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.

Annette Brock Davis, Sailor

I came across a picture of the sailing barque L'Avenir:

The comments with the picture mentioned a Canadian woman called Annette Brock Davis who, in 1933, became an apprentice on the ship and learned to sail.
There were several hurdles she had to overcome that male apprentices did not, though. To start with, she had to pay double the amount that a male apprentice paid and her contract did not guarantee her a job at the end of the apprenticeship, as it did for the male apprentices. Also, she had to get her father's permission, even though she was 23.
By the end of the training voyage, though, she was offered the position of ordinary seaman with the Erikson Line, which owned the ship. This offer was withdrawn when they discovered that she had got married
She wrote about her experiences in My Year Before the Mast.

Trowelblazers: Dr Sada Mire

I'm still looking for British women archaeologists who are black. I haven't succeeded yet, but I have found someone with a local connection.

Dr Sada Mire was chosen by Hay Festival in 2017 as one of their Hay 30 international thinkers and writers. Onstage at the Festival she talked to Rageh Omaar and Mary Harper (who was the Africa Editor at the BBC World Service) on Somaliland: the African miracle you've never heard about. Also in 2017, New Scientist magazine chose her as one of their list of Inspiring Women in Science.
Dr Mire is the only working Somali archaeologist, and she is described in the programme notes as Swedish-Somali, as she was an asylum seeker who ended up in Sweden after fleeing Somalia with her twin sister Sohur as unaccompanied child refugees. Sohur went on to become a medical doctor. Their father was a police criminal investigator who was murdered when they were twelve.
She is an art historian as well as an archaeologist, and she is a visiting professor in the department of archaeology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. She also holds a PhD from UCL's Institute of Archaeology, London.
In 2007 she led a team of fifty people to Somaliland, where they discovered prehistoric rock art at almost one hundred locations. At least ten of these are likely to receive World Heritage status, according to her Wikipedia entry.
As a result of her work on the rock art, she founded the Horn Heritage, a non-profit organisation to fund her work. She was also involved with the establishment of Somalia's Department of Tourism and Archaeology. She is also active in campaigns to protect Somali archaeological sites from looting and destruction.
Her latest book came out this year, and is called Divine Fertility: the continuity in transformation of an Ideology of Sacred Kinship in North-East Africa.

Trowelblazers: Tabitha Kabora

I found it quite difficult to find details about any black British women archaeologists. American women archaeologists are much easier to find online - Black archaeologists in the United States have formed the Society of Black Archaeologists, but there's no similar body in the UK.
Then I found an article about a seminar on racism in archaeology, and the chair of the debate was Tabitha Kabora.
Dr. Kabora did her doctoral thesis at the University of York on the utility of the long-term perspectives of archaeological and environmental studies, in order to understand the effects of human-environment interactions on agricultural systems. Her research formed part of the Archaeology of Agricultural Resilience in Eastern Africa Project (AAREA).
Her BSc and MSc degrees were from the University of Nairobi, in Environmental Sciences and Conservation Biology. So she's actually Kenyan, and came to the UK for further study.
At the moment she's working on the Europe's Lost Frontiers project while employed by the University of Bradford as an Environmental Modelling Research Assistant. Her work is on Doggerland, the sunken area in the North Sea which used to be a land bridge between the British Isles and the Continent. She has been developing palaeo-ecological models of Doggerland during the early Holocene period to incorporate into computer simulations.

Roma Archaeologists: John Henry Phillips

I was following a Twitter conversation the other day about types of racism, prompted by the Black Lives Matter campaign. Someone mentioned an academic journal in which an article stated that there were no Roma archaeologists. At least three Roma archaeologists commented on the thread, so there are probably more out there.

This is John Henry Phillips, who specialises in Second World War archaeology, though he's also dug on sites of many different periods across Europe. He appeared in the TV documentary No Roses for a Sailor's Grave, and has been a guest on various BBC programmes. He's also a diver.