Dead Celebrity Alert

Actor who was an energetic champion of Gaelic culture in Scotland

The actor Simon MacKenzie was best known for his leading role in the long-running Gaelic television soap, Machair, in which he played the dignified head of a further education college.

He had been a BBC broadcaster on the Gaelic radio news services and went on to become Scotland’s most prolific Gaelic arts activist, appearing almost constantly in films, videos, plays and live events for nearly 30 years. …

He is survived by his long-term partner, Charlie Curran.

Simon MacKenzie, actor and activist for the Gaelic culture, was born on December 4, 1949. He died of cancer on April 8, 2008, aged 58 … Read full obituary

Czech film-maker, known for his skill on location work, whose worked was often themed around wartime Nazi attrocities

Jirí Sequens built a long and successful career as a film director by wedding the dictates of Fifties-style heroic social realism to the dramatic requirements of slick, engrossing action. His location-shot thrillers and war films culminated in Assassination (1964), a vivid widescreen re-creation — five years in preparation — of the wartime assassination in occupied Prague of Czechoslovakia’s brutal Nazi overlord Reinhard Heydrich and the ferocious reprisals that followed.

Born in Brno, he acted on stage and radio while still a student, graduating in 1946 from the drama department of Brno Conservatoire. He learnt film-making in Moscow under Eisenstein and Gerasimov, and following military service was stage manager at the E. F. Burian Theatre in Prague, then head of the State Film Theatre in Prague before writing and directing his first short film in 1949. His first feature, Happy Journey (1951), was a typical propaganda piece of that era about a young woman assisting in the collectivisation of private farms in her village. …

Jirí Sequens, writer-director, was born on April 23, 1922. He died on January 21, 2008, aged 85 … Read full obituary

Actor and communist who was mostly loyal to the East German regime

The stage, film and television actor Erwin Geschonneck was one of East Germany’s most popular performers. Brought up in poverty in Berlin, he became a Communist, endured exile during the 1930s purges in the Soviet Union, spent several years in Nazi concentration camps and was one of the few survivors when a ship containing thousands of former camp prisoners was bombed by the RAF at the end of the war.

After 1945, already in his forties, he built an acting career in first West, and then East, Germany, starring in Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble before defying Brecht to turn his attention to film. His relationship with the communist authorities in East Germany was turbulent. Communist loyalties led him to support the regime broadly and even collaborate with its secret police. But the films in which he starred sometimes fell foul of the censor in their challenges to idealised images of communist society. … Read full obituary

Israeli theater persona Nissan Native was found dead in his Tel Aviv apartment Sunday night. Native was named winner of the 2008 Israel Prize earlier this year. He was 86 years old.

Native was the founder of a renowned acting school, which held classes both in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Despite being widely considered the best acting school in Israel and producing some of the most acclaimed actors in Israel — such as Moshe Ivgi, Keren Mor and Tiki Dayan, to name a few — the school battled financial difficulties in the past few years and was on the verge of closing down. …

Native was the winner of the 1992 Tel Aviv Award for the Performing Arts and the 1999 Israeli Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award. … Read full obituary

Robin Moore’s subjects as a writer included Pope John Paul II and the notorious former call girl, Xaviera Hollander with whom he wrote The Happy Hooker. In 1969 he wrote the novel, The French Connection, on which the acclaimed film was based. …

For a time Moore settled down to run a smallholding in Jamaica while writing schlock paperbacks. But hankering for wilder action than mucking out pigs, he trained with the US Army’s Green Berets whose Vietnam service yielded his multi-million selling The Green Berets (1965). This was further promoted by collaboration with an injured staff sergeant, Barry Sadler, on the rousingly patriotic song Ballad of the Green Berets in 1966. The Green Berets was made into a film, starring John Wayne, in 1968. …

He is survived by his fifth wife, Helen, and by two daughters.

Robin Moore, writer, was born on October 31, 1925. He died on February 21, 2008, aged 82 … Read full obituary

A sexy star of “The Raven” and similar horror films has died

1 of Roger Corman’s so-called “scream queens” is gone.

Hazel Court died of a heart attack at age 82 at her home near Lake Tahoe, California.

1 of her most famous roles is in the 1963 film “The Raven.” Other films include “The Premature Burial,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Curse of Frankenstein” and “Devil Girl from Mars.” … Read full obituary

Cameron Diaz’s father passed away…

The elder Diaz, Emilio Diaz, was reportedly down with the flu that turned into pneumonia. His death was sudden and it came as a shock to everyone he knew as he was in good health.

Emilio Diaz was 58 years old and was a popular resident of Seal Beach, Calif. He was briefly seen starring alongside his daughter in the 1998 movie “There’s Something About Mary,” in which he appeared as “Jailbird.” … Read full obituary

Ollie Johnston, the last of the “Nine Old Men” who animated “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Fantasia,” “Bambi” and other classic Walt Disney films, died Monday. He was 95.

Johnston died of natural causes at a long-term care facility in Sequim, Washington, Walt Disney Studios Vice President Howard Green said Tuesday. …

Walt Disney lightheartedly dubbed his team of crack animators his “Nine Old Men,” borrowing the phrase from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s description of the U.S. Supreme Court’s members…

Perhaps the two most accomplished of the nine were Johnston and his close friend Frank Thomas, who died in 2004 at age 92. … Read full obituary

Widely remembered for his excessive corpulence on stage and television, Willoughby Goddard spent over 40 years never trying to disguise it. It brought him authority, variety, monotony and joy. Whether he was genial or aggressive, alarming or soothing, he could be cast in all sorts of moods. Sometimes he played up self-consciously to his weightiness; sometimes it hardly mattered. He could play judges, professors, mayors, landlords, managing directors and chairmen; he could also play sundry characters of no importance whatever. …

He was the the bulky Mr Holmes in Jack Roffey’s whodunnit, No Other Verdict (Duchess, 1954), and as the “massive vulgarian” Gowing in The Diary of a Nobody (Arts), six chapters of the book by George and Weedon Grossmith, Goddard was able to “talk to his hosts with conviction” in a show adapted by Basil Dean and Richard Blake.

On television he created first a fine impression as Professor Mark Harrison in The Voices; and in the Adventures of William Tell he put the shivers up watchers as the hero’s splendidly weighty main protagonist. … Read full obituary

In classic Hollywood fashion Guy McElwaine rose from the mail room at Paramount Pictures in the 1950s to become head of Columbia Pictures in the 1980s, overseeing such classics as Gandhi (1982) and Ghostbusters (1984).

During a varied career, he was Frank Sinatra’s publicist and Steven Spielberg’s agent and confidant, making the deals that secured artistic freedom and a fortune for the young director before his 30th birthday. He was a partner in the early days of International Creative Management (ICM), one of the biggest showbiz talent agencies in the world. …

Guy McElwaine, Hollywood executive, was born on June 29, 1936. He died of pancreatic cancer on April 2, 2008, aged 71 … Read full obituary

AP — 49 minutes ago — Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 83. … Yahoo! News full coverage, with links to various obituaries.

ATHENS (AFP) — Veteran US moviemaker Jules Dassin, who died Monday in Athens at the age of 96, was a film noir master who sought exile in Europe after being named during the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.

Dassin married the legendary Greek actress Melina Mercouri, joined her campaign for the return of Greece’s lost Parthenon marbles and was eventually awarded honorary Greek citizenship.

Born in Middletown, Connecticut in 1911, Dassin earned a reputation as an innovative director and was one of America’s hottest young filmmakers of the 1940s with films such as “Brute Force” (1947) and “Naked City” (1948).

But as an active Communist who never compromised on his beliefs, he was blacklisted at the height of the witch-hunts on leftists unleashed by Senator Joseph McCarthy. …

In 1960, Dassin made “Never on Sunday” a story about an American in Greece trying to save a kind-hearted prostitute.

The film won an Oscar for Best Song for composer Manos Hadjidakis, and is considered one of the finest movies ever made in Greece. …

More importantly for Dassin however, the film starred Melina Mercouri, one of Greece’s most adored actresses. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Abby Mann, writer of socially conscious scripts for movies and television and winner of the 1961 Academy Award for adapted screenplay for “Judgment at Nuremberg,” has died at 80.

Writers Guild of America spokesman Gregg Mitchell said Mann died Tuesday. The cause of death was not given.

Mann also won multiple Emmys, including one in 1973 for “The Marcus-Nelson Murders,” which created a maverick New York police detective named Theo Kojak. The film, starring Telly Savalas, was spun off into the long-running TV series “Kojak.”

In a career spanning more than 50 years as a writer, director and producer, Mann returned repeatedly to morally conscious themes, doing films for television on such subjects as Martin Luther King Jr., human rights advocate Simon Weisenthal and the Teamsters. … Read full obituary

Richard Widmark, who created a villain in his first movie role who was so repellent and frightening that the actor became a star overnight, died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 93.

His death was announced Wednesday morning by his wife, Susan Blanchard. She said that Mr. Widmark had fractured a vertebra in recent months and that his conditioned had worsened.

As Tommy Udo, a giggling, psychopathic killer in the 1947 gangster film “Kiss of Death,” Mr. Widmark tied up an old woman in a wheelchair (played by Mildred Dunnock) with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoved her down a flight of stairs to her death. …

Tommy Udo made the 32-year-old Mr. Widmark, who had been an established radio actor, an instant movie star, and he spent the next seven years playing a variety of flawed heroes and relentlessly anti-social mobsters in 20th Century Fox’s juiciest melodramas.

His mobsters were drenched in evil. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Bill Hayward, the associate producer of “Easy Rider,” has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 66.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Hayward shot himself in the heart with a handgun on March 9 in Castaic. The suicide occurred in the trailer where he was living.

Hayward was the son of agent Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan, all part of a Hollywood family whose talent and beauty was often outshone by its demons.

Sullavan and her daughter Bridget Hayward both died of drug overdoses in 1960. … Read full obituary