And His Child (1977), Winds Of Change (1978) and Tarka The Otter (1979). Memed, My Hawk (1984), the last film he directed, was an unsuccessful version of Yashar Kemal’s novel of young love. He also found time to write two novels, The Loser (1961) about a young Nazi on the run in Italy, and Krumnagel (1971) about an American police chief who is sentenced to seven years in jail for the manslaughter of a Scottish trade unionist. In January 1963 the Mirisch Company sued him for pulling out of The Pink Panther, which was in production in Rome. Ustinov was replaced by Peter Sellers. Ustinov, who was Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF from 1968 until his death, was appointed Comm
ander of the Order of the British Empire in 1975 and knighted in 1990. He was fluent in English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish and could get by in Turkish and Greek. 5́ 11˝ Ustinov was married three times. His first wife Isolde Denham was the daughter of Reginald Denham and Moyna MacGill and half-sister of Angela Lansbury. They married in 1940 in London and divorced in the same city in 1950. They had one daughter, Tamara (b. Woolavington wing of the Middlesex Hospital, July 25, 1945). On February 15, 1954 at Chelsea register office he married the actor Suzanne Cloutier. It was her second marriage, the first was not consummated and she left her husband during the wedding reception. She went on to play Desdemona in Orson Welles’ film of Othello. They had a son Igor (b. London, April 30, 1956) and two daughters, Pavla (b. St John’s Hospital, Santa Monica, California, June 2, 1954 at 3.33pm) and Andrea (b. Los Angeles, March 30, 1959). The couple was divorced in 1971. The following year on June 21, 1972, in Corsica, he married Hélène du Lau d’Allemans, a French press agent. He once remarked, “I am a constitutional gypsy, at home nowhere and absolutely at home everywhere.”
CAUSE: He died in Genolier, Switzerland from heart failure. He was 82.
FURTHER READING: Dear Me – Peter Ustinov (London: Heinemann, 1977).
V
Roger Vadim
(ROGER VADIM PLéMIANNIKOV)
Born January 26, 1928
Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries Page 173
