Farewell to Una Stubbs

 She was Mrs Hudson in Sherlock, Aunt Sally in Worzel Gummidge, Alf Garnett's daughter in Till Death Us Do Part, and Cliff Richard's girlfriend in Summer Holiday.  She danced with Lionel Blair's ensemble in the 1960s, and I remember her appearing on Cliff Richard's TV show in the 1970s.  She was also the team captain opposite Lionel Blair in the game show Give Us a Clue.  I've even heard her in a Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama, The Horror of Glam Rock, alongside the 8th Doctor Paul McGann and his audio companion Lucie Miller!

Here she is in Summer Holiday.

That's a long and varied career, including several well loved characters, so I was sorry to hear today that Una Stubbs has died, aged 84.

Goodbye to Craig Sterling

 On the one hand, there has been some very good news today, with the announcement of a second season of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman.

On the other hand, Stuart Damon has died.  He was, of course, one of The Champions. 

Here they are in the title sequence, supposedly in Geneva where Nemesis headquarters was (it was actually an office block in a place called Whetstone, in the UK).  He did some of his best acting in the episode The Interrogation, where Craig is questioned because his special powers have made him too successful as a secret agent.

Damaris Hayman, the White Witch of Devil's End

 I was sorry to see the obituary of Damaris Hayman, who has died at the age of 91, in the Guardian today.  It was written by Toby Hadoke, so mentioned her appearance as Miss Hawthorne, the white witch of Devil's End in The Daemons, one of the most fun Doctor Who stories from the Jon Pertwee era:

In later years, she also starred in a series of short stories on DVD about the character, collected as The Daemons of Devil's End.

There was a lot more to her career than that, of course - from British films of the 1950s right through to TV comedy in the 1980s.  Here she is looking glamorous with Les Dawson:

Goodbye Manolito

 I just heard that Henry Darrow has died, aged 87 - and it's only now, looking at his Wikipedia entry, that I discovered that his ancestry was Puerto Rican.

He was a familiar face on TV when I was younger, often playing Latino or Native American characters - there was a TV movie called Brock's Last Case where Richard Widmark retired from being a police detective and started running an orange grove in California, for instance, assisted by Henry Darrow's character (who I think was accused of murder, bringing Richard Widmark out of retirement to clear his name).   He also appeared briefly in The Invisible Man (starring David McCallum), and a host of other popular series of the 1970s.

He appeared in Star Trek TNG as a Starfleet Admiral whose body had been taken over by maggot eating aliens, and also as Chakotay's dad in Voyager.

But I liked him best as Manolito Montoya in the High Chapparal.  I always did like the roguish bad boys with a heart of gold.

"We are all Star Stuff" Delenn Goes Home

 

Mira Furlan, who played  Minbari Ambassador Delenn in Babylon 5, has just died at the age of 65.

She had only been in the US for two years when she got the part of Delenn, having emigrated from the former Yugoslavia with her husband.  She was born in Croatia, and her husband Goran, who survives her, was Serbian.  They have a son called Marko.  

War had broken out in Yugoslavia when they left.  Mira had been part of a travelling theatre company which crossed borders to perform despite receiving death threats from both sides of the civil war.  When asked about it she said: "What's the worst that could have happened?  Yes, they could have killed me.  So what?  Art should have no borders."

Her official Twitter account announced the news of her death with a quotation from Mira:

"I look at the stars.  It's a clear night and the Milky Way seems so near.  That's where I'll be going soon.  "We're all star stuff",  I suddenly remember Delenn's line from Joe's script.  

Not a bad prospect.  I am not afraid.

In the meantime, let me close my eyes and sense the beauty around me.  And take that breath under the dark sky full of stars.

Breathe in.  Breathe out.

That's all."

Farewell, Edward of Wickham

 Most people will think of Jeremy Bulloch in his role as Boba Fett, but I remember him best as the leader of the village of Wickham and ally of the outlaws in Robin of Sherwood.

He's just died, aged75.

His son Robbie played Edward's son Matthew of Wickham.

He also appeared in Doctor Who - in the Time Warriors (the story that introduced Sarah Jane Smith) and, even earlier, in The Space Museum with the First Doctor. 

Sean Connery has Died

 

He wasn't just Bond, of course. 

He starred in some of my favourite films, including Robin and Marion, The Name of the Rose, and The Man Who Would be King with Michael Caine. 

He was Spanish in Highlander, Irish-American in The Untouchables, and Russian in The Hunt for Red October (and he'd been Russian before, in Anna Karenina for the BBC).    

He was Indiana Jones' dad. 

He sang in Darby O'Gill and the Little People. 

He wore high boots and a red loincloth (and not a lot else) in Zardoz.

He had a fight on the roof of a steam train carriage in The First Great Train Robbery.

He was a cop in space in Outland, a prisoner in a military prison in The Hill, and a truck driver in The Hell Drivers.

That's quite a range for an actor who will mostly be remembered as James Bond.

Dame Diana Rigg has Died

 

This is how I best remember her, as Emma Peel in the Avengers.  I wanted to be like her, when I was six.

But she was a brilliant actress in so many roles - the only Bond girl to marry Bond (just a pity it was George Lazenby - and that she died just after the wedding), a nun in In This House of Brede, and Mrs Bradley in The Mrs Bradley Mysteries, for instance.

More recently, she played the villain in the Doctor Who episode The Crimson Horror, which had been specially written for her and her daughter Rachel Stirling by Mark Gatiss, and of course she was the Queen of Thorns, Oleanna Tyrell, in Game of Thrones.

She did Shakespeare, and the Morecambe and Wise Show, and she will shortly be seen in the new series of All Creatures Great and Small (returning to her native Yorkshire) and as another nun, Mother Dorothea, in Black Narcissus.

I was lucky enough to hear her rehearsing, once.  I was on a coach tour in Scotland with my gran, and we were looking round the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling.  Diana Rigg was in the pulpit, rehearsing a speech - there was no mistaking the voice.  I was thrilled, and wanted to stay to listen, but my gran wasn't terribly sure who Diana Rigg was, and wanted to go and have a cup of tea before we had to get back to the coach.  I see from her Wikipedia page that she had an honorary degree from the University of Stirling, where she was also Chancellor for a time.

She also collected a book of theatrical reviews called No Turn Unstoned.

I know what I'll be watching later this evening....

Wakanda Forever!

 The King is dead.

I woke up this morning to the shocking news that Chadwick Boseman has died of colon cancer.  He was only 43.

He was an impressive lead in the film Black Panther, and part of the ensemble cast in other Marvel movies - and T'Challa is the only role I know him from.  He also played James Brown and Jackie Robinson, a black baseball player who was the first to play in the Major League  (I know nothing about baseball).

He was also a writer and director.

Olivia de Havilland, Screen Legend

She was the last of the great stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and her most famous roles have her looking serene and beautiful in period costume, such as Gone With the Wind, above, and The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn (who once said that his ideal woman was a mix of Olivia de Havilland and various dusky maidens....). She co-starred with Errol Flynn several times - including the Western Dodge City, and she first appeared with Errol Flynn in Captain Blood:

Another early film role was as Helena in the Hollywood version of Midsummer Night's Dream.

But she wasn't always glamorous on screen - another famous role was as the star of The Snake Pit, where her character was in a mental asylum:

Off screen, she challenged Warner Brothers in a lawsuit over her contract with the studio, (they wanted to add to the original seven year contract) and won. The ruling is still called the De Havilland Law.

On TV, she appeared in Roots: The Next Generations as Mrs Warner, the wife of a former Confederate officer played by Henry Fonda (I'd completely forgotten this until I looked it up - I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the white characters when I watched the series).
I did know she was related to the de Havillands who built aeroplanes - the founder of the de Havilland aircraft company was her cousin.
She died at her home in Paris, aged 104.

John Saxon has died

John Saxon appeared in all sorts of TV programmes when I was young and square-eyed. I started noticing that a show or a film might be low budget but he would always be good in it. I particularly remember Planet Earth, a pilot for a series that never happened, with a cast made up of many actors who had worked with Gene Roddenberry (who wrote it) before.

And then there was Enter the Dragon, where he was one of Bruce Lee's rival martial artists.

He was 83, and died of pneumonia.

Earl Cameron, Actor

I just heard that Earl Cameron has died, at the age of 102. He came to the UK from Bermuda as a sailor, at the beginning of the Second World War, and quickly became involved with the London stage. He went on to have a film and TV career which included Doctor Who. In The Tenth Planet he was the first black actor on film or TV to play an astronaut.

He also read Brer Rabbit stories for Jackanory, and appeared in Thunderball with Sean Connery, which gives an idea of the range of parts he played.
The Earl Cameron Theatre in Hamilton, Bermuda, is named after him.

Bilbo Baggins has Sailed into the West

I was sorry to hear of the death of Sir Ian Holm, aged 88. His death was related to Parkinson's disease.

For me he was the perfect Frodo Baggins, in the BBC radio series of Lord of the Rings, and he was also the perfect Bilbo Baggins in the Peter Jackson films.
But there was far more to his career than that - I think I first became aware of him as an actor in Jesus of Nazareth in the mid 1970s, where he played one of the Sadducees.
He also had a busy and varied film career. He played Ash in the first Alien film, Jonathan Pryce's boss in Brazil, King John in Robin and Marion, and many more. His last film role was as the older Bilbo in The Battle of Five Armies, in 2014.
He did a lot of Shakespeare on stage and on film, including Polonius in Mel Gibson's film of Hamlet and Fluellen in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V.
He was knighted in 1998 for his services to drama.
He was married four times, and had five children.

Norman Florence's Acting Career

I was watching another episode of The Saint, The Set Up - it's 1965 and involves an unusually brutal mail van robbery. There are fist fights in The Saint every week, and Simon does get knocked out rather a lot, but one of the bad guys in this episode was shooting people all over the place.
And another member of the gang of robbers was a certain Norman Florence.
In Hay, Norman Florence (or Flo, as he was usually known), was best known for having the original idea that became Hay Festival, now an international concern run by his son Peter. I knew he had been an actor, but I hadn't noticed him appearing in anything until last night.
When I looked up his acting career, I saw that he had also appeared (well down the cast list) in one of my favourite episodes of The Champions, The Iron Man, in which Craig, Richard and Sharon are sent to protect a South American dictator in exile from being murdered.
He did quite a lot of TV work in the 1960s, including two other episodes of The Saint and one other episode of The Champions. Several of his characters seem to have been called Carlo, or some other vaguely Mediterranean name - he also seemed to play quite a few policemen, and he was Tony Marchesi in the series Compact, which was a soap opera set in the offices of a glossy women's magazine. He was also in Redcap, with a young John Thaw. The last acting credit in his IMDb entry is for Doomwatch in 1971.
In the 1970s he went into theatre management, working with Sam Wanamaker on the Globe project, and coming to Wales with Theatr Ym Ymylon, a bilingual theatre group - and he happened to settle just outside Hay....

Earl Cameron, actor

BBC Two have shared a short video of the actor Earl Cameron speaking about his life. He's just over 100 years old, and in 1951 he was the first black man to star in a post-war British film (Paul Robeson, Elisabeth Welch and Nina Mae McKinney had all starred in the 1930s). The film was Pool of London, and he played a sailor who got involved with a local white girl.

He also played the astronaut in the 1966 Doctor Who story The Tenth Planet. It had always impressed me that a black actor had been chosen to play the astronaut, and I never imagined he was still alive now.
He's had a varied career on stage, film and TV, appearing in Tarzan and Bond films, and many British TV series.

Peter Wyngarde has died

Here he is in his heyday, back in the late 1960s and early 70s, when he played Jason King in Department S and later his own spin off series Jason King. The character was a flamboyant author and spy, and quite frankly the two other leads in Department S were completely forgettable. I recently re-watched some episodes on DVD, not having seen any since they were on TV, and had no memory of them at all. And although he was portraying a notorious ladies' man, he was in a long term relationship with fellow actor Alan Bates. One of his first leading roles was in South, the first gay drama on British TV, in 1959.
Peter Wyngarde was 90 when he died, a couple of days ago, having been unwell for some time. Or at least, he was possibly 90, as there is some dispute about his date of birth, and place of birth, and even his parentage. I do remember seeing him giving an interview in which he described being interned by the Japanese as a child in Shanghai during the Second World War, where he said his father was a diplomat.
Before he co-starred in Department S, he was a guest on several British TV series, including the Saint, the Champions, the Avengers and the Prisoner. In the Saint, he was supposed to be Turkish, and had to wear blackface, something he said he was uneasy about - but had hoped to be cast as Othello if he did it! In the Avengers, he was the leader of the Hellfire Club, who menaced Emma Peel. Later, he also appeared in Doctor Who - I think he was Turlough's uncle, or something. The story was Planet of Fire, when Turlough returned to his home planet.
He also appeared as the King in The King and I on stage - which must have been quite a different portrayal of the role from Yul Brynner's.

Goodbye, Mr Rodney

Very sad to hear that Rodney Bewes has just died. He was 79.
Most people seem to be remembering him for The Likely Lads, but I first knew him as Mr Rodney, human sidekick to Basil Brush, trying to be sensible, and reading Basil de Farmer, the Man in Shining Armour in instalments at the end of each show.

In more recent years, he toured a one man show about Three Men in a Boat, which came to local Theatr Brycheiniog.

Roy Dotrice, RIP

Sorry to hear that Roy Dotrice has died. He was 94.

I remember him first as Father in Beauty and the Beast - the wise, kind older man who held the underground community together.

Later, he played a much more unpleasant father - Wesley's dad in Angel:

And of course he was in Hellboy, with Ron Perlman again.

On stage, he was part of the RSC at a time when many great names were gracing the boards there, including Laurence Olivier, Peter O'Toole and Paul Robeson.

Born on the island of Guernsey, he escaped with this brother and mother at the beginning of the Second World War, and joined the RAF as a wireless operator and air gunner - and ended up in a POW camp after being shot down. After the War, he began his acting career, and was still going strong quite recently, with a small part in Game of Thrones, for which he also read the audio books.

RIP John Hurt

A wonderful actor - he'll be fondly remembered as the War Doctor, The Naked Civil Servant, The Elephant Man, and many more. He was the voice of Aragorn in the 1970s Lord of the Rings cartoon, and driven mad by the Crystal Skulls in that Indiana Jones film no-one talks about.
On Twitter, all sorts of people are saying what a wonderful person he was off-screen as well.

Debbie Reynolds

I've just been watching the "Good Morning!" clip from Singing in the Rain. What talented people they were - Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelly, all tap dancing together.
They don't make films like that any more!
It's nice that the first thing people are thinking of in tribute to Debbie Reynolds is such a cheerful song.