ANNE FRANCIS, ACTRESS IN TV SERIES ‘HONEY WEST’ AND THE FILM ‘FORBIDDEN PLANET’
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 3, 2011
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Anne Francis, who was best known for her roles in the 1950s science-fiction film “Forbidden Planet” and the 1960s television series “Honey West,” died on Sunday in Santa Barbara, Calif. She was 80.
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ABC, via PhotofeAnne Francis played Honey West, a sexy private detective.
The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, her daughter Jane Uemura told The Los Angeles Times. Ms. Francis had surgery and chemotherapy after she learned she had lung cancer in 2007.
Ms. Francis, with blond hair and a prominent beauty mark near one corner of her mouth, appeared in some of the most popular films of the 1950s. But “Forbidden Planet” and “Honey West” made her reputation.
In “Forbidden Planet” (1956), a science-fiction retelling of Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” a group of space travelers including Leslie Nielsen visited a planet where an expatriate scientist played by Walter Pidgeon, his daughter (Ms. Francis) and a robot named Robby had built a settlement.
Before filming began, the actors held a meeting and agreed “to be as serious about this film as we could be,” Ms. Francis said in a 1999 interview. “We could have hammed it up, but we wanted to be as sincere as we could.”
“Honey West” lasted only one season, 1965-66, on ABC. But the character she played, a private detective who was sexy, stylish and as good with martial arts as she was with a gun (and who had a pet ocelot), made an impression.
“A lot of people speak to me about Honey West,” Ms. Francis once recalled. “The character made young women think there was more they could reach for. It encouraged a lot of people.”
She was nominated for an Emmy and won a Golden Globe for the role.
Anne Francis was born Ann Marvak on Sept. 16, 1930, in Ossining, N.Y. She was working as a model by the time she was 5 and appearing on daytime radio serials by age 11. She also had some small roles on Broadway.
She began her movie career at MGM in 1947 and went on to act opposite some of the biggest male stars of the day.
In “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), she played the pregnant wife of an idealistic teacher (Glenn Ford). Among her other films were “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955) with Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan, “A Lion Is in the Streets” (1953) with James Cagney, and “Hook, Line and Sinker” (1969) with Jerry Lewis.
When her movie career declined, Ms. Francis became active in television. She appeared in dozens of series, including “Mission: Impossible,” “Gunsmoke,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “The Golden Girls.”
Ms. Francis’s marriages to the actor and director Bamlet L. Price Jr. and Dr. Robert Abeloff ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Uemura, she is survived by another daughter, Maggie, and a grandson.
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PETE POSTLEWAITE, BRITISH ACTOR
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: January 3, 2011
Pete Postlethwaite, a lanky, craggy-faced character actor whose range stretched from sweet sentimentality to acid menace and who was nominated for an Academy Award in 1994 for his role as the father of a man unjustly accused of terrorism in “In the Name of the Father,” died on Sunday in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. He was 64 and lived on a farm near Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire.
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Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
Pete Postlethwaite in 2009.
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Universal Pictures, via Photofest
Pete Postlethwaite in “In the Name of the Father” (1993).
The cause was cancer, said Andrew Richardson, a friend.
With a broad nose, prominent ears, high cheekbones and hollow cheeks, Mr. Postlethwaite (pronounced POSS-ul-thwayt) was distinctive looking and rawboned, if not exactly classically handsome. His face was an especially suitable one for the rough-hewn working-class men he often (though far from always) played.
He was widely known in England as a stage and television actor before beginning a busy film career in the 1980s — his first significant role was in “A Private Function,” with Michael Palin and Maggie Smith, in 1984 — and in the 1990s he became familiar to American audiences in, among other films, “Alien 3,” “Waterland,” “The Last of the Mohicans” and “The Usual Suspects.”
In 1996, he starred as the leader of a local brass band in “Brassed Off,” a melancholy and sentimental comedy about the threatened closing of a coal mine in a village in northern England that would also mean the end of the band, the village’s pride and joy. His later films included “The Shipping News” and a remake of the 1976 horror film “The Omen.”
Last year he was seen in two Hollywood action extravaganzas, as a fisherman and adoptive father of a character loosely based on the mythological figure Perseus in “Clash of the Titans” and as a dying corporate baron in “Inception”; he also played a vicious gangster in Ben Affleck’s crime drama “The Town.”
“In the Name of the Father” was based on the real-life tribulations of Gerry Conlon, a feckless Irishman wrongly accused in the 1974 Irish Republican Army bombing of two pubs popular with British soldiers in Guildford, England. Mr. Postlethwaite played Giuseppe Conlon, “a father in an unimaginable predicament” as The New York Times described the role, whose complicated relationship with his son (Daniel Day-Lewis) is made even more difficult when he becomes a victim of the prosecution of the crime his son did not commit.
Peter William Postlethwaite was born on Feb. 7, 1946, into a working-class Roman Catholic family in Warrington, near Liverpool, where as a teenager he once booked the Beatles to appear at a village hall. His father, William, was a cooper and later a school caretaker. He and his wife, Mary, expected their son to become a priest (Peter spent two years in a seminary, beginning at age 11) or a teacher.
As a young man Mr. Postlethwaite did teach for a while — drama and physical education — until he gave it up to pursue acting, a decision that, according to family lore, his mother chided him for until the 1980s, when he had his picture taken with Queen Elizabeth II after appearing in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “The Taming of the Shrew.”
Mr. Postlethwaite studied to be an actor at the Bristol Old Vic and spent his first years as a professional at the Everyman Theater in Liverpool, where he worked with Bill Nighy, Jonathan Pryce and others. He began appearing on television in the 1970s, in both films and series. It was a brazen and brutal performance as a drunken, abusive husband and father in the 1988 film “Distant Voices, Still Lives” that brought him wider attention as a film actor.
He continued to perform onstage throughout much of his career, and two years ago he returned to Liverpool’s Everyman as King Lear. Dominic Cavendish wrote in The Telegraph of London, “The journey Postlethwaite takes is beautifully shaded, by turns semi-serious, pensive and pained before arriving, touchingly, at some dazed, carefree state where madness has become his sole means of self-preservation.”
Mr. Postlethwaite’s survivors include his wife, Jacqui Morrish; a son, Will, who is a drama student in London; and a daughter, Lily.
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VANG PAO, LAOTIAN GENERAL WHO AIDED U.S.
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: January 8, 2011
Vang Pao, a charismatic Laotian general who commanded a secret army of his mountain people in a long, losing campaign against Communist insurgents, then achieved almost kinglike status as their leader-in-exile in the United States, died Thursday in Clovis, Calif. He was 81.
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John Dominis/Time Life Pictures — Getty Images
Gen. Vang Pao in 1961. He was the chief of a secret army financed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
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Ingrid Young for The New York Times
Gen. Vang Pao in 2004.
His death was confirmed by Michael Bailey, a spokesman for the Clovis Community Medical Center.
Vang Pao was a general in the official Laotian Army, the chief of a secret army financed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the undisputed leader of the varied factions of his people, the Hmong. Tens of thousands of them followed him in his flight to Thailand after the Communist victory in 1975. Later, in the United States, he was so revered that some of his people believed he had supernatural powers.
“He is like the earth and the sky,” Houa Thao, a Hmong refugee, said in an interview with The Fresno Bee in 2007.
That year, Gen. Vang Pao was charged with plotting to provide $10 million in arms to antigovernment forces in Laos in a conspiracy of such dimensions that American prosecutors compared it to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The charges were dropped two years later.
Even before President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vow in 1960 that Laos must not fall to the Communists, the country was immersed in bloody conflict. Its importance grew immensely during the Vietnam War, when most of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the serpentine route that North Vietnam used to funnel supplies southward, ran through Laotian territory.
The United States wanted to interdict the supply route, rescue American pilots shot down over Laos and aid anti-Communist forces in a continuing civil war, but was hampered in doing so publicly because Laos was officially neutral, so the C.I.A. recruited General Vang Pao for the job. At the time, he held the highest rank ever achieved by a Hmong in the Royal Laotian Army, major general.
The Hmong are a tribe in the fog-shrouded mountains separating Laos from southern China, and they were natural allies for the C.I.A. because of their enmity toward Laotian lowlanders to the south, who dominated the Communist leadership.
General Vang Pao quickly organized 7,000 guerrillas, then steadily increased the force to 39,000, leading them in many successful battles, often against daunting odds. William Colby, C.I.A. director in the mid-1970s, called him “the biggest hero of the Vietnam War.”
Lionel Rosenblatt, president emeritus of Refugees International, in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2008, put it more bluntly, saying General Vang Pao’s Hmong were put “into this meat grinder, mostly to save U.S. soldiers from fighting and dying there.”
Congressional committees discussed the war in secret sessions at the time it was being fought, and the press uncovered significant details. But the United States government did not officially recognize the Hmong’s contribution until 1997, when the Clinton administration authorized a plaque at Arlington National Cemetery saying that the valor of General Vang Pao’s troops would never be forgotten.
General Vang Pao was born in December 1929 in a village in northeast Laos, had six years of sporadic schooling and worked as an interpreter for French colonial forces fighting the Japanese in World War II. He became a sergeant in the French colonial army, and, in 1954, an officer in the army of the newly independent Laos.
When the C.I.A. approached him in 1960, he was already fighting Laotian Communists. The next year, he would also fight Communists from Vietnam after they had crossed the Laotian border. The Times in 1971 said that the C.I.A. did not command the general’s army at any level, because his pride and temper would have never permitted it.
The general led troops into combat personally, suffered serious wounds and was known to declare: “If we die, we die together. Nobody will be left behind.” About 35,000 Hmong died in battle.
General Vang Pao was also skilled at uniting the 18 clans of Hmong. One technique was to marry women from different tribes, as multiple marriages were permitted in Laos. He had to divorce all but one of his five wives when he went to the United States in 1975, settling on a ranch in Montana.
His son Chu Vang told The Bee in 2007 that General Vang Pao had fathered more than 20 children and had more than 40 grandchildren. Complete information about survivors was not available.
General Vang Pao lived more recently in Southern California and Minnesota, where many of the 200,000 Hmong that followed him to the United States or were born here live. His picture hangs in thousands of homes.
Asked by the news agency Agence France-Presse to comment on his death, the Communist government of Laos said, “He was an ordinary person, so we do not have any reaction.”
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GERRY RAFFERTY, SONGWRITER
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: January 4, 2011
Gerry Rafferty, a Scottish singer and songwriter who combined a gift for melody, a distinctive voice and a fatalistic worldview to produce 1970s hits like “Stuck in the Middle With You” and “Baker Street,” died Tuesday in Dorset, England. He was 63.
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Photofest
Gerry Rafferty in the 1970s.
His death was confirmed by Michael Gray, his former manager, in an obituary he wrote for the London newspaper The Guardian, and later by his agent, Paul Charles, in a report by The Associated Press. Various news reports said Mr. Rafferty had been hospitalized for severe liver and kidney problems.
Mr. Rafferty’s 1978 album, “City to City,” reached No. 1 in the United States. One track, “Baker Street,”made the Top 10 in both Britain and the United States. So did “Stuck in the Middle With You,”a song Mr. Rafferty and Joe Egan recorded with their group Stealers Wheel in 1972. That song reached a new generation of listeners when Quentin Tarantino used it in the notorious ear-slicing scene in his 1992 movie “Reservoir Dogs.”
In all, Mr. Rafferty sold more than 10 million albums over three decades.
But Mr. Gray, writing in The Guardian, said Mr. Rafferty’s success was a shadow of what it might have been. At the peak of his popularity, Mr. Rafferty declined to tour the United States and turned down chances to play with Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney. In his later years his output declined, then stopped altogether as he “spiraled into alcoholism,” Mr. Gray said. Mr. Rafferty himself said in a rare interview in 2009 with The Sunday Express that he suffered from depression.
But at his peak Mr. Rafferty drew rave reviews for his synthesis of country, folk and rock music. Reviewing “City to City” in Rolling Stone, Ken Emerson said Mr. Rafferty “writes with the sweet melodiousness of Paul McCartney and sings with John Lennon’s weary huskiness.”
Mr. Emerson discerned “a prayerful quality” in Mr. Rafferty’s voice, reminiscent of “the dim dawn after a dark night of the soul.”
Almost from his birth in Paisley, Scotland, on April 16, 1947, Gerald Rafferty knew plenty about life’s dark side. He and his mother would hide from his father to avoid being beaten when he stumbled home drunk, Mr. Gray wrote. But music pervaded the family’s life, as young Gerry assimilated Roman Catholic hymns, traditional folk music, 1950s pop and even the Irish rebel tunes his deaf father bellowed.
Mr. Rafferty dropped out of school at 15 and went to work in a butcher shop. On weekends he and a friend, Mr. Egan, played in a local group, the Mavericks. After bouncing about a bit, Mr. Rafferty and Mr. Egan reunited in Stealers Wheel, whose debut album included “Stuck in the Middle.”
“Stuck in the Middle,” written as a parody of many of Bob Dylan’s songs, ridiculed a music industry cocktail party, complaining, “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”
By 1975, Stealers Wheel had broken up after recording three albums, and Mr. Rafferty spent the next three years in legal disputes over contracts. Finally, in 1978, he was free to record again and signed with United Artists. “City to City,” a solo effort, was his first album for the label. Its centerpiece song, “Baker Street,” featured a saxophone solo by Raphael Ravenscroft that became so popular it was said to spark a global increase in saxophone sales.
Mr. Rafferty went on to record several more albums, including “Night Owl,” which made it to the Top Five in England and the Top 20 in the United States in 1979. Other albums followed, some of which garnered good reviews but none of which approached Mr. Rafferty’s earlier success.
He contributed a vocal to the soundtrack of the 1983 film “Local Hero,” and produced the Proclaimers’ 1987 hit “Letter From America.”
Mr. Rafferty’s marriage to Carla Ventilla ended in divorce. He is survived by his daughter, Martha, a brother and a granddaughter.
In the 2009 interview, Mr. Rafferty called the music industry “something I loathe and detest.” Nevertheless, he earned nearly $125,000 a year in royalties for “Baker Street” alone.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
Helen Wills Moody, Tennis Champion, Dies at 92
(Jan. 3, 1998)
Calvin Coolidge, 30th President, Dies at 61
(Jan. 6, 1933)
Dizzy Gillespie, Jazz Giant, Dies at 75
(Jan. 7, 1993)
Hirohito, Japan’s Emperor, Dies at 87
(Jan. 7, 1989)
Emily Greene Balch, Pacifist, Dies at 94
(Jan. 11, 1961)
Coco Chanel, the Couturier, Dies at 87
(Jan. 11, 1971)
Ray Kroc, Man Behind McDonald’s, Dies at 81
(Jan. 15, 1984)
Ida Tarbell, Who Exposed Standard Oil Trust, Dies at 86
(Jan. 17, 1944)
Cecil De Mille, Movie Pioneer, Dies at 77
(Jan. 22, 1959)
Johnny Weissmuller, Athlete and Movie Tarzan, Dies at 79
(Jan. 22, 1984)
Lyndon Johnson, 36th President, Dies at 64
(Jan. 23, 1973)
Queen Victoria, Who Reigned for Six Decades, Dies at 82
(Jan. 23, 1901)
Al Capone, Gangster, Dies at 48
(Jan. 26, 1947)
Nellie Bly, Journalist, Dies at 56
(Jan. 28, 1922)
Mahalia Jackson, Singer and Civil Rights Symbol, Dies at 60
(Jan. 28, 1972)
Robert Frost, Poet, Dies at 88
(Jan. 30, 1963)
William Butler Yeats, Irish Poet and Playwright, Dies at 73
(Jan. 30, 1939)
Mohandas Gandhi, Hindu Reformer and Leader, Dies at 80
(Jan. 31, 1948)
Ann
