Dead Celebrity Alert

July 16, 1929 - July 9, 2008

An influential manager of comic talent, Charles Joffe was, in partnership with Jack Rollins, the producer of almost all of Woody Allen’s films, most notably Annie Hall, which beat Star Wars to the Best Picture Oscar in 1977. In addition Joffe and Rollins fostered the careers of Billy Crystal, David Letterman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and had been among the first to promote Lenny Bruce. The actor Robin Williams good-naturedly called the cigar-brandishing Joffe “the Beast” in tribute to his tenacity in wresting worthwhile payment from studios. … Read full obituary

Chester-born comedian and actor Hugh Lloyd MBE, famed for co-starring with the legendary Tony Hancock, has died aged 85. …

He went on to star in 25 episodes of ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ from 1957-61 as the comedy great’s sidekick, including the classic ‘Blood Donor’ episode.

Following that great success, he got the title role in ‘Hugh and I’ with Terry Scott. Other TV credits included ‘The Gnomes of Dulwich’, ‘Lollipop Loves Mr Mole’, ‘Jury’ and ‘You Rang M’Lord’. He also starred in and devised the series ‘Lord Trump’. … Read full obituary

January 29, 1916 - May 22, 2008

The Czech actress Hana Pravda was a survivor of both the Theresienstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps. She was a leading light in Prague theatre and later, from the 1960s, enjoyed a successful career in British television and films. Then, when she might have expected to move into quiet retirement, her moving wartime diary of her escape from a Nazi death march was rediscovered. Published in Czech and in English as I Was Writing This Diary for You, Sasha, it was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in 2000, and was recognised as one of the most vivid memoirs of the Holocaust. … Read full obituary

Evelyn Keyes, 91, a leading lady of dozens of Hollywood films who wryly dismissed much of her career, noting that she was most remembered for a bit part as Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister Suellen in “Gone With the Wind,” died July 4 at a care facility in Montecito, Calif. She had uterine cancer.

Ms. Keyes wrote two memoirs that brushed by her appearances in more than 40 movies. Instead, she spoke at length about her marriages to director John Huston and bandleader Artie Shaw, as well as sexual conquests that included Kirk Douglas, David Niven and Anthony Quinn. …

Her light touch graced comedies (”Here Comes Mr. Jordan”) and musicals (”The Jolson Story,” “A Thousands and One Nights”), and she could convincingly adapt to the required accent, whether Georgia peach (”Gone With the Wind”) or English cockney (”Ladies in Retirement”). … Read full obituary

Don S. Davis, a college professor who found a second career as a character actor, gaining notice for his roles in TV’s “Stargate: SG-1″ and “Twin Peaks,” died of a heart attack June 29 at his home in Gibsons, Canada. He was 65. …

A native of the Missouri Ozarks who had served in the U.S. Army, Davis drew upon those experiences in his frequent portrayals of authority figures on television and film. He had a regular role as Gen. George S. Hammond on the science-fiction TV series “Stargate: SG-1″ from 1997 to 2006 and a recurring role as Maj. Garland Briggs on the quirky “Twin Peaks” in the early ’90s. He also appeared periodically as Scully’s father in “The X-Files” TV series about FBI agents investigating unsolved cases. … Read full obituary

September 18, 1929 - July 2, 2008

A large, jolly woman with an ample bosom and twinkling eyes, Elizabeth Spriggs was one of Britain’s best and most cherished character actresses, equally at home in Shakespeare and Dickens as in contemporary television drama. Superb in comic roles, she could also give her characters depth and gravitas. …

She served a long apprenticeship in regional theatre, crowned with spells at the Bristol Old Vic and Birmingham Repertory, where she played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra and Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard. But she was well into her thirties before she achieved national recognition. This came in 1962 when she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company under Peter Hall, and stayed for 14 years, appearing regularly at Stratford and the RSC’s London homes, the Aldwych Theatre and later the Barbican. … Read full obituary

Dody Goodman, whose ditzy comic persona was well known to patrons of theatre, film and television from the 1950s on, died June 22 at the Actors Fund Home in New Jersey, a spokesperson for the Fund confirmed. Her age was thought to be 92 by many accounts, though the subject of her birthdate was something she was known to falsify throughout her career. Her agent said she was 94. …

Her airhead persona, buttressed by curly hair, wide childlike blue eyes and a long, loopy grin, attracted the attention of Jack Paar, then the host of “The Tonight Show.” …

Fame and good fortune returned in the late ’70s when she took on the role of Martha Shumway in the widely praised, if short-lived, mock soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and made a much-commented-upon supporting turn in the film of “Grease.” A semi-regular role on “Diff’rent Strokes” followed. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her performance in an 1984 revival of Ah, Wilderness!. She also spent a great deal of time in productions of Nunsense and its sequels. … Read full obituary

January 12, 1908 - June 19, 2008

In the 1950s Jean Delannoy was the French film director whom the upstart talent of the Nouvelle Vague most liked to bait and wound.

François Truffaut, the future director of Jules et Jim, told the readers of Cahiers du Cinéma that he had sat through Delannoy’s 1954 Jean Gabin drama Chiens perdus sans collier three times, in order to learn how not [to] direct.

His sins, in Truffaut’s eyes, included the academic precision of his images, the coolness of his temperament — both undoubted characteristics — and something much harder to prove: insincerity. … Read full obituary

October 27, 1927 - May 16, 2008

Jimmy Slyde was the aptly named practitioner of a sinuous, slithering form of tap dance that helped to define the heyday of an ever-changing cultural phenomenon. Whereas modern tap is aggressive, sometimes even obstreperous, Slyde embodied a seemingly effortless ability to, well, slide across a stage, often letting slip the odd mot juste as he made his way past an admiring public.

An early acolyte of such African-American tap legends as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Slyde in turn helped pave the way for the likes of Savion Glover, who transformed Slyde’s vaunted rhythmic ease into something deliberately rougher and more raw. The two generations of performer were both seen on Broadway in the elaborate 1989 revue Black and Blue, which began in Paris in 1985 before settling into a two year run in New York, where it won three Tony Awards. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Cyd Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday. She was 86.

Charisse was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Monday after suffering an apparent heart attack, said her publicist, Gene Schwam.

She appeared in dramatic films, but her fame came from the Technicolor musicals of the 1940s and 1950s.

Classically trained, she could dance anything, from a pas de deux in 1946’s “Ziegfeld Follies” to the lowdown Mickey Spillane satire of 1956’s “The Band Wagon” (with Astaire).

She also forged a popular song-and-dance partnership on television and in nightclub appearances with her husband, singer Tony Martin. … Read full obituary

January 6, 1928 - May 19, 2008

Vijay Tendulkar endured having one of his plays howled off the stage by an unappreciative audience; another about man-woman relationships in South Asia was banned by the Indian Government; and he was once lashed by a furious theatregoer with a bamboo rod. Such were the passions aroused by one of India’s most influential dramatists.

He went on, nevertheless, to win a host of awards and to write one of the longest-running plays in the world, Ghasiram Kotwal (Ghasiram the Constable), which was performed 6,000 times in India and abroad in the original Marathi and in translation. He wrote 30 full-length plays, collections of short stories and film scripts, although he never took up offers to write screenplays for mainstream popular cinema. That, he asserted, was work for hacks.

The dominant theme of his writings was violence, a subject that fascinated and repelled him. … Read full obituary

1951 - May 3, 2008

Ngugi wa Mirii was co-author of one of the most influential works in modern African literature. His play, I Will Marry When I Want, written with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, was a searing indictment of what he considered the betrayal of the hopes of ordinary Kenyans by the country’s postindependence leaders. First performed in 1977, its brilliant use of song helped the play to become an immediate popular hit across Kenya, leading to a government ban and the persecution of the authors which, eventually, forced wa Miiri into exile in Zimbabwe.

There, over the course of two decades, Ngugi wa Mirii was a pioneering force in community theatre, founding a national organisation, which supported more than 300 theatre groups across the country. While his focus remained pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist, his concept of theatre was always rooted in the concerns of ordinary people, and his work played an important role in raising popular consciousness of womens’ rights and the dangers of HIV/Aids. … Read full obituary

December 23, 1916 - June 7, 2008

There is a brief but telling scene in Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962) that encapsulates his vision as a film-maker. In it, Vittorio Gassman’s playboy parks his racer illegally, and then casually tucks under the windscreen wiper the parking ticket from a neighbouring car so as to avoid getting a fine himself.

The gesture’s mix of elegance, bravado and cunning are for Risi both the best and worst of his fellow Italians’ characteristics, and emblematic too of the country’s postwar transformation from the values of a traditional society to those of consumerism.

This theme supplied the material for the most successful of his 50-odd films, and customarily led Risi to be hailed as one of the chief creators, both as director and screenwriter, of the commedia all’italiana, at once funny and tragic. … Read full obituary

Bob Anderson, who played the young George Bailey in the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” has died. He was 75.

Anderson died Friday of cancer at his home in Palm Springs, his wife, Victoria, said Saturday. …

He was 7 when he appeared in the 1940 Shirley Temple film “Young People” and went on to play roles in such films as 1945’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”

But he was best known for his role as the young Bailey in Frank Capra’s 1946 “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the same character portrayed in adulthood by James Stewart. In one scene, the story called for him to spot a potentially fatal error made by a drunken druggist, played by H.B. Warner.

Warner took the role seriously and on the day of shooting had been drinking and was “pretty ripe,” Victoria Anderson said. … Read full obituary

Mel Ferrer, the tall, darkly handsome star of such classic films as “Lili,” “War and Peace” and “The Sun Also Rises,” as well as producer and director of movies starring his then-wife, Audrey Hepburn, died Monday at age 90.

Ferrer died at a Santa Barbara, California, convalescent home, his son Mark Ferrer said Tuesday. He had been in failing health for the past six months and had recently moved to the home from his nearby ranch in Carpinteria, his son said.

Ferrer’s most impressive film role came in 1953 in “Lili.” He played a disabled carnival puppeteer with whom a French orphan (played by Leslie Caron) falls in love.

In later years, he turned more to directing and producing for movies and TV. …

Ferrer … produced one of Hepburn’s greatest film triumphs, 1967’s “Wait Until Dark,” a thriller in which she portrays a blind woman terrorized by drug dealers who break into her home. … Read full obituary