Fifty-five-year-old Brad Delp, the lead singer with soft rock group Boston, was found dead on 9 May. He had committed suicide. Delp’s vocals can be heard on the band’s hits “More Than a Feeling” and “Long Time”.
Fifty-year-old American stand-up comedian Richard Jeni (Richard John Colangelo) committed suicide by gunshot on 10 March. He had been suffering from severe clinical depression. Jeni appeared in a few films, including The Mask (1994), and he voiced “The Host” on the Batman cartoon episode, “Make ’Em Laugh”, the same year.
American actress Lanna Saunders, best known for playing “Sister Marie Horton” on NBC-TV’s Days of Our Lives from 1979-85, died of complications from multiple sclerosis the same day, aged 65. Her other credits include episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man and Fantasy Island.
Hollywood musical comedy star Betty Hutton (Elizabeth June Thornburg) died of colon cancer on 11 March, aged 86. Best known for her 1950 film Annie Get Your Gun, she also starred in The Perils of Pauline (1947). In 1952 she walked out of her contract with Paramount Pictures and, except for a year-long TV series, rarely worked again.
Austrian-born character actor Herbert Fux died on 13 March, aged 79. His many films include The Invisible Terror, House of 1,000 Dolls (with Vincent Price), Gorilla Gang, Island of Lost Girls, Castle of Fu Manchu (with Christopher Lee), Mark of the Devil, Eugenie . . . the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion (again with Lee), Bite Me Darling, Lady Frankenstein, Hitler’s Son (with Peter Cushing), Lady Dracula and Asterix and Obelix Take on Caesar. He became a founding member of Austria’s Green Party and was a Member of Parliament during the 1980s.
British actor Gareth Hunt (Alan Leonard Hunt), who played tough guy “Mike Gambit” opposite Patrick Macnee and Joanna Lumley in The New Avengers (1976-77), died of pancreatic cancer on 14 March, aged 64. The nephew of actress Martita Hunt, he also appeared in Doctor Who (“Planet of the Spiders”), Space: 1999, Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense, the sci-spy spoof Licensed to Love and Kill (aka The Man from S.E.X.) and Bloodbath at the House of Death (with Vincent Price).
Singer Carol Richards (Carol June Vosburgh), who recorded “Silver Bells” in 1950 and other Christmas songs with Bing Crosby, died of heart disease and kidney failure on 16 March, aged 84. In the movies she provided the uncredited singing voices for Joan Caulfield, Vera-Ellen, Betta St John and Cyd Charisse (including Brigadoon).
Seventy-four-year-old Japanese actor Eiji Funakoshi died of a cerebral infarction on his birthday, 17 May. His many credits include Kaidan Kakuidori, Camera, The Ghostly Trap and Camera vs. Guillon.
David Letterman’s former sidekick Calvert DeForest, who was known on the 1980s NBC-TV talk show (1962-2002) as “Larry (Bud) Melman”, died in New York after a long illness on 19 March, aged 85. The cousin of Bebe Daniels and Star Trek actor DeForest Kelley, he had small roles in the films My Demon Lover, Freaked and Encino Woman.
Soul singer Luther Ingram, who had a hit with “If Loving You is Wrong (I Don’t Want to Be Right)” in 1972, died of heart failure the same day, aged 69. He also wrote the Staple Singers’ hit “Respect Yourself”.
American character actor John P. Ryan died of a stroke on 20 March, aged 70. A discovery of Jack Nicholson’s, he was frequently cast by director Bob Rafelson in films. He played protective father “Frank Davis” in the first two films of Larry Cohen’s mutant baby trilogy – It’s Alive and It Lives Again. His other credits include Futureworld, Class of 1999, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and episodes of Matt Helm, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Faerie Tale Theatre and The Adventures of Br is co County, Jr.
American character actor Harry Frazier, best known for his portrayals as Santa Claus on TV and playing King Neptune in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, died of complications from diabetes on 26 May, aged 77. His other credits include episodes of Batman and Shelley Duvall’s Tall Tales and Legends (“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”).
Bahamian-born actor Calvin Lockhart (Bert Cooper) died of complications from a stroke on 29 March, aged 72. Best remembered as the obsessed werewolf hunter in Amicus’ The Beast Must Die (aka Black Werewolf), he also appeared in Myra Breckinridge, Predator 2 and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
British “tough guy” actor George Sewell, who portrayed “Colonel Alec Freeman” in Gerry Anderson’s SF series UFO (1970-71), died of cancer on 1 April, aged 83. His many film and TV appearances include Deadlier Than the Male (uncredited), Hammer’s The Vengeance of She, The Haunted House of Horror (aka Horror House), Doppelgänger (aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun), Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Tales of the Unexpected, Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (“Mark of the Devil”) and Doctor Who (“Remembrance of the Daleks”).
American character actor Edward Mallory, who portrayed “Dr Bill Horton” on the NBC daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives for fourteen years, died on 4 April after a long illness. He was 76. Mallory’s other credits include episodes of Men Into Space, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Bewitched, The Munsters (including the unaired pilot) and Automan.
Barry Nelson (Robert Haakon Nielson), the first actor to play James (“Jimmy”) Bond on the screen in a 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale (opposite Peter Lorre), died on 7 April, aged 89. An MGM contract player in the 1940s, his film credits include Shadow of the Thin Man, A Guy Named Joe, Island Claws and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, along with episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (A. M. Burrage’s “The Waxwork”), The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Ghost Story, Thriller (1974), Battlestar Galactica, Salvage 1, Fantasy Island and Monsters (Michael McDo-well’s “Far Below”).
Emmy Award-winning actor Roscoe Lee Browne died of cancer on 11 April, aged 81. A former track champion, college literature instructor and wine-seller, he made his acting debut in the early 1960s and his credits include Disney’s The World’s Greatest Athlete (1973), Logan’s Run (as the robot “Box”), Twilight’s Last Gleaming, Dr Scorpion, Night Angel (aka Hellborn), Moon 44, The Beast (1995) and Muppet Treasure Island (uncredited), along with episodes of TV’s The Invaders, Planet of the Apes, Highway to Heaven and SeaQuest DSV. His rich Shakespearean tones could also be heard in Disney’s Oliver and Company and Treasure Planet, The Real Ghostbusters, Batman: The Animated Series, Freakazoid! and various episodes of Spider-Man (as “The Kingpin”). Browne also narrated Babe, Babe Pig in the City, Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties and Epic Movie.
Broadway theatres dimmed their lights in honour of stage and screen singer and actress Kitty Carlisle [Hart] (Catherine Conn) who died of congestive heart failure on 17 April following a long battle with pneumonia. She was 96. A former opera singer, Carlisle moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s, where she appeared in the musical mystery Murder at the Vanities (Bela Lugosi was in the stage version), The Marx Brothers’ comedy A Night at the Opera and Woody Allen’s Radio Days. She was married to composer Moss Hart from 1946 until his death in 1961.
French leading man Jean-Pierre Cassel (Jean-Pierre Crochon) died of cancer on 19 April, aged 74. A discovery of Gené Kelly, he was the father of actor Vincent Cassel and the father-in-law of Italian actress Monica Belluci. Cassel’s many credits include Malpertius, Superman II (uncredited), Alice (1982), The Phantom of the Opera (1992), Mister Frost, The Favour the Watch and the Very Big Fish, The Crimson Rivers, Asterix at the Olympic Games and an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.
Detroit TV horror host Sir Graves Ghastly (Lawson J. Deming) died of congestive heart failure in a Ohio nursing home on 24 April, the day after his 94th birthday. Each weekend from 1967-1983 he appeared on WJBK-TV as the vampiric host introducing classic horror movies.
Canadian-born character actor Roy Jenson, best known for playing thugs in films like Chinatown, died of cancer in Los Angeles the same day, aged 80. In a career that spanned five decades, the former stuntman and double for Robert Mitchum appeared in more than 170 films (often uncredited), including 13 Ghosts (1960, as a ghost), Atlantis the Lost Continent, Confessio
ns of An Opium Eater (with Vincent Price), Five Weeks in a Balloon, Our Man Flint, The Ambushers, The Helicopter Spies, 5 Card Stud, Nightmare Honey-moon, Soylent Green, 99 and 44/100% Dead, Helter Skelter, The Car, Demonoid, Red Dawn, The Night Stalker and Solar Crisis. Jenson also turned up in episodes of Batman, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Wild Wild West, The Invaders, The Man from U.NC.L.E. (“The Prince of Darkness Affair”), Tarzan, Star Trek, Search, Rung Fu, Fantasy Island and Knight Rider.
He’s no longer working in the lab, late one night. . . Singer Bobby “Boris” Pickett (Robert George Pickett), whose spot-on Boris Karloff impersonation sent “Monster Mash” (which he co-wrote in half an hour) to the top of the US music charts in October 1962, died of leukaemia on 25 April, aged 69. The son of a movie theatre manager, Pickett recorded “Monster Mash” with a backing band christened “The Crypt-Kickers” (which included a then-unknown piano player named Leon Russell). When originally released, BBC Radio banned the song for being “offensive” and “unhealthy”. The song “was a graveyard smash” again in 1970 and 1973, and formed the basis of the 1967 stage musical I’m Sorry the Bridge is Out. You’ll Have to Spend the Night. It was filmed in 1995 as Monster Mash: The Movie (aka Frankenstein Sings) with Pickett playing Dr Victor Frankenstein. He was also in It’s a Bikini World, Deathmaster (uncredited), Strange Invaders, Sister Sister, Frankenstein General Hospital, Lobster Man from Mars, Boogie With the Undead and an episode of The Simpsons. Described as “The Guy Lombardo of Halloween”, Pickett’s Christmas follow-up single, “Monster’s Holiday”, reached #30 in December 1962. In 1973, while on a Halloween tour, his bus broke down outside the town of Frankenstein, Missouri.
Veteran American character actor Dabbs [Robert William] Greer died of a kidney and heart ailment on 28 April, aged 90. Best known for playing “Old Paul Edgecomb” in the 1999 film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Green Mile, his many other films include Monkey Business (uncredited), House of Wax (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Hot Rod Girl (1956), The Vampire (1957), It! The Terror from Beyond Space, Evil Town, Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat and House IV, plus episodes of Dick Tracy, Space Patrol, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Science Fiction Theatre, The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, Adventures of Superman, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Invaders, The Wild Wild West, The Ghost & Mrs Muir (in the recurring role of “Norrie Coolidge”), Ghost Story, Shazam!, The Incredible Hulk, The Greatest American Hero and Starman.
Eighty-year-old peplum muscleman actor and 1950s screen Tarzan Gordon Scott (Gordon Merrill Werschkul) died on 30 April of heart failure following post-heart valve surgery complications. Scott was discovered by Hollywood producer Sol Lesser while he was working as a lifeguard at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. His films include Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle, Tarzan and the Lost Safari, Tarzan and the Trappers, Tarzan’s Fight for Life, Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, Tarzan the Magnificent (with John Carradine), Goliath and the Vampires, Hercules Against Moloch, Death Ray (as super-spy “Bart Fargo”) and the TV pilot Hercules and the Princess Troy. Scott was married to actress Vera Miles from 1954-59 and spent the final six years of his life living as a “guest” in the spare bedroom of a couple of his fans in Baltimore, Maryland.
Veteran character actor Tom (Thomas) Poston, best known for his recurring roles as “George Utley” on TV’s Newhart, died of respiratory failure the same day following a brief illness. He was 85. His credits include William Castle’s Zotz! and The Old Dark House (1963), The Happy Hooker and The Girl the Gold Watch & Dynamite, plus episodes of Lights Out (“Dr Heidegger’s Experiment”), Tom Corbett Space Cadet, Thriller (“Masquerade”), Get Smart, Mork & Mindy (as neighbour “Franklin Delano Bickley”), Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Touched by an Angel, Honey I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show, Dr Quinn Medicine Woman (“Halloween”) and The Lone Gunman. He married his third wife, actress Suzanne Pleshette, in 2001.
Zola Taylor (Zoletta Lyn Taylor), a founding member of the 1950s singing group The Platters, died of pneumonia on 30 April, aged 69. The group, whose hits include “Only You”, “The Great Pretender” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, appeared in such films as Rock Around the Clock and The Girl Can’t Help It. Taylor was married to doo-wop singer Frankie Lymon from 1959 until his death in 1968, and Halle Berry portrayed her in the 1998 film Why Do Fools Fall in Love.
Beefy American character actor Nicholas Worth died of heart failure on 7 May, aged 69. He appeared in Scream Blacula Scream, The Terminal Man, Coma, Don’t Answer the Phone!, Swamp Thing, Invitation to Hell, Hell Comes to Frogtown, Darkman, Dark Angel: The Ascent, Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II, New Eden, Hologram Man, Timelock, Barb Wire, Blood Dolls and Starforce, along with episodes of TV’s The Invisible Man (1975), The Greatest American Hero, Fantasy Island, Knight Rider, Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Sliders, The X Files and Star Trek: Voyager.
Tony Award-winning stage and screen actor Charles Nelson Reilly died of complications from pneumonia after a long illness on 25 May, aged 76. Best known for his recurring role as “Claymore Gregg” on TV’s The Ghost & Mrs Muir (1968-70), his other credits include Charlotte’s Web (1973), All Dogs Go to Heaven (and various sequels and spin-offs), A Troll in Central Park, Babes in Toyland (1997), SpongeBob Square Pants and Tom and Jerry in Shiver Me Whiskers, along with episodes of The Flintstone Comedy Hour (as the voice of “Frank Frankenstone”), Spacecats, Amazing Stories, and The X Files and Millenium (as author “Jose Chung” in both series). He was also a regular on various game shows on American television in the 1970s and 1980s.
Italian actress Leonora Ruffo (Eleonora Ruffo), who played “Princess Deianira” in Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World, died on 28 May, aged 72. Her other film credits include Goliath and the Dragon, Goliath and the Vampires and Star Pilot (aka 2+5: Missione Hydra).
Prolific French actor and director Jean-Claude Brialy died of cancer on 30 May, aged 74. He appeared in the 1962 adaptation of John Dickson Carr’s The Burning Court (La Chambre ardente), Demon of the Island and the serial killer comedy The Monster (1994).
Lugubrious New Zealand-born British character actor Gordon [Massey] Gostelow died on 3 June, aged 82. He emigrated to Britain in 1950, where he appeared in Disney’s The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, Wuthering Heights (1970), Merlin of the Crystal Cave and episodes of TV’s Sherlock Holmes (1965), The Saint, Doctor Who (“The Space Pirates”), The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Return of the Saint and The Return of Sherlock Holmes (“The Sign of Four”). Gostelow was married to actress Vivian Pickles.
Hollywood leading lady María Powers (Mary Ellen Powers) died of complications from leukaemia on 11 June, aged 75. At the age of eleven she appeared (uncredited) in the 1942 Bowery Boys comedy Tough as They Come. Her other films include The Unknown Terror, The Colossus of New York, Flight of the Lost Balloon, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting and The Doomsday Machine, and she also appeared in episodes of Thriller, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West and Bewitched. Powers later became an author of children’s books and taught acting.
Hank Medress, a singer with the Tokens, whose doo-wop vocals were heard on the 1961 hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, died of lung cancer on 18 June, aged 68.
Canadian-born WWE wrestling champion Chris Benoit, known as the “Canadian Crippler”, was found hanged at his Atlanta home on 25 June in what police believe was a double murder-suicide. The asphyxiated bodies of Benoit’s wife, Nancy, and 7-year-old son, Daniel, were also found in the house. The 40-year-old wrestler was a former world heavyweight and intercontinental champion. In a bizarre twist, it was revealed that the death of 43-year-old Nancy Benoit was apparently posted on Wikipedia several hours before the bodies were discovered.
Nashville saxophonist Boots Randolph (Homer Louis “Boots” Randolph III) died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 3 July, aged 80. Best known for his 1963 hit “Yakety Sax”, he also played on tracks by Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Brenda Lee and REO Speedwagon.
British jazz singer, author and scriptwriter G
eorge Melly died of lung cancer on 4 July, aged 80. A film critic for The Observer newspaper in the early 1960s, he scripted the film Smashing Time and wrote the long-running Daily Mail satirical cartoon strip Flook with artist creator “Trog” (Wally Fawkes). He was also the voice of a dwarf in Richard Williams’ 1993 animated film The Princess and the Cobbler (aka The Thief and the Cobbler) starring Vincent Price. Diagnosed with cancer in 2005, Melly refused treatment and, despite also suffering from dementia, continued to perform in public until a month before his death.
Singer Bill Pinkney, the last founding member of the original Drifters, died of an apparent heart attack the same day, aged 81. He left the R&B group in 1958 to set up the Original Drifters.
American leading man Kerwin Matthews died of a heart attack on 5 July, aged 81. Best remembered as the swashbuckling hero pitted against Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion monsters in the classic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, his other credits include The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (again with Harryhausen), Hammer’s The Pirates of Blood River (opposite Christopher Lee) and Maniac, the S^W-influenced Jack the Giant Killer, the European sci-spy adventures OSS 117 and Panic in Bangkok, Battle Beneath the Earth, Octaman, Death Takes a Holiday (1971), The Boy Who Cried Werewolf and Nightmare in Blood. Matthews also turned up in an episode of TV’s Space Patrol and a 1958 production of The Suicide Club, and he starred in the failed 1960s pilots Ghostbreakers and Dead of Night: A Darkness at Blaisedon.
Veteran American character actor Charles Lane (Charles Gerstle Levison, aka “Charles Levison”) died on 9 July at the ripe old age of 102. His numerous credits (often in small or uncredited parts playing crotchety tax inspectors or desk clerks) include Blonde Crazy, 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Twentieth Century, Mi Baba Goes to Town, Professor Beware, Tod Browning’s Miracles for Sale, Television Spy, Beware Spooks!, The Cat and the Canary (1939), The Invisible Woman, I Wake Up Screaming, Tarzan’s New York Adventure, Arsenic and Old Lace, It’s a Wonderful Life, Mighty Joe Young, The 30 Foot Bride of Candy Rock, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Ghost and Mr Chicken, The Gnome-Mobile, The Aristocats, Strange Behaviour (aka Dead Kids), Strange Invaders, Date With an Angel, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1995) and he narrated the 2006 animated short The Night Before Christmas. A regular on such TV shows as Petticoat Junction, I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show, Lane also turned up in episodes of Topper, The Twilight Zone, Mister Ed, Get Smart, Honey West, The Munsters, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, Bewitched, Mork & Mindy, Otherworld and the 1991 revival of Dark Shadows. One of the last survivors of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, he was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933. In 2005, 30 January was named “Charles Lane Day” by SAG, and that same year he was honoured at the Emmy Awards on the occasion of his 100th birthday.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 Page 77
