Mexican-born Hollywood star and former boxer Anthony Quinn (Anthony Rudolph Oaxaca) died in a Boston hospital on June 3rd, aged 86. Best known for his 1964 film Zorba the Greek, he also appeared in Bulldog Drummond in Africa, Television Spy, The Ghost Breakers, Road to Morocco, Sinbad the Sailor, Ulysses (1955), The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1956, as Quasimodo), The Shoes of the Fisherman, The Magus, Ghosts Can’t Do It and Last Action Hero. On television he was in a 1951 episode of Lights Out and portrayed Zeus in five Hercules The Legendary Journeys TV movies in 1994. Married three times (once to Cecil B. DeMille’s daughter Katherine), he had at least thirteen children by five different women.
76-year-old stage, film and TV actor Carroll O’Connor, best remembered for his Emmy Award-winning portrayal of Archie Bunker on the CBS-TV sitcom All in the Family (1971-79), died of a heart attack brought on by complications from diabetes on June 21st. He also appeared in the TV movie Fear No Evil (1969), and such series asThe Outer Limits, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel and The Wild Wild West.
French-born actress Corinne Calvet (Corinne Dibos) died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Los Angeles on June 23rd, aged 75. Her film credits include Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons, Dr Heckle and Mr Hype, The Sword and the Sorcerer and the TV movie The Phantom of Hollywood. Actor John Bromfield was one of her five husbands, and she once filed a $1 million slander suit against Zsa Zsa Gabor for alleging that she was not French.
Hollywood star Jack Lemmon (John Uhler Lemmon III) died of a cancer-related illness on June 27th, aged 76. The two-time Academy Award winner, best known for his long screen partnership with Walter Matthau (who died almost exactly a year earlier), appeared in such early TV series as Suspense and the movies Bell Book and Candle, How to Murder Your Wife, Airport 77, The China Syndrome, JFK, Hamlet (1996) and, uncredited, in The Legend of Bagger Vance (which he also narrated).
71-year-old British character actress Joan Sims died the same day after a long illness and years of heavy drinking and depression. Best known as the star of twenty-four Carry On comedies (including Carry On Screaming), she also appeared inColonel March Investigates (with Boris Karloff), Meet Mr Lucifer, Disney’s One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing and The Canterville Ghost (1996), and was a regular on TV’s Worzel Gummidge (1979-81).
British actress Patricia Hilliard, who appeared in The Ghost Goes West (1936) and had a role in Things to Come (1936), died in mid-June, aged 85.
British character actor Jack Gwillim died on July 2nd, aged 91. Best known for his royal roles on stage, his films include Circus of Horrors, Jason and the Argonauts (1963, as King Aeetes), Hammer’s Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, Clash of the Titans and as Van Helsing in The Monster Squad. On TV his career ranged from A for Andromeda to Conan.
British stage and screen actress Eleanor Summerfield died on July 13th, aged 80. Her film credits include Scrooge (1951) and Disney’s The Watcher in the Woods.
Hollywood actress Molly Lamont, who appeared in Scared to Death (with Bela Lugosi), Devil Bat’s Daughter and Jungle Princess, died on July 15th, aged 91.
‘England’s Premier Ventriloquist’, Arthur Worsley, died on July 19th, aged 80. With his cheeky dummy Charlie Brown he worked with such acts as Laurel and Hardy, Elvis Presley and The Beatles.
Stage and TV actor Steve Barton, who played Raoul in both the original London and Broadway productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, died of heart failure in Germany on July 21st, aged 47. He also played the Beast in an Austrian production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, appeared in the short-lived 1993 Broadway musical The Red Shoes, and originated the role of Count von Krolock in Jim Steinman’s stage adaptation of Dance of the Vampires in Vienna in 1997.
American actor Alex Nicol died on July 28th, aged 85. He appeared in The Clones, The Night God Screamed, A *P *E and The Screaming Skull. He also directed the latter, along with Point of Terror.
British-born actor Christopher Hewett died of complications due to diabetes in Los Angeles on August 3rd, aged 80. Best known for the role of Mr Belvedere on TV from 1985-90, he also appeared in such films as The Producers, Massarati and the Brain andRatboy. For the final season of Fantasy Island (1983-84) he played Mr Roarke’s new sidekick Lawrence, after Herve Ville-chaize left the show.
64-year-old TV scriptwriter, producer and cartoon voice Lorenzo Music (Gerald David Music), who played Carlton the Doorman in Rhoda (1974-78), which he co-created, andGarfield the Cat on the Saturday morning series, died of cancer on August 4th. He won an Emmy in 1969 as a writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
British actress Dame Dorothy Turin, who played Peter Pan for two seasons (1971-72) on the London stage, died of leukaemia on August 6th, aged 71.
Hollywood leading lady Dorothy McGuire died of heart failure on August 13th, aged 85. She had broken her leg three weeks before. Her many films include The Enchanted Cottage (1945), The Spiral Staircase (1945, as the mute heroine), Disney’sThe Swiss Family Robinson, The Greatest Story Ever Told (as the Virgin Mary) and the TV movie She Waits.
Stage and occasional movie actress Kim Stanley (Patricia Beth Reid) died of uterine cancer the same day, aged 76. Her movies include Séance on a Wet Afternoon (for which she was nominated for an Oscar) and The Right Stuff.
Raymond Edward Johnson, who hosted the radio showInner Sanctum (1941-52) as the macabre Raymond, died on August 15th, aged 90. He also played the lead in radio’s Mandrake the Magician series.
Daytime soap opera star Gerald Gordon, who also appeared in the TV movie It Happened at Lakewood Manor, the original Twilight Zone series, Highway to Heaven and Knight Rider, died on August 17th after a long illness, aged 67.
Soul singer Betty Everett, who topped the US charts in 1964 with ‘The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss)’, died on August 18th, aged 61.
American character actor Walter Reed (Walter Smith) died of kidney failure on August 20th, aged 85. Since making his debut in 1929 at the age of thirteen, he appeared in nearly 100 films and serials including Flying Disc Man from Mars, Government Agent vs. Phantom Legion, Superman and the Mole Men, How to Make a Monster, Macumba Love and The Destructors.
American character actress Kathleen Freeman died of lung cancer on August 23 rd, aged 78. Best remembered as the fearsome Sister Stigmata (aka ‘The Penguin’) in both Blues Brothers movies, she made almost 100 films, including Monkey Business, The Magnetic Monster, The Fly (1958), Psycho Sisters, Heart-beeps, Innerspace, Teen Wolf Too, Gremlins 2 The New Batch, Hocus Pocus, Nutty Professor II The Klumps, Shrek, and ten with Jerry Lewis (including the original The Nutty Professor). She was also a regular on the 1953-55 Topper TV series and was appearing in the Broadway production of The Full Monty at the time of her death.
Howard Hughes discovery and Hollywood’s leading film noir actress, Jane Greer (Bettejane Greer), died of complications from cancer on August 24th, two weeks short of her 77th birthday. Her films include Out of the Past, Dick Tracy (1945), The Falcon’s Alibi, Sinbad the Sailor (1946), Run for the Sun and the Lon Chaney Sr. biopic Man of a Thousand Faces. She was briefly married to actor/crooner Rudy Vallee, and her family was descended from the poet John Donne.
22-year-old American R&B singer and actress Aaliyah (Dana Haughton) was one of nine people killed on August 25th, when a ‘substantially overloaded’ light airplane crashed shortly after take-off in the Bahamas, where she had been filming a music video. The niece of Gladys Knight, she was rumoured to have married singer/producer R. Kelly when she was only fifteen. After appearing in Romeo Must Die, she starred in the Anne Rice adaptation Queen of the Damned and had just completed pre-production on the two Matrix sequels. Her parents subsequently launched a legal action against Virgin Records and several video production companies alleging negligence led to the plane crash.
75-year-old Spanish actor Francisco Rabal, who suffered from bronchitis, died of emphysema on August 29th on a flight from Montreal, where he had received a lifetime achieve
ment award. His nearly 200 films include The Witches (1967), Umberto Lenzi’s City of the Walking Dead (aka Nightmare City), Treasure of the Four Crowns and Dagon.
American leading lady Julie Bishop (Jacqueline Brown, aka Jacqueline Wells) died on August 30th, her 87th birthday. After starting out as a child actress in silent films, she went on to appear in Alice in Wonderland (1933), Tarzan the Fearless (with Buster Crabbe), The Black Cat (with Karloff and Lugosi),Torture Ship and The Hidden Hand. Lionel Atwill was once her step father-in-law and her daughter is actress Pamela Shoop Sweeney.
Former American teen idol Troy Donahue (Merle Johnson, Jr.) died on September 2nd of a massive heart attack the 65-year-old had suffered while returning from a gym three days earlier. His film roles include The Man With a Thousand Faces, Monolith Monsters, Monster on the Campus, My Blood Runs Cold, Rocket to the Moon (aka Those Fantastic Flying Fools), Sweet Saviour, Seizure, The Love-Thrill Murders, Cyclone, Deadly Prey, Dr Alien, Bad Blood, The Chilling, Omega Cop, Shock ‘em Dead, Cockroach Hotel and The Godfather Part II. Amongst four divorces, he was married to co-star Suzanne Pleshette for a year, and in the 1970s became addicted to drink and drugs, spending a summer homeless in New York’s Central Park. In later years he gave acting lessons to passengers on a cruise line.
53-year-old American actress and photographer Berry Berenson, the widow of actor Anthony Perkins and younger sister of actress Marisa Berenson, was one of the ninety-two passengers and crew on American Airlines Flight 11, en route from Boston to Los Angeles, that terrorists crashed into the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center on September 11th. She appeared in such movies as Cat People (1982) andWinter Kills.
Former TV reporter, Beat poet, Second City founding member and belated character actor, Victor [Keung] Wong died in his sleep on September 12th, aged 74. His nearly thirty films include Big Trouble in Little China, The Golden Child, Prince of Darkness andTremors. He retired in 1998 after suffering two strokes.
46-year-old Lani O’Grady (Lanita Rose Agrati), best known for playing the eldest daughter in the TV series Eight is Enough (1977-81), was found dead at her California home on September 25th. The actress, whose other credits include Massacre at Central High (aka Blackboard Massacre), The Curious Case of the Campus Corpse and the TV movie The Kid With the Broken Halo, had suffered from panic attacks, agoraphobia and alcohol and drug abuse.
Actress Gloria Foster, who appeared as The Oracle in The Matrix, died of complications from diabetes in New York on September 29th, aged 64.
Early American TV sex symbol Dagmar (Virginia Ruth Egnor, aka Jennie Lewis) died on October 9th, aged 79. The buxom blonde appeared on Broadway with comedy duo Olsen and Johnson in the mid-1940s, and guested on TV alongside Jerry Lester, Morey Amsterdam and Milton Berle during the following decade. She retired in the 1970s.
American actor Otis Young died of a stroke on October 12th, aged 69. His films include The Clones, The Capture of Bigfoot and Blood Beach.
British actress Linden Travers (Florence Lindon-Travers), best remembered for her role as Mrs Todhunter in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, died on October 23rd, aged 88. Her other films include The Terror (1939), The Ghost Train (1940), The Bad Lord Byron and No Orchids For Miss Blandish, which was banned in Britain for several years. Her younger brother was actor Bill Travers.
British character actress Jenny Laird, who appeared in Village of the Damned (1960) and the TV movies A Place to Die and The Masks of Death (as Mrs Hudson, opposite Peter Cushing’s Sherlock Holmes), died on Halloween, aged 84. She also appeared in episodes of TV’s Doctor Who and Hammer House of Horror.
Actor and Tony award-winning composer Albert Hague, who played the cantankerous Mr Shorofsky inFame and the spin-off TV series, died of lung cancer on November 12th, aged 81. In 1966 he scored the animated short Dr Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (narrated by Boris Karloff), and also appeared in Nightmares, Space Jam and TV’s Tales from the Darkside.
American actor Byron Sanders, who appeared in The Flesh Eaters and also modelled for Salvador Dali’s ‘Crucifixion’, died the same day, aged 76.
Veteran British comedienne and character actress Peggy Mount died on November 13th, aged 86.
33-year-old British actress Charlotte Coleman, best remembered as Hugh Grant’s room-mate in Four Weddings and a Funeral, died of a severe asthma attack in London on November 14th. She also appeared in The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale and TV’s Worzel Gummidge, as well as providing voices for the feature cartoon Faeries.
79-year-old Australian actor and screenwriter Michael St. Clair died of a brain aneurysm while driving to an audition on November 22nd. He appeared in Skullduggery and the TV movie The Hound of the Baskervilles (1972), and scripted Mission Mars and co-wrote The Body Stealers (aka Thin Air).
Actor and opera singer Norman Lumsden, best known as author J.R. Hartley looking for a copy of his own book on flyfishing in the British Yellow Pages TV commercial, died on November 28th, aged 95. His first job was as a commercial artist for publisher Hodder & Stoughton, where he designed book covers for Leslie Charteris’sThe Saint series and other titles. Benjamin Britten wrote the part of Peter Quince in his 1960 opera of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Lumsden in mind.
John Mitchum, the actor brother of Robert, died of a stroke on November 29th, aged 82. He appeared in Bigfoot, High Plains Drifter, Telefon and Escapes.
American character actress Pauline Moore, who played one of the bridesmaids in the 1931 Frankenstein, died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on December 7th, aged 87. Her other credits include Charlie Chan at the Olympics, Charlie Chan on Treasure Island and Charlie Chan in Reno.
Veteran Indian actor Ashok Kumar [Ganguli], who appeared in more than 300 films during a career that spanned over sixty years, died of a heart attack on December 10th, aged 90.
Singer Rufus Thomas, best known for his novelty hit ‘Do the Funky Chicken’, died of apparent heart failure in Memphis, Tennessee, on December 15th, aged 84. The Rolling Stones covered his ‘Walking the Dog’ on their first album in 1964.
72-year-old British actor Sir Nigel Hawthorne died of a heart attack on December 19th after a two-year battle against pancreatic cancer. He won a Tony Award for his stage performance as C.S. Lewis in the 1991 Broadway production of Shadowlands and was forced to pull out of playing Jack the Ripper in From Hell (2001) when potentially lethal blood clots were discovered on his lungs prior to filming. He also appeared in DreamChild, Demolition Man, Richard III, Memoirs of a Survivor, Firefox and the 1981 TV movie of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and contributed voice characterizations to Water ship Down, The Plague Dogs and Disney’s The Black Cauldron and Tarzan.
American character actor Lance Fuller died in a Los Angeles nursing home after a long illness on December 22nd, aged 73. He portrayed the Metaluna Mutant in the classic This Island Earth, and also appeared in The She Creature (1956), Voodoo Woman, The Bride and the Beast, The Andromeda Strain and episodes of TV’s Thriller and The Twilight Zone.
American character actress [Anna] Eileen Heckart died after a three-year battle with cancer on December 31st, aged 82. Among her many roles, she appeared in both the Broadway and film productions of The Bad Seed, gaining an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in the part of Mrs Daigle. Her other movies includeNo Way To Treat a Lady and Burnt Offerings. She retired from acting in 2000.
Swiss-born leading man Paul Hubschmid (aka Paul Christian) died in Berlin of a pulmonary embolism the same day, aged 84. He appeared in Bagdad, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Fritz Lang’s Tiger of Eschnapur (aka Journey to the Lost City), Funeral in Berlin, The Day the Sky Exploded and Skullduggery.
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FILM/TV TECHNICIANS
British cartoon film-maker Alison de Vere died on January 2nd, aged 73. In 1967 she helped create the backgrounds for The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and made a cameo appearance as one of the photographed figures in the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sequence.
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p; American independent film producer/director James Hill died of Alzheimer’s disease on January 11th, aged 84. After working as a contract screenwriter at MGM, he joined actor Burt Lancaster and agent Harold Hecht in a production partnership. In 1958, he became Rita Hayworth’s fifth and final husband. The marriage lasted two years.
Following years of poor health (his death was prematurely announced in 1996), Spanish writer/director Amando De Ossorio died on January 13th, aged 82. His many films include Malenka The Niece of the Vampire, Tombs of the Blind Dead, Return of the Evil Dead, Night of the Sorcerers, Horror of the Zombies (1974), Night of the Seagulls and The Sea Serpent.
Film exhibitor Ted Mann, who changed the name of Hollywood’s famed Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to his own in 1973, died of a stroke on January 15th, aged 84. He also produced the 1969 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man and Krull, and was married to actress Rhonda Fleming.
Sam Wiesenthal, who was production manager to Carl Laemmle, Jr’s vice-president at Universal Pictures, died on February 11th at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital, aged 92. With Laemmle, he was responsible for All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and the studio’sFrankenstein and Dracula franchises. After Universal was sold in 1936, he moved on to other studios and later became an independent producer.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Page 70
