Ronnie Barker.

Perhaps not so well known in the States, but he was a legend in the UK.

You know, I was thinking...this thread has turned into a report system for whoever has recently died, but the original intent was to start a non-monied dead pool.  I was thinking of adding the incentive of cash.  Maybe we can all donate a dollar to a paypal account with each guess as to who will go next, and whoever wins gets the pool.  No wins - the pool keeps going.

Any idea how we can make this viable?  Any foreseeable problems?

smilin_buddha_joe,Oct 24 2005, 08:32 AM wrote:

'Porky' from 'Our Gang' dead at 71

Friday, October 21, 2005; Posted: 43 p.m. EDT (20:03 GMT)

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota (AP) -- Gordon Lee, the chubby child actor who played Spanky McFarland's little brother, "Porky," in "Little Rascals" comedies, has died. He was 71.

Lee died Sunday in a Minneapolis nursing home after battling lung and brain cancer, said Janice McClain, his partner of 13 years.

Lee played one of the younger members in the "Our Gang" shorts in the 1930s, appearing in more than 40 of them from 1935 to 1939. The comedies, produced by Hal Roach, became known as "The Little Rascals" when shown on TV in the 1950s.

Among the films Lee appeared in were "Bored of Education," which won the Oscar for best one-reel short subject in 1937; "Our Gang Follies of 1936"; "The Awful Tooth"; and "Roamin' Holiday."

In a 1998 interview with the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, the Texas-born Lee said he was 2 years old when his mother sent his picture to studio executives who were seeking an actor to play McFarland's brother.

"We were on the next train to L.A. and I had a contract within a few days," Lee said. "Fat kid got lucky."

"My memories are not about making movies. We played with our toys and the adults played with theirs (the cameras)," he said.

He and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas teamed up against older boys Spanky and Alfalfa in many of the comedies. The Porky character is credited with originating the catchphrase "otay."

In the interview, Lee recalled a warm friendship with his black costar when they were kids and praised their interracial relationship on screen, saying, "Buckwheat played an absolute equal part in the Gang."

Lee told friends his career ended when a growth spurt made him thinner. "They wanted Porky to be a chunky fellow, so they looked for someone else," McClain said.

He was born Eugene Lee in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1933. His adoptive parents began calling him Gordon after Gordon Douglas, who directed many of the films Lee appeared in. He kept the first name as an adult.

Lee was a schoolteacher, living in Colorado for a time. He moved to Minnesota after he retired to be closer to his only son, Douglas, said a friend, Tracy Tolzmann. In recent years, Lee sold autographed photos of himself as Porky, Tolzmann and McClain said.

"Before that he felt like he was forgotten," McClain said. "It really made him feel good about himself."

© CNN

[snapback]73616[/snapback]

Bandleader Skitch Henderson dies at 87
New York Pops founder was first ‘Tonight Show’ bandleader

Updated: 12:40 a.m. ET Nov. 2, 2005

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Skitch Henderson, the Grammy-winning conductor who lent his musical expertise to Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby before founding the New York Pops and becoming the first “Tonight Show” bandleader, died Monday. He was 87.

Henderson died at his home in New Milford of natural causes, said Barbara Burnside, director of marketing and public relations at New Milford Hospital.

Born in England, Lyle Russell Cedric Henderson moved to the United States in the 1930s, eking out a living as a pianist, playing vaudeville and movie music in Minnesota and Montana roadhouses.

He got his big break in 1937, when he filled in for a sick pianist touring with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. When the tour wrapped up in Chicago, he used the original pianist’s ticket and went to Hollywood.

There he joined the music department at MGM and played piano for Bob Hope’s “The Pepsodent Show.” His friendship with Hope put him in touch with other stars of the day, including Crosby, who became a mentor to Henderson.

He studied with the noted composer Arnold Schoenberg, and Henderson’s talented ear brought him renown from some of the era’s most successful musicians.

“I could sketch out a score in different keys, a new way each time,” Henderson said earlier this year.

That quicksilver ability earned him the nickname “the sketch kid,” which Crosby urged him to adapt to “Skitch.” It stuck.

Wartime pilot
During World War II, Henderson flew for both the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Corps. At his estate in New Milford, which he shared with his wife, Ruth, Henderson kept a collection of aviation memorabilia. Even at 87, he had said he hoped to fly the Atlantic once more.

After the war, Henderson toured as Sinatra’s musical director and lived what he called a “gypsy lifestyle,” touring the country with various bands. It was Sinatra’s phone call that lured Henderson to New York.

“Frank said, ’I’m moving the “Lucky Strike Show” to New York. Get rid of those gypsies and get back here where you belong,”’ Henderson recalled in 1985.

He served as musical director for the “Lucky Strike” radio show and “The Philco Hour” with Crosby. And when NBC moved to television, the studio brought Henderson along as musical director.

In 1954, NBC pegged him as the bandleader for Steve Allen’s “Tonight Show,” which brought Henderson into the nation’s living rooms every night. Even as the hosts changed from Allen to Jack Paar to Johnny Carson, Henderson was a constant.

‘Music that’s accessible’
He founded the New York Pops in 1983, using popular tunes to make orchestral music exciting.

“People come to hear music that’s accessible to them — old songs that are powerful and don’t go away,” he said.

Even in his late 80s, Henderson maintained a tireless work schedule as music director for the Pops, where he regularly served as conductor. He also was a frequent guest conductor at a number of orchestras around the world.

“I watch the public like a hawk. If I see boredom, I worry,” Henderson said. “You can tell by the applause: There’s perfunctory applause, there’s light applause, and then there’s real applause. When it’s right, applause sounds like vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce.”

speaking of showmen.....


Fayard Nicholas, of dancing duo, dead

Wednesday, January 25, 2006; Posted: 19 p.m. EST (18:09 GMT)


LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Fayard Nicholas, who with his brother Harold wowed the tap dancing world with their astonishing athleticism and inspired generations of dancers, from Fred Astaire to Savion Glover, has died. He was 91.

Nicholas died Tuesday at his home from pneumonia and other complications of a stroke, his son Tony Nicholas said.

"My dad put Heaven on hold and now they can begin the show," the younger Nicholas said Wednesday.

The Nicholas brothers were still boys when they were featured at New York's Cotton Club in 1932. Though young, they were billed as "The Show Stoppers!" And despite the racial hurdles facing black performers, they went on to Broadway, then Hollywood.

Astaire once told the brothers that the acrobatic elegance and synchronicity of their "Jumpin' Jive" dance sequence in "Stormy Weather" (1943) made it the greatest movie musical number he had ever seen. In the number, the brothers tap across music stands in an orchestra with the fearless exuberance of children stone-hopping across a pond. In the finale, they leap-frog seamlessly down a sweeping staircase.

The two were vaudeville brats who toured with their musician parents, Fayard stealing dance steps as they went along and teaching them to his brother, who was seven years younger.

"We were tap-dancers, but we put more style into it, more bodywork, instead of just footwork," Harold Nicholas recalled in a 1987 interview.

Harold, who died in 2000, once said of his older brother's dancing, "He was like a poet ... talking to you with his hands and feet."

Their dancing betrayed not only creative genius but the athletic marvel of what no one else would dare attempt.

Their trademark no-hands splits -- in which they not only went down but sprang back up again without using their hands for balance -- left film audiences wide-eyed. The legendary choreographer George Balanchine called it ballet, despite their lack of formal training.

"My brother and I used our whole bodies, our hands, our personalities and everything," Fayard Nicholas said in an interview last year. "We tried to make it classic. We called our type of dancing classical tap and we just hoped the audience liked it."

The great dancer and actor Gregory Hines, who died in 2003 at age 57, once said that if a film were ever made about their lives, the dance numbers would have to be computer-generated because nobody could duplicate them.

Fayard, born in 1914, and Harold, born in 1921, learned to dance watching vaudeville shows while their parents played in the pit orchestra.

"One day at the Standard Theater in Philadelphia, I looked onstage and I thought, 'They're having fun up there; I'd like to do something like that,' " Fayard recalled in a 1999 interview.

"We worked up an act called 'The Nicholas Kids,' and did it in the living room. Our father said: 'When you're dancing, don't look at your feet, look at the audience. You're not entertaining yourself, you're entertaining the audience.' "

The brothers were good enough by 1928 to debut in vaudeville. In 1932 they made their film debut in the short "Pie Pie Blackbird," and were booked at the Cotton Club, which became their base. They were allowed to mingle with the white celebrity patrons before going home to bed at 5 or 6 a.m. They would sleep until 3 p.m., when their daily tutoring began, then return to the club by chauffeur-driven limousine for the first show at midnight. Fayard was 18, Harold 11.

Movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn spotted them at the club and cast them in the Eddie Cantor musical "Kid Millions" (1934).

Their polished urbanity and classic good looks made them film stars despite the celluloid segregation that relegated them to non-speaking parts and dance sequences that could be easily cut for racially squeamish audiences in the South. They finally danced with a white star, Gene Kelly, in their last film together, "The Pirate" in 1948.

"If you were black, you experienced (prejudice)," Harold Nicholas once said. "It wasn't a real horrible thing for us; we went through it."

In later years, Harold did solo work in Europe, then returned to Broadway in "The Tap Dance Kid" and "Sophisticated Ladies" and to film in "Uptown Saturday Night" (1974). Fayard won a Tony award in 1989 for his choreography of "Black and Blue," and the brothers were awarded Kennedy Center Honors in 1991.

The two remained close throughout their lives, despite their different personalities. Fayard was known as the more outgoing of the two, the one whose optimism kept the act afloat. Harold was more withdrawn and introspective.

Both brothers had tumultuous personal lives. Harold admitted that his first marriage, to famed actress Dorothy Dandridge, collapsed because of his relentless womanizing. Dandridge, the first black woman nominated for a best-actress Oscar, died of a drug overdose in 1965 at 42.

In an interview for A & E's Biography in 1999, Fayard said wistfully, "I tried to be a good husband and father. ... I don't know what happened."

But he remained on good terms with his first wife, Geraldine, and by all accounts, had a long and happy marriage to his second wife, the late Barbara January. He married dancer Katherine Hopkins in 2000.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Amen to that. Rusty Frank knew him well.

'Grandpa Munster' Al Lewis Dies at 95


45 minutes ago

NEW YORK - Al Lewis, the cigar-chomping patriarch of "The Munsters" whose work as a basketball scout, restaurateur and political candidate never eclipsed his role as Grandpa from the television sitcom, died after years of failing health. He was 95.

Lewis, with his wife at his bedside, passed away Friday night, said Bernard White, program director at WBAI-FM, where the actor hosted a weekly radio program. White made the announcement on the air during the Saturday slot where Lewis usually appeared.

"To say that we will miss his generous, cantankerous, engaging spirit is a profound understatement," White said.

Lewis, sporting a somewhat cheesy Dracula outfit, became a pop culture icon playing the irascible father-in-law to Fred Gwynne's ever-bumbling Herman Munster on the 1964-66 television show. He was also one of the stars of another classic TV comedy, playing Officer Leo Schnauzer on "Car 54, Where Are You?"

But Lewis' life off the small screen ranged far beyond his acting antics. A former ballplayer at Thomas Jefferson High School, he achieved notoriety as a basketball talent scout familiar to coaching greats like Jerry Tarkanian and Red Auerbach.

He operated a successful Greenwich Village restaurant, Grandpa's, where he was a regular presence — chatting with customers, posing for pictures, signing autographs.

Just two years short of his 90th birthday, a ponytailed Lewis ran as the Green Party candidate against incumbent Gov. George Pataki. Lewis campaigned against draconian drug laws and the death penalty, while going to court in a losing battle to have his name appear on the ballot as "Grandpa Al Lewis."

He didn't defeat Pataki, but managed to collect more 52,000 votes.

Lewis was born Alexander Meister in upstate New York before his family moved to Brooklyn, where the 6-foot-1 teen began a lifelong love affair with basketball. He later became a vaudeville and circus performer, but his career didn't take off until television did the same.

Lewis, as Officer Schnauzer, played opposite Gwynne's Officer Francis Muldoon in "Car 54, Where Are You?" — a comedy about a Bronx police precinct that aired from 1961-63. One year later, the duo appeared together in "The Munsters," taking up residence at the fictional 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

The series, about a family of clueless creatures plunked down in middle America, was a success and ran through 1966. It forever locked Lewis in as the memorably twisted character; decades later, strangers would greet him on the street with shouts of "Grandpa!"

Unlike some television stars, Lewis never complained about getting typecast and made appearances in character for decades.

"Why would I mind?" he asked in a 1997 interview. "It pays my mortgage."

Lewis rarely slowed down, opening his restaurant and hosting his WBAI radio program. At one point during the '90s, he was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern radio show, once sending the shock jock diving for the delay button by leading an undeniably obscene chant against the     Federal Communications Commission.

He also popped up in a number of movies, including the acclaimed "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" and "Married to the Mob." Lewis reprised his role of Schnauzer in the movie remake of "Car 54," and appeared as a guest star on television shows such as "Taxi," "Green Acres" and "Lost in Space."

But in 2003, Lewis was hospitalized for an angioplasty. Complications during surgery led to an emergency bypass and the amputation of his right leg below the knee and all the toes on his left foot. Lewis spent the next month in a coma.

A year later, he was back offering his recollections of a seminal punk band on the DVD "Ramones Raw."

He is survived by his wife, Karen Ingenthron-Lewis, three sons and four grandchildren.

Can't believe no-one's mentioned this yet:

Don Knotts

and the dad from a Christmas Story

-----------------------------

Who's gonna be the third?????????

------------------

Such great actors.

Hell of a past couple of days-

<a href="http://www.filmbuffonline.com/InRemembrance/RichardFleischer.htm" target="_blank">Richard Fleischer</a>- Director of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Tora&#33; Tora&#33; Tora&#33; and Solyent Green.

Stanislaw Lem- Polish science-fiction writer, author of Solaris

Dan Curtis- creator of vampire soap opera Dark Shadows

&#39;Third Man&#39; Co-Star Alida Valli Dies
Saturday, April 22, 2006 86 PM EDT
The Associated Press

ROME (AP) — Alida Valli, one of Italy&#39;s great actresses who co-starred in the 1949 film "The Third Man" and Alfred Hitchcock&#39;s "The Paradine Case," died Saturday in Rome, the mayor&#39;s office said. No cause of death was given. She was 84.

Valli, born Alida von Altenburger, had a film career that spanned more than 60 years and worked with some of the greats of Italian cinema, including Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said Italian cinema had lost one of its most significant stars in the dark-haired beauty, who was often compared to Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman.

Valli, who was born in 1921 in Pula, in what is now Croatia, made her film debut in Italy in the mid-1930s but moved to Hollywood a decade later, where she appeared opposite Gregory Peck in Hitchcock&#39;s "The Paradine Case."

Two years later, in 1949, she got top female billing in Carol Reed&#39;s "The Third Man," the classic tale about the new world order of moral ambiguity, set in post-World War II Vienna.

After her brief sojourn in Hollywood, Valli returned to Italy, where she starred in Visconti&#39;s 1953 film "Senso" (Sense) and also appeared on stage.

<!--quoteo(post=79679:date=Apr 24 2006, 12&#58;58 PM:name=The Bubbler)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(The Bubbler &#064; Apr 24 2006, 12&#58;58 PM) [snapback]79679[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
Top film that. Really eccentric photography, with an equally eccentric soundtrack.

Andy

June Allyson, "perfect wife", dies at 88

LOS ANGELES -
June Allyson, the sunny, raspy-voiced "perfect wife" of James Stewart, Van Johnson and other movie heroes, has died, her daughter said Monday. She was 88.

Allyson died Saturday at her home in Ojai, with her husband of nearly 30 years, David Ashrow, at her side, Pamela Allyson Powell said. She died of pulmonary respiratory failure and acute bronchitis after a long illness.

During World War II, American GIs pinned up photos of Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable, but June Allyson was the girl they wanted to come home to. Petite, blond and alive with fresh-faced optimism, she seemed the ideal sweetheart and wife, supportive and unthreatening.

"I had the most wonderful last meeting with June at her house. ... We were such dear friends. I will miss her," said lifelong friend and fellow actress
Esther Williams.

Besides Ashrow and her children, she is survived by her brother, Dr. Arthur Peters, and her grandson, Richard Logan Powell.

A private family memorial will be held in Ojai. A day of remembrance will be scheduled in the fall, her daughter said.

Bruno Kirby&#33; He was only 57; it was leukiemia (sp).

What a shame...I love his work.