July 5, 2009...10:00+00:00Jul

IN REMEMBRANCE: 7-5-2009

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FAYETTE PINKNEY, SOULFUL SINGER WITH THE THREE DEGREES
 
Published: July 1, 2009
 
Fayette Pinkney, an original member of the Three Degrees who lent her strong, soulful voice to the 1970s hits “When Will I See You Again?” and “T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia),” the theme song of the television show “Soul Train,” died Saturday in Lansdale, Pa. She was 61.
 
July 1, 2009    

Fred Mott, Evening Standard, via Getty Images

Fayette Pinkney, left, with Sheila Ferguson and Valerie Holiday, members of the Three Degrees in its 1974 incarnation.

 

The death was confirmed by Abington Health Lansdale Hospital. The cause was acute respiratory failure, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
 
The Three Degrees formed in the early 1960s when Ms. Pinkney, who was still going to Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, joined with Shirley Porter and Linda Turner under the management of Richard Barrett, the record producer behind the Chantels and Little Anthony and the Imperials.
 
For more than a decade, Ms. Pinkney was the one constant in a group whose members came and went. She sang on the group’s first single, “Gee Baby (I’m Sorry),” on its 1970 hit “Maybe” and on the hits for Philadelphia International Records in the 1970s that helped the define the Philadelphia sound.
 
In a statement, Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, the label’s founders, called the Three Degrees “our Philly sound version of Motown’s Supremes, but bigger and stronger and melodic.”
 
The group’s first two singles for Philadelphia International, “Dirty Ol’ Man” and “I Didn’t Know,” were modest successes, but “T.S.O.P.,” a mostly instrumental piece featuring the studio band MFSB, reached No. 1 on both the R&B and pop charts in 1974. “When Will I See You Again?,” which sold more than two million records, reached No. 2 on the pop charts that year.
 
Their close-harmony singing made the Three Degrees a popular nightclub act. The group performed with Engelbert Humperdinck at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas; a performance at the Copacabana in Manhattan ended up in the 1971 film “The French Connection.”
 
After leaving the Three Degrees and recording a solo album, “One Degree,” in 1979, Ms. Pinkney studied psychology at Temple University and earned a master’s in human services at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1985. She began working as an administrative assistant for the Medical College of Pennsylvania and rose to become an education coordinator there. She later counseled incoming patients at United Behavioral Health in Philadelphia.
 
She is survived by a brother, Nathaniel.
 
Ms. Pinkney continued to sing. “I travel with a unique group called the Intermezzo Choir Ministry,” she told the Web site thethreedegrees.com. “Yes, I do still love people and I love to make them smile.”
 
  
Godspeed, Fayette. Your voice was so sublime and beautiful. You and Sheila and Valerie gave your fans so much wonderful music that will stand the test of time.
  
Rest in peace, Fayette.
  
Rest in peace.
  
  
  
  
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KARL MALDEN, THE ACTOR WHO PLAYED THE UNCOMMON EVERYDAY MAN
 
Warner Bros., via Photofest

Karl Malden with Vivien Leigh in “Streetcar Named Desire” in 1951. More Photos >

Published: July 1, 2009
Karl Malden, the Academy Award-winning character actor who for more than 60 years brought an intelligent intensity and a homespun authenticity to roles in theater, film and television, from “A Streetcar Named Desire” to “The Streets of San Francisco,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 97.
 
 
July 1, 2009    
Karl Malden, Everyman Actor, Dies at 97

Everett Collection

Karl Malden, left, and his partner, played by Richard Hatch, gathered information in “The Streets of San Francisco.” More Photos »

 

 

His family announced his death to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which Mr. Malden served as president from 1989 to 1992. The announcement said family members were present when he died of natural causes in his home in the Brentwood section.
 
Mr. Malden was perhaps the ideal Everyman. He realized early on that he lacked the physical attributes of a leading man; he often joked about his blunt features, particularly his crooked, bulbous nose, which he had broken several times while playing basketball in school. But he was, he once said, determined “to be No. 1 in the No. 2 parts I was destined to get.”
 
He wound up playing everything from a whiskey-swigging cowboy to a prison warden, from an Army drill sergeant to the combative priest opposite Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.”
 
On Broadway he appeared with Mr. Brando in a legendary production of Tennessee Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire,” then repeated the role in a film version that brought him an Oscar. On film he won memorable parts in a host of other major productions, including “Ruby Gentry,” “Fear Strikes Out” and “Patton,” in which he played Gen. Omar Bradley.
 
On television, too, he found wide popularity — as the gruff Lt. Mike Stone in “The Streets of San Francisco” and as a long-running pitchman for American Express travelers’ checks in the 1970s. His signature line, “Don’t leave home without them” — delivered as he peered intently from under the brim of his “San Francisco” fedora — became a national catch phrase.
 
Mr. Malden’s Broadway career began in 1937 with a small part in “Golden Boy,” the Clifford Odets drama about a doomed prizefighter; it reached its peak a decade later, in 1947, when he appeared in two major plays, both directed by Elia Kazan.
 
He began the year in “All My Sons,” Arthur Miller’s searing drama about a profiteering manufacturer (played by Ed Begley) who sells faulty parts to the Army during World War II and then pins the blame on his partner. Mr. Malden played the partner’s disillusioned son. It was Mr. Miller’s first Broadway hit and a triumph for Mr. Kazan and the cast.
 
A few months later, Mr. Malden won a plum role in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The production made a star of Mr. Brando, who created the role of the brooding, hard-drinking mechanic Stanley Kowalski. The cast also included Kim Hunter as Stella, Stanley’s long-suffering wife, and Jessica Tandy as Stella’s fragile, haunted sister, Blanche DuBois. Mr. Malden played Mitch, Blanche’s hopelessly inept suitor.
 
The production won rave reviews and Mr. Malden, Mr. Brando and Ms. Hunter repeated their roles in the 1951 film version, also directed by Mr. Kazan, with Vivien Leigh as Blanche. Mr. Malden’s performance brought him an Academy Award as best supporting actor.
 
Three years later, he received an Oscar nomination for his role as a militant priest in “On the Waterfront,” Budd Schulberg’s drama of dockside brutality. Again, Mr. Kazan directed and Mr. Brando starred, as a battered former prizefighter persuaded to oppose the venal leadership of the longshoremen’s union.
 
Mr. Malden continued performing on the stage in Broadway revivals of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” with John Garfield and Mildred Dunnock, and Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” in which he starred as the flinty patriarch of a hardscrabble New England farm.
 
In 1957 he played the lead role in “The Egghead,” a drama by Mr. Kazan’s wife, Molly, about a liberal professor who defends a former student charged with Communist sympathies. Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, was cool to what he saw as a strained thesis play, but he lauded “one of those excellent Malden performances in which thoughtful timing, the poised stance, the inquiring look into the faces of other actors yield a winning impression of homeliness and sincerity.”
 
When “The Egghead” closed after only 21 performances, Mr. Malden turned to films. For a while he shuttled between New York and Hollywood, but finally, after co-starring with Mr. Brando in the 1961 western “One-Eyed Jacks,” he bought a house in Los Angeles and moved west with his wife, Mona, and two daughters, Mila and Carla.
 
In December, the couple celebrated their 70th anniversary. In addition to his wife, Mr. Malden is survived by his daughters as well as three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
 
He was born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago on March 22, 1912. His father, Petar Sekulovich, was a Serbian immigrant who worked in a steel mill and later delivered milk; his mother, the former Minnie Sebera, came from Bohemia, later to become part of the Czech Republic. As a young man, Mladen helped his father deliver milk in Gary, Ind., and spent three years working in a steel mill.
 
At 22, having acquired a taste for the theater and determined to make his own life far from the mills, he set off for Chicago with a few hundred dollars in savings to study acting at the Goodman Theater. He earned tuition by building sets and eventually met the woman he would marry, an aspiring actress named Mona Greenberg.
 
He graduated from the Goodman in 1937 but found himself back in Gary driving a milk truck, much as his father had. Luck came along in a letter from Robert Ardrey, a playwright he had met at the Goodman. Mr. Ardrey invited him to New York to try out for a part in his latest play. That play was never produced, but Mr. Malden also auditioned for the director Harold Clurman and Mr. Kazan, who were casting “Golden Boy” for the Group Theater. He wound up with “four lines in the third act,” he later wrote, but it was a significant initiation.
 
The Group Theater and “Golden Boy” began an enduring friendship between Mr. Malden and Mr. Kazan. It was Mr. Kazan, in fact, who persuaded the young actor to change his name to something less daunting. So Mladen became Malden, and he took the name Karl from one of his grandfathers.
 
He also took classes with the Group Theater in the early 1940s and later with the Actors Studio, but he did not regard himself as one of the studio’s Method actors. “I do have a method, of course,” he wrote in his 1997 autobiography, “When Do I Start?” He said it was “any method that works.”
 
After serving in the Army in World War II, Mr. Malden played a drunken sailor in a Clurman and Kazan production of Maxwell Anderson’s 1946 play “Truckline Cafe.”
 
The play was a flop, but Mr. Malden got good notices. The reviews also took note of another young actor who had made the most of a small role: Mr. Brando. The two actors became friends, and little more than a year later, they and Mr. Kazan collaborated on “Streetcar.”
 
 
July 1, 2009    

Mike Blake/Reuters

Karl Malden at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2004. More Photos >

Associated Press

Karl Malden, a former steelworker who won an Oscar for his role as Mitch in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” More Photos >

 

 

Mr. Malden had made a handful of movies before “Streetcar,” including “Kiss of Death” (1947), “The Gunfighter” (1950) and “Halls of Montezuma” (1950). But his Oscar-winning performance in “Streetcar” made Mr. Malden one of Hollywood’s leading character actors.
 
He went on to portray the wealthy man Jennifer Jones marries to spite Charlton Heston in “Ruby Gentry” (1952); the policeman in Alfred Hitchcock’s “I Confess” (1953); and the slow-witted husband of a child bride in “Baby Doll” (1956), another Tennessee Williams story directed by Mr. Kazan.
 
In 1962 he was the doggedly loving boyfriend of Rosalind Russell in “Gypsy,” and in 1970 he won critical praise for his stalwart General Bradley in “Patton,” starring George C. Scott.
 
With his movie career tailing off in the early 1970s, Mr. Malden reluctantly tried his hand at television. “I felt that I had started at the bottom in the theater and worked my way up for 20 years, then started at the bottom with bit parts in films and worked my way up for another 20 years,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I didn’t feel like starting at the bottom again.”
 
Still, he agreed to star in a new detective series on ABC, “The Streets of San Francisco.” Making its debut in 1972, the show was an immediate hit and ran through June 1977. The sidekick to Mr. Malden’s Lieutenant Stone was Michael Douglas, who left the show in 1976.
 
He appeared in a few more movies in the 1980s, notably as the stepfather of Barbra Streisand’s call girl in Martin Ritt’s film “Nuts.” There were television shows, including the 1980 NBC series “Skag,” in which he reached back to his roots to play a hard-bitten foreman in a steel mill. In the 1984 NBC drama “Fatal Vision,” he played a man who belatedly realizes that his son-in-law is a murderer. His performance brought him an Emmy award.
 
In one of his last appearances, in “The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro,” a 1989 made-for-television movie, he was cast as Leon Klinghoffer, the American Jew who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists on a Mediterranean cruise ship. And in 2000, in the first season of “The West Wing,” he played a priest one last time, counseling President Jed Bartlet on the death penalty.
 
In 1989 Mr. Malden began his term as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization responsible for the Academy Awards. Ten years later he used that standing in Hollywood to urge the academy’s board to award an honorary Oscar to his old friend and mentor Elia Kazan.
 
The recommendation was bitterly opposed by those who had never forgiven Mr. Kazan for testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 and informing on colleagues who had been members of the Communist Party. But the board voted its approval.
 
“If anyone deserved this honorary award because of his talent and body of work,” Mr. Malden said after the vote, “it was Kazan.”
 
Mr. Malden never forgot his beginnings as a son of immigrants, nor did he lose his perspective. Not long after his Oscar-winning work with Vivien Leigh in “Streetcar,” he referred to himself as probably “the only ex-milkman Vivien ever kissed in a movie.”
In an interview nearly a half-century later, he said he thought of an actor’s work as “digging ditches.”
 
“Sometimes they’re deep and sometimes they’re shallow,” he said, “but we keep digging them.”
 
SOURCE  
  
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HARVE PRESNELL, SINGING ACTOR
 
Published: July 2, 2009
 
Harve Presnell, whose rich operatic baritone thrilled audiences in the stage and film versions of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” and who made an unexpected return to the screen as William H. Macy’s overbearing father-in-law in “Fargo,” died Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 75 and lived in Livingston, Mont.
 
 
Leo Friedman

Harve Presnell performing with Tammy Grimes in the stage version of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

 

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, said his agent, Gregg Klein.
Mr. Presnell, who trained as an opera singer, brought an imposing physical presence — he stood 6 feet 4 inches — and a resplendent voice to the Broadway stage, delivering a star-making performance as Leadville Johnny Brown in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”
“He anchored that show, with a down-to-earth quality that played perfectly against Tammy Grimes’s wonderfully eccentric style,” said Miles Kreuger, the president of the Institute of the American Musical. “It’s a pity they didn’t give him more larger-than-life roles because he had the physical presence and the voice for it.”
 
It was Mr. Presnell’s misfortune to arrive on the scene as the golden age of the musical was in its twilight, and roles worthy of his voice were few and far between.
 
His triumphant debut led to unsatisfactory film roles and a somewhat stunted career appearing in national tours of Broadway musicals, most notably as Daddy Warbucks in “Annie,” a role he also played on Broadway and reprised in the ill-fated “Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge.”
 
The Coen brothers gave him a second Hollywood career as a character actor when they cast him in “Fargo” in 1996. That role led to a series of meaty film parts, including Gen. George C. Marshall in “Saving Private Ryan.”
 
George Harvey Presnell was born in Modesto, Calif. After graduating from Modesto High School, he studied voice at the University of Southern California and embarked on a concert career.
 
In the 1950s he sang with the Roger Wagner Chorale and performed on their recordings for Capitol, including the Christmas album “Joy to the World,” “Folk Songs of the New World” and “Folk Songs of the Frontier.”
 
Mr. Presnell also sang the baritone part in the 1960 recording of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana,” with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra.
 
After hearing Mr. Presnell sing, Meredith Willson created the part of Johnny Brown as a star-making vehicle for him. When “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” opened in 1960, with Ms. Grimes in the starring role, Mr. Presnell planted his feet and let audiences have it with both barrels as he boomed the songs “Colorado, My Home” and “I’ll Never Say No.” He repeated the role in the highly successful film version, released in 1964, with Debbie Reynolds as Molly.
 
It was a once-in-a-lifetime role. In 1965 he tried his hand at a straight western, “The Glory Guys,” but he was desperate to sing, which helps explain his appearance in the Connie Francis film “When the Boys Meet the Girls.”
 
The film of “Paint Your Wagon” (1969), with bizarre casting that mingled Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg, delivered the golden opportunity to sing the unforgettable ballad “They Call the Wind Mariah,” but by the 1970s his Hollywood adventure had seemingly come to an end.
 
For the next decade Mr. Presnell toiled in the minor leagues of musical theater. He toured with “Annie Get Your Gun” and “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” He played Rhett Butler in a short-lived musical version of “Gone With the Wind” in London. His second crack at Broadway came when John Schuck left “Annie” in 1980, allowing him to step in as Daddy Warbucks, a role he had played in touring companies.
 
The breakthrough role of Wade Gustafson in “Fargo” rejuvenated a film career that had barely had time to get started in the 1960s. Mr. Presnell, whose face and voice had weathered with the years, suddenly found his services as a character actor in demand in film and on television for roles requiring a powerful presence and a whiff of menace.
 
He had recurring roles in the television series “The Pretender” and “Andy Barker, P.I.” and appeared in the films “Larger Than Life,” “Face/Off” and “The Legend of Bagger Vance.” His most recent film role was as a senator in “Evan Almighty.”
Mr. Presnell’s first marriage ended in divorce. His survivors include his second wife, Veeva; six children, Stephanie, Taylor, Etoile, Tulley, Shannon and Raine; and several grandchildren.
 
  
Harve was an actor who had starred in many films, but he will be remembered most for his role as William Macy’s harsh, gruff, and overbearing father-n-law.
  
Rest peace, Harve.
  
Rest in peace.
  
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GALE STORM, STAR OF TV’S ‘MY LITTLE MARGIE’
 
Published: June 30, 2009
 
Gale Storm, the Texas-born actress who made wholesome perkiness a defining element of television’s golden age on two hit sitcoms, “My Little Margie” and “The Gale Storm Show,” died on Saturday in Danville, Calif. She was 87.
 
 
June 30, 2009    
Movie Star News

Gale Storm with her television co-star Charles Farrell in 1955.

 

Her death was confirmed by a representative of the convalescent hospital where she died.
 
Ms. Storm had been a B-movie actress for more than a decade when “My Little Margie” had its premiere on CBS in June 1952 as a summer replacement for the era’s biggest hit series, “I Love Lucy.” Ms. Storm played a young Manhattanite living with her widowed father (Charles Farrell), an affluent businessman, and often trying to keep amorous single women away from him. Critics dismissed the show as silly, but the public disagreed and the series ran for three full seasons.
 
A year later Ms. Storm returned to television with another sitcom, “The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna.” The title character was a social director on a cruise ship who, with her beautician sidekick (ZaSu Pitts), regularly confounded the ship’s stuffy captain and, every third episode, burst into song (a condition of Ms. Storm’s contract). The show ran from 1956 to 1960.
 
During the same decade Ms. Storm had a successful recording career, with a gold record for “I Hear You Knockin’ ” and other pop hits including “Teen Age Prayer,” “Tell Me Why” and “Dark Moon.” Six of her records reached the Top 10 between 1955 and 1957.
 
After her decade of television fame, Ms. Storm turned to stage work in Las Vegas and to regional theater. But she also battled alcoholism in the 1970s and wrote about her struggle in her 1981 autobiography, “I Ain’t Down Yet.”
 
“I was the star of my own cornball B movie,” she wrote, alluding to her success and her stable, happy home life, “and suddenly it turned into a horror story.” She gave the credit for her recovery to a California hospital’s aversion-therapy program.
 
Josephine Owaissa Cottle was born on April 5, 1922, in Bloomington, Tex., a small town near the Gulf of Mexico. She was the youngest of five children (an older sister suggested her middle name, an American Indian word for bluebird). Her father, a potter, died when Josephine was a year old, and her mother became a seamstress to make ends meet.
 
The family moved to Houston, where Josephine was active in high school dramatics. Two teachers there persuaded her to enter the Gateway to Hollywood talent contest, sponsored by the producer Jesse L. Lasky, RKO Radio Pictures and Wrigley, the chewing gum manufacturer.
 
In 1939 she won the local competition and traveled with her mother to Hollywood, where she won the national prize, which included the preordained screen name Gale Storm and an RKO contract. In a fairy tale twist, she also met and fell in love with the contest’s male winner, Lee Bonnell, a young actor from Indiana. She married him in 1941.
 
Ms. Storm made her film debut in the boys’ boarding school drama “Tom Brown’s School Days” (1940), starring Cedric Hardwicke. But RKO soon canceled her contract, and the three dozen or so movies she made during the next decade were less than artistic triumphs.
 
“Where Are Your Children?” (1943), an early treatment of juvenile delinquency starring Jackie Cooper, garnered some positive attention. She played opposite the cowboy star Roy Rogers in three films, including “Red River Valley” (1941). Her personal favorites among her films were “It Happened on Fifth Avenue” (1947), a holiday comedy with Don DeFore, in which she was cast as a millionaire’s daughter, and “The Dude Goes West” (1948), a comedy with Eddie Albert.
 
After her second television series went off the air, Ms. Storm’s screen-acting career largely ended. She did two episodes of “Burke’s Law” in the 1960s and one of “The Love Boat” (considered something of an “Oh! Susanna” copycat) in 1979. Her final screen appearance, in 1989, was on the CBS drama series “Murder, She Wrote.” playing a bridegroom’s mother.
 
Ms. Storm’s marriage to Mr. Bonnell, who abandoned his acting career early on and became an insurance executive, lasted until his death, in 1986. They had four children. In 1988 she married Paul Masterson, a former ABC television executive, who died in 1996.
She is survived by three sons, Phillip, Peter and Paul; a daughter, Susie; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
 
In her memoir, Ms. Storm looked back on her greatest success, “My Little Margie,” and the difficulties of doing a weekly series for several years.
 
“I’d get tired, but I’d wake up every morning looking forward to the day’s work,” she wrote.
 
“I think that the secret to happiness is being surrounded by people you love and having work that you look forward to doing.”
  
SOURCE  
  
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MOLLIE SUGDEN, STAR OF BRITISH COMEDY ‘ARE YOU BEING SERVED?’
 
Published: July 2, 2009
 
Mollie Sugden, who achieved wide popularity in Britain and the United States as Betty Slocombe, the snooty, officious head of the ladies’ department at Grace Brothers department store in the long-running BBC comedy series “Are You Being Served?,” died Wednesday in Guildford, Surrey. She was 86 and lived in Surrey.
 
 
 
R. F. Herrick/Camera Press

Mollie Sugden, about 1982.

Funny Women: Mollie Sugden (Youtube.com)

 

The death was confirmed by her agent, Joan Reddin.
 
Ms. Sugden, well known to British viewers as an overbearing mother on several television comedies, kept both customers and fellow workers on the defensive in “Are You Being Served?,” which ran on the BBC from 1972 to 1985 and was repeatedly broadcast on many public television stations in the United States.
 
Lavishly upholstered and coiffed, with hair that changed color with each episode but seemed to favor purple hues, Mrs. Slocombe did her utmost to ensure that shopping was a painful experience for all customers.
 
In dealings with her colleagues, she projected an ironclad sense of dignity and decorum that was undermined by her habit of dropping double-entendres, especially references on nearly every episode to her beloved cat.
 
Mary Isobel Sugden was born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, where she attended grammar school and played a cat in a Sunday school play.
 
After making shells for the Royal Navy in an armaments factory during World War II, she studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Her first role was the juvenile lead in “Dear Octopus.”
 
She started out in repertory theater and, in the late 1950s, married the “Coronation Street” actor William Moore, who died in 2000. She is survived by their twin sons, Robin and Simon Moore.
 
In the early 1960s she got her first regular television role, as the next-door neighbor to two hapless schemers in “Hugh and I.” The show’s writer recommended her for the role of the heroine’s snobby mother in his next series, “The Liver Birds,” which ran from 1971 to 1979 and was revived in 1996 with the original cast.
 
“Are You Being Served?” was made in 1972 as a one-shot segment of another series, “Comedy Playhouse,” but when the killing of several Israeli athletes sent the 1972 Summer Olympics into chaos, the BBC, faced with hours of empty air time, rushed the series onto its schedule. There it stayed for more than a decade.
 
In the early 1990s, five of the original cast members were reassembled for a sequel, “Grace and Favour,” set in a country manor house.
 
In a 2003 interview for the Web site teletronic.co.uk, Ms. Sugden theorized that the show lasted for the same reason that another far-from-cutting-edge series, “Dad’s Army,” did.
 
“They were old-fashioned to begin with, so they haven’t dated,” she said. “They were dated when we did them.”
 
In the late 1980s she and her husband appeared together in the sitcom “My Husband and I.”
Ms. Sugden withdrew from acting in the 1990s, struggling with ill health for most of the decade, but her reputation soared in the United States after PBS began showing reruns of “Are You Being Served?” in the early 1990s.
 
The broad comedy of the series, rich in social stereotypes, descended straight from music hall and pantomime. Ms. Sugden found this comic style thoroughly enjoyable, unlike that of the situation comedies today, she said in the Teletronic interview: “I find it a bit, well, sordid, and it’s not my scene — bad language and who’s in whose bed.”
 
SOURCE  
  
  
Many people are unfamiliar with the British TV series “Are You Being Served?”, but, it is one of my favourite foreign sitcoms (the other is “Eastenders”.)
  
The series was about a typical day for the employees of Grace Brothers Department store, and the hilarious experiences they had while going about their routines. Most notable, was Mollie, who gave all the employees grief, in her own inimitable way.
  
Rest in peace, Mollie.
  
Rest in peace.
  
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FRED TRAVELENA, COMEDIAN AND MASTER OF IMPRESSIONS
 
Published: June 30, 2009
 
Fred Travalena, a comedian and singer known in Las Vegas and on the talk-show circuit for his impressions of celebrities — not just the usual politicians and movie stars but cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny, broadcasters like Ted Koppel and singers like Sammy Davis Jr. and Bobby Darin — died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 66.
 
 
June 30, 2009    
The comedian Fred Travalena channeling President George Bush in about 1989.
 

The cause was non-Hodgkins lymphoma, his wife, Lois, said.
 
Arriving in the early 1970s on the heels of Frank Gorshin, Rich Little, John Byner and a few others, Mr. Travalena was part of a generation that brought impressionists to the forefront of popular entertainment. He had a rubbery face that could morph — his word — to suggest the facial shapes of all the presidents from John F. Kennedy forward and of show business celebrities like Jim Nabors, Jack Nicholson and Jay Leno. But his chief distinction was an unusual vocal suppleness that allowed him to mimic not just speaking and singing voices but also musical instruments and other sound effects like police klaxons, automobile ignitions and telephone answering machines.
 
Mr. Travalena was an aspiring singer performing at catered events on Long Island when the impressions and sound effects that were part of his act grew into the main attraction. In the early 1970s he was hired to open for Shirley MacLaine at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and he shortly became a regular performer there and a guest on many television talk shows. Over the years he appeared with Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, David Letterman, Sally Jessy Raphael and Arsenio Hall. He also had acting roles on television series like “Fantasy Island,” “Murphy Brown” and “Walker, Texas Ranger,” and he was a guest panelist on “The Match Game” and “Hollywood Squares.”
 
Frederick Albert Travalena III was born in the Bronx on Oct. 6, 1942. He grew up on Long Island; his father dreamed of being an entertainer himself but made his living as an ink salesman and helped his son get his first job — as a paper salesman. Young Fred, known in high school as a cutup who did impressions of teachers, predictably hated it. He knew what he wanted to do, and he first applied his talent in earnest in the Army, serving stateside during the Vietnam War as an entertainer in the Special Services division.
 
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1970, Mr. Travalena is survived by a brother, John, of Brooklyn; a sister, Catherine Lesh of Webb City, Mo.; two sons, Cory, of Simi Valley, Calif., and Frederick IV, of Overland Park, Kan.; and one grandchild.
 
Mr. Travalena met his wife, who was also a singer, while he was in the Army. They performed together at officers’ clubs, and it was during their act that she jump-started his career. As Mrs. Travalena recalled in an interview Monday: “One day I just took the mike and said, ‘I’m going to walk off stage and let Fred do impressions.’ ”
 
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SHI PEI PU, SPY AND ‘M. BUTTERFLY’
 
Published: July 1, 2009
 
Shi Pei Pu, a Beijing opera singer and spy whose sexually convoluted love affair with a French Embassy worker created one of the strangest cases in international espionage and was the inspiration for the Broadway show “M. Butterfly,” died in Paris on Tuesday.
 
 
Associated Press

Shi Pei Pu in the mid-1960s.

His death was announced to Agence France-Presse by an aide.
 
Mr. Shi (pronounced Shuh), who was convicted of espionage in France in 1986 along with his lover, Bernard Boursicot, was believed to be 70. He had also been believed for years to be a woman, at least by Mr. Boursicot, who served time in prison after the affair and became a laughingstock in France.
 
Mr. Boursicot, who is 64 and has been living in a nursing home in France while recovering from a stroke, showed no sadness when he learned of Mr. Shi’s death in a telephone interview.
 
“I’m not surprised,” he said, in a tone that suggested weariness with a former lover’s theatrics. “It is a long time he has been sick. Now it’s over 40 years.”
 
Asked if he had any sadness at all, Mr. Boursicot said: “He did so many things against me that he had no pity for, I think it is stupid to play another game now and say I am sad.
 
The plate is clean now. I am free.”
 
In the 1988 Broadway play and the 1993 film “M. Butterfly,” Bernard Boursicot was depicted as a high-ranking diplomat and Shi Pei Pu as a beautiful female opera singer who met in 1964. In fact, Mr. Boursicot was a 20-year-old high school dropout who had finagled a job as an accountant at the newly opened French Embassy in Beijing. His few sexual experiences had been with male schoolmates, and he was determined to fall in love with a woman, he wrote in his diary.
 
Shi Pei Pu was 26 when they met, delicate and charming. He lived as a man and taught Chinese to the diplomatic wives. He told Mr. Boursicot that he had been a singer and a librettist in the Beijing Opera. One perfect night in the Forbidden City Mr. Shi told Mr. Boursicot a story no romantic could resist: Mr. Shi said he was a woman who had been forced to go through life as a man, because her father required a son. A short time later, the men became lovers, although the sex, Mr. Boursicot would later say, was fast and furtive, always carried out in the dark.
 
When the affair was discovered by the Chinese authorities, Mr. Boursicot passed them French documents, first from the embassy in Beijing and later from his posting at the consulate in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.
 
Mr. Boursicot spent most of his life outside China and was romantically involved with men and women. On his rare visits to Shi Pei Pu, sexual contact was circumscribed. On one visit, Mr. Shi presented him with a 4-year-old boy, Shi Du Du, who Mr. Shi said was their son.
 
In 1982, Mr. Boursicot — then living openly with a male companion, Thierry Toulet — was able to arrange for Shi Pei Pu and Shi Du Du to live with him in Paris. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu were arrested. Mr. Shi first told the police he was a woman, but he admitted the truth to prison doctors, showing them how he hid his genitals.
 
Shi Du Du explained the mystery of where he came from in his statement to the police: he was from China’s Uighur minority, he said, and had been sold by his mother. “It was not that my mother did not love me,” he said. ”We were starving.”
 
Mr. Boursicot, hearing that Shi Pei Pu was a man and always had been, sliced his throat with a razor blade in prison.
 
In 1986, Mr. Shi and Mr. Boursicot received six-year sentences for espionage. They were pardoned a year later. Mr. Shi is survived by Shi Du Du, who lives in Paris and who, Mr. Boursicot said, has three young sons.
 
Although Mr. Boursicot and Mr. Shi occasionally spoke over the years, relations were strained. Mr. Boursicot said that they last spoke a few months ago and that Mr. Shi told him he still loved him.
 
Mr. Shi enjoyed the spotlight, performing in public as an opera singer, but disliked talking about his romance with Mr. Boursicot, particularly the sexual specifics.
 
“I used to fascinate both men and women,” he said in a rare interview in 1988. “What I was and what they were didn’t matter.”
 
SOURCE  
  
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STEVE MCNAIR EX-OILER QUARTERBACK
 
By MEGAN MANFULL
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

July 5, 2009, 2:07AM

photo
Ed Rode AP
Police hold up a sheet as a body is taken out of the Nashville apartment where Steve McNair was shot and killed.

  

 

1991: Graduates from Mount Olive (Miss.) High School, where he was SuperPrep All-American at quarterback and defensive back.
 

 

1994: As record-setting QB for Alcorn State, finishes third in voting for Heisman Trophy and wins Walter Payton Award as top player in Division I-AA. Exits college as only player in NCAA history with more than 16,000 yards (16,823) in career total offense.
 

 

1995: Is selected third overall by Houston Oilers in NFL draft.
 

 

1995-96: Though primarily a backup to Chris Chandler, makes first two NFL starts as rookie and four more in second and final year in Houston. Has first 300-yard passing game in 23-17 loss to Jacksonville in Astrodome on Dec. 8, 1996.
 

 

1997: In first full season as NFL starter, guides Oilers to 8-8 record in their first season in Tennessee. His 674 rushing yards are, at time, third-highest single-season total by an NFL quarterback.
 

 

1999: Guides Tennessee to Super Bowl in its first season as the Titans. On final play of that 23-16 loss to St. Louis Rams, McNair completes 9-yard pass to Kevin Dyson, who is tackled just short of goal line.
 

 

2003: After leading NFL with 100.4 passer rating, shares league’s Most Valuable Player Award with Indianapolis Colts QB Peyton Manning.
 

 

2004: Breaks Warren Moon’s Oilers/Titans record of 70 wins by a starting QB. McNair will finish with 76 in 11-year tenure with franchise.
 

 

2006: Starts all 16 games in first season with Baltimore Ravens and joins Fran Tarkenton and Steve Young as only quarterbacks in NFL history to pass for 30,000 yards and rush for 3,500 in career.
 

 

2008: After appearing in only six games in 2007, retires from football.
 

Former Houston Oilers quarterback Steve McNair was found shot to death in Nashville, Tenn., on Saturday, shocking former teammates and NFL personnel around the country.

McNair, 36, and Sahel Kazemi, 20, were found dead inside a condominium Saturday afternoon, the Nashville Police Department said.

 

Police said McNair was shot multiple times, including once in the head, and Kazemi was shot once. A pistol was found near her body.

 

Autopsies were planned for today.

 

Police spokesman Don Aaron said McNair’s wife, Mechelle, is “very distraught.”

 

“At this juncture, we do not believe she is involved,” he said. “Nothing has been ruled out, but as far as actively looking for a suspect tonight, the answer would be no.”

 

The bodies were discovered Saturday afternoon by McNair’s longtime friend Wayne Neeley, who said he rents the condo with McNair.

 

Aaron said Neeley told authorities he went into the condo, saw McNair on the sofa and Kazemi on the floor but walked to the kitchen before going back to the living room, where he saw the blood. Neeley then called a friend, who alerted authorities.

 

Police said a witness saw McNair arrive at the condo between 1:30 and 2 a.m. Saturday and that Kazemi’s vehicle was already there.

 

Last week, Nashville police arrested Kazemi on a DUI charge while driving a 2007 Escalade registered to her and McNair. McNair was in the front seat, but didn’t break the law and was allowed to leave by taxi.

 

The Tennessean newspaper’s Web site reported that Keith Norfleet, Kazemi’s boyfriend for four years before they broke up five months ago, said he came to pick up the car for Kazemi after her DUI arrest.

 

Norfleet said she told him she was seeing McNair, whom she met while working as a waitress at Dave & Busters, the paper reported. He was worried about her dating a married man and hopeful they’d get back together. They had lived together for four years, since they moved from her family’s home in Jacksonville, Fla., to Nashville, The Tennessean reported.

 

In June, McNair opened a restaurant near the Tennessee State University campus. It was closed Saturday evening, but had become a small memorial, where flowers, candles and notes had been placed outside the door.

 

On the restaurant’s windows were messages: “We will miss you Steve” and “We love you Steve.”

 

A note attached to a small blue teddy bear read, “We will never forget you, Steve. Once a Titan, always a Titan.”

 

McNair, the No. 3 overall pick by the Oilers in 1995, spent two seasons in Houston before the franchise moved to Tennessee in 1997 (and was renamed the Titans in 1999). He retired in 2008 after 13 NFL seasons.

 

Skilled with both his arm and legs, the three-time Pro Bowler finished with a career record of 91-62 (.595) as a starting NFL quarterback. He, Fran Tarkenton and Steve Young are the only NFL quarterbacks who threw for more than 30,000 yards and rushed for more than 3,500 .

 

“We don’t know the details, but it is a terrible tragedy, and our hearts go out to the families involved,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.

Super Bowl appearance

In McNair’s two seasons in Houston (1995-96), he won four of the six games he started. In 1997, he became a full-time starter during the Oilers’ lone season in Memphis, Tenn., then spent the subsequent eight years in Nashville before joining the Baltimore Ravens in 2006.

“Steve was one of the greatest players to play for us,” Titans owner Bud Adams said.

 

“This is a terrible thing. It’s so hard to understand.”

 

The Titans’ lone Super Bowl appearance came in January 2000, when they narrowly fell 23-16 to the St. Louis Rams. Getting the ball with less than two minutes to play, McNair engineered a long drive to the Rams’ 10-yard line with five seconds remaining. On the game’s final play, he connected on a 9-yard pass to Kevin Dyson, who was tackled less than yard from the goal line. Prior to that, McNair had brought the Titans back from a 16-0 deficit to even the score.

 

“I’m still in a state of shock,” former Oilers/Titans running back Eddie George told ESPN. “In this situation, you can’t help but go back to the great times we shared together on the field and off the field — bringing this team to Nashville and the whole transition and watching him mature into a great player after being scrutinized early in his career by the media and everyone else.”

 

McNair passed for more than 3,000 yards six times in his career, his last 3,000-yard season coming in 2006. In his most prolific season, 2002, he passed for 3,387 yards.

 

In 2003, he shared NFL Most Valuable Player honors with Indianapolis Colts star quarterback Peyton Manning.

 

“He was a player who I admired a great deal,” said Patriots senior football adviser Floyd Reese, general manager of the Titans during McNair’s tenure, said in a statement.

Played through the pain

Among the former teammates shocked and saddened by the news was cornerback Samari Rolle, who spent nine seasons with McNair in Tennessee and Baltimore.

 

“Steve was the ultimate man, first of all,” Rolle told BaltimoreRavens.com. “I still can’t even believe it. To lose such a good friend and a good man so soon doesn’t make sense.

 

“If you were going to draw a football player — the physical part, the mental part, everything about being a professional — he is your guy. I can’t even wrap my arms around it. It is a sad, sad day. The world lost a great man today.”

 

McNair played through injuries throughout much of his career, and it was injuries that eventually forced him to retire. However, his teammates said you could rarely tell he was in pain.

 

“Steve was such a happy person,” former Ravens teammate Derrick Mason told BaltimoreRavens.com. “I even called him ‘Smile.’ He was always smiling and was always willing to lend a hand to anyone who needed it. I’ve known him for 13 years, and he was the most selfless, happiest and friendliest person I have known.”

 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

megan.manfull@chron.com

  
SOURCE  
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
 

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