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Obituaries
William Peter Blatty (January 7, 1928 – January 12, 2017) was an American writer and filmmaker.[1] The Exorcist, written in 1971,[1] is his most well-known novel; he also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, for which he won an Academy Award, and wrote and directed the sequel The Exorcist III.[1]

His most recent works include the novels Elsewhere (2009), Dimiter (2010), and Crazy (2010). In 2013, Demons Five, Exorcist Nothing: A Fable (1996) and Dimiter (2010) were re-released as revised editions with new covers and interior artwork. Each were limited to 250 signed copies.[2] The former had its subtitle changed from A Fable to A Hollywood Christmas Carol.

Blatty's upcoming publications include The Exorcist For The 21st Century featuring "an original and never before published adaptation for a new miniseries of Blatty's classic novel,"[3] and a non-fiction book that is "part funny memoir and part proof of life after death," titled Finding Peter: A True Story Of The Hand Of Providence And Evidence Of Life After Death.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Peter_Blatty
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist  but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.


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Youguang Zhou (Chinese: 周有光; Zhou Yaoping, 13 January 1906 – 14 January 2017) was a Chinese linguist, sinologist, and supercentenarian, often credited as the "father of (Hanyu) Pinyin",[1][2] the official romanization for Mandarin in the People's Republic of China.

Zhou was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province on 13 January 1906.[1][3] Zhou enrolled in St. John's University, Shanghai, in 1923, where he majored in economics and took supplementary coursework in linguistics.[3] He left during the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925 and transferred to Guanghua University, from which he graduated in 1927.[3] Zhou spent time as an exchange student in Japan,[3] and spent his early career working as a banker and economist overseas (mainly in New York City), but returned to Shanghai[3] in 1949 when the People's Republic was established.[1][2]

In 1955, the government placed Zhou at the head of a committee to reform the Chinese language in order to increase literacy. While other committees oversaw the tasks of promulgating Mandarin Chinese as the national language and creating simplified Chinese characters, Zhou's committee was charged with developing a romanization to represent the pronunciation of Chinese characters.[1] Zhou said the task took about three years, and was a full-time job.[1] Pinyin was made the official romanization in 1958, although then (as now) it was only a pronunciation guide, not a substitute writing system.[4]



During the Cultural Revolution Zhou was sent to live in the countryside and be "re-educated", like many intellectuals at that time.[1][2] He spent two years in a labour camp.[5]

After 1980, Zhou worked with Liu Zunqi and Chien Wei-zang on translating the Encyclopædia Britannica into Chinese, earning him the nickname "Encyclopedia Zhou".[3] Zhou continued writing and publishing since the creation of Pinyin; for example, his book Zhongguo Yuwen de Shidai Yanjin 中國語文的時代演進, translated into English by Zhang Liqing, was published in 2003 as The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts.[6] In total he wrote ten books since 2000, some of which have been banned in China. In his old age he became an advocate for political reform, and was critical of the Communist Party of China's attacks on traditional Chinese culture when it came into power.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_Youguang
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist  but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.


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RIP astronaut Gene Cernan
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Mary Tyler Moore (December 29, 1936 – January 25, 2017) was an American actress, known for her roles in the television sitcoms The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977), in which she starred as Mary Richards, a thirty-something single woman who worked as a local news producer in Minneapolis; and The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966), in which she played Laura Petrie, a former dancer turned Westchester homemaker, wife and mother.[1][2][3][4] Her notable film work includes 1967's Thoroughly Modern Millie and 1980's Ordinary People, in which she played a role that was very different from the television characters she had portrayed, and for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.[5][6][7]

Moore was active in charity work and various political causes, particularly the issues of animal rights and diabetes mellitus type 1. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes early in the run of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.[8] She also suffered from alcoholism, which she wrote about in her first of two memoirs. In May 2011, Moore underwent elective brain surgery to remove a benign meningioma.[9] She died from cardiopulmonary arrest because of pneumonia at the age of 80 on January 25, 2017.[10]


Much more here.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist  but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.


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(01-25-2017, 03:50 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Mary Tyler Moore (December 29, 1936 – January 25, 2017) was an American actress, known for her roles in the television sitcoms The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977), in which she starred as Mary Richards, a thirty-something single woman who worked as a local news producer in Minneapolis; and The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966), in which she played Laura Petrie, a former dancer turned Westchester homemaker, wife and mother.[1][2][3][4] Her notable film work includes 1967's Thoroughly Modern Millie and 1980's Ordinary People, in which she played a role that was very different from the television characters she had portrayed, and for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.[5][6][7]

Moore was active in charity work and various political causes, particularly the issues of animal rights and diabetes mellitus type 1. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes early in the run of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.[8] She also suffered from alcoholism, which she wrote about in her first of two memoirs. In May 2011, Moore underwent elective brain surgery to remove a benign meningioma.[9] She died from cardiopulmonary arrest because of pneumonia at the age of 80 on January 25, 2017.[10]


Much more here.

Oh No!!! Sad
#MakeTheDemocratsGreatAgain
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Yes, another figure of Silent comedy... someone who kept us from getting too full of ourselves by compelling us to contemplate our own fallibility.

Now we get a sick joke of a President. He really is a sick joke. My apology if you think that excessively partisan... but we are too deadly serious today.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist  but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.


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Last Perry Mason main character has died.

Barbara Hale, who played Della Street on ‘Perry Mason,’ dies at 94

Barbara Hale, a Hollywood leading lady in the 1940s and 1950s, in an undated photo. (Universal Pictures )
By Adam Bernstein January 27 at 5:00 PM

Barbara Hale, a wavy-haired model and Hollywood leading lady of the 1940s and 1950s who warbled with Frank Sinatra in his first big film role and had a long television career as the devoted secretary Della Street to Raymond Burr’s tireless defense lawyer Perry Mason, died Jan. 26 at her home in Sherman Oaks, Calif. She was 94.

Ms. Hale was the matriarch of a show business family that included her late husband, actor Bill Williams, who starred in the 1950s western series “The Adventures of Kit Carson,” and their son, William Katt, who played the title role in the early 1980s TV series “The Greatest American Hero,” confirmed the death and said the cause was complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Although Ms. Hale had a flourishing career in movies — often in wholesome roles opposite stars such as James Stewart, James Cagney and Robert Mitchum — she found her big-screen career overshadowed by her work on CBS’s “Perry Mason.”

The series aired from 1957 to 1966, making it one of the longest-airing courtroom shows in history, and Ms. Hale earned an Emmy Award for her role as Street. Two decades later, she reprised her role in more than two dozen made-for-TV movies for NBC.

Mason, who solved murder mysteries with his savvy as a cross-examiner, is the creation of novelist Erle Stanley Gardner.

Actress Barbara Hale in a promo shot for the movie "First Yank Into Tokyo" circa 1945. (RKO Radio Pictures )
There had been many Mason iterations: a low-budget movie series in the 1930s with titles such as “The Case of the Lucky Legs” and “The Case of the Curious Bride” and then as a radio show on CBS from 1943 to 1955, with a rotating cast of Masons and Streets.

The television series was propelled by the chemistry among its top cast: Burr as the brilliant courtroom tactician, William Hopper as the private investigator who helps Mason pull off his legal victories in down-to-the-wire dramatics, and Hale as the glamorous and unflappable secretary who gamely stays late at the office every day. The perpetually stymied adversary was the district attorney played by William Talman.

Ms. Hale, who won a 1959 Emmy for best supporting actress in a dramatic series, stayed with the show until it folded. Burr once called her “a remarkably intuitive actress. She has an instinct for doing exactly the right thing when it is needed.” The actor, who cultivated orchids in his spare time, named one after her.

She later appeared in movies such as the all-star disaster film “Airport” (1970) — as the wife of a pilot played by Dean Martin — and had a long sideline as a commercial pitchwoman for Amana kitchen appliances.

Ms. Hale and Burr — the surviving members of the old principal cast — reunited in 1985 for “Perry Mason Returns,” in which Mason takes leave from a judgeship to exonerate his former secretary from a murder charge. Ms. Hale’s son, William, played the private-eye role.

“Perry Mason Returns” was an enormous hit and led to a run of made-for-television movies. They tended to accent the personal, thoroughly platonic bond between Mason and Street far more than the old series.

As Ms. Hale was doing interviews to promote “The Case of the Telltale Talk Show Host,” which aired in 1993, she confided to a reporter, “This week, at the end of the show, very quietly and very surprisingly, Perry plants one on Della. It’s a first!”

After Burr’s death in 1993, the TV movies continued briefly with Ms. Hale as Street and Hal Holbrook playing a defense lawyer named “Wild Bill” McKenzie.

Barbara Hale was born April 18, 1922, in De Kalb, Ill., and grew up in Rockford, Ill., where her father was a landscape gardener. She won a beauty contest while in high school, and while attending the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, she began modeling.

For a time, she became known as the “Long Woolies Girl” for her form-fitting allure in warming undergarments.

RKO studios in Hollywood took notice of her striking looks and put her under contract for movie work. In a small role, she sang with Sinatra in “Higher and Higher” (1943). “I never had been so scared in my life,” she later told the Los Angeles Times, “but he’s been a very dear friend ever since.”

She rose to leading parts opposite Mitchum in “West of the Pecos” (1945) and the comedy-romance “Lady Luck” (1946) with Robert Young.

In “The Window” (1949), a first-rate thriller, she and Arthur Kennedy played the preoccupied parents of a tenement youth (Bobby Driscoll) who witnesses a murder and becomes the target of the killers. Ms. Hale also starred with Williams, her husband, in “The Clay Pigeon” (1949), a taut drama about a veteran who is framed on a murder charge. In “A Lion Is in the Streets” (1953), she was the sweet-natured wife to Cagney’s rabid political demagogue.

She co-starred with Larry Parks in “Jolson Sings Again” (1949), playing a wife of the entertainer Al Jolson, as Stewart’s spouse in the light comedy “The Jackpot” (1950), and in the title role in the costume romance “Lorna Doone” (1951), with Richard Greene.

Ms. Hale also was a leading lady in westerns such as “The Lone Hand” (1953) and “The Oklahoman” (1957), both with Joel McCrea, and “7th Cavalry” (1956), with Randolph Scott. In “The Far Horizons” (1955), with Fred MacMurray and Charlton Heston as the westward explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Ms. Hale played a love interest of the two men, along with Donna Reed as the Indian maiden Sacagawea.

In addition, Ms. Hale became a prolific performer on TV anthology series such as “Climax!,” “Schlitz Playhouse” and “Playhouse 90.” In the early 1980s, she appeared on “The Greatest American Hero” playing the mother of Katt’s character.

Ms. Hale wed Bill Williams, whose real name was Herman Katt, in 1946. He died in 1992. Besides their son, of Woodland Hills, Calif., survivors include two daughters, Johanna Katt and Juanita King, both of Van Nuys, Calif.; two half-brothers; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

In 1993, Ms. Hale told the Chicago Tribune that playing Della Street for so long was appealing for many reasons — among them, the character did not threaten to throw off her family life when she was a young mother.

“When we started, it was the beginning of women not working at home,” she said. “I liked that she was not married. My husband didn’t have to see me every week married to another man, and our children didn’t have to see me mothering other children.

“When [my son] Billy was in the first grade, we went to school for the first parent meeting, and on his desk were little projects he’d made — pictures of Daddy and Mommy and his sister and his animals. And underneath my picture . . . he’d written in inch-high block letters, ‘This is my mom. I love her. She is a secretary.’ ”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertain...5129071c1b

Interesting that I watched Bill Williams as the temperamental client in "The Crippled Cougar" last night on MeTV. I didn't know he was her husband. William Katt, their son, played Paul Drake Jr. in the early Perry Mason TV movies in the late 1980s.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive;
Eric M
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Mike Connors, brawny star of ‘Mannix’ TV detective series, dies at 91

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertain...151851a6ec
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive;
Eric M
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Sir John Vincent Hurt, CBE (22 January 1940 – 25 January 2017) was an English actor and voice actor whose career spanned six decades. He initially came to prominence for his supporting role as Richard Rich in the film A Man for All Seasons (1966). After this, he played leading roles as John Merrick in David Lynch's biopic The Elephant Man (1980), Winston Smith in a version of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), Mr. Braddock in the Stephen Frears drama The Hit (1984) and Stephen Ward in the drama depicting the Profumo affair, Scandal (1989). He is also known for his television roles such as Quentin Crisp in the television film The Naked Civil Servant (1975), Caligula in I, Claudius (1976) and the War Doctor in Doctor Who: Day of the Doctor (2013).[1][2]

Hurt's other films include the prison drama Midnight Express (1978), the science-fiction horror film Alien (1979), the adventure film Rob Roy (1995), the political thriller V for Vendetta (2006), the super-natural thriller "The Skeleton Key" (2005), the sci-fi adventure film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), the Harry Potter film series (2001–11), the Hellboy films (2004 and 2008) and the Cold War espionage film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). His character's final scene in Alien has been named by a number of publications as one of the most memorable in cinematic history.[3]

Recognised for his distinctive rich voice,[4] he also enjoyed a successful voice acting career in films such as Watership Down (1978), the animated The Lord of the Rings (1978), The Black Cauldron (1985) and Dogville (2003), as well as the BBC television series Merlin.

One of Hurt's last films is the biopic Jackie (2016). He will next be in the 2017 film Darkest Hour, as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, due to be released in November 2017. Among his honours, he received two Academy Award nominations, a Golden Globe Award and four BAFTA Awards, with the fourth being a Lifetime Achievement recognition for his outstanding contribution to British cinema.[5] He was knighted in 2015 for his services to drama.


Much more here.

Really noteworthy character here, as one of the most convincing villains in cinematic history:


A former Conservative Member of Parliament and Under-Secretary for Defence, Chancellor Sutler is the founder of Norsefire and is Britain's dictator. Hurt played a contrary role in another dystopian film: Winston Smith, a victim of the state in the film adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four.[11][12]

Smug, ruthless, bigoted, and despotic... I couldn't be thinking of... oh, no. It's not safe to think about such things.

Barbara Hale (April 18, 1922 – January 26, 2017) was an American actress best known for her role as legal secretary Della Street on more than 270 episodes of the long-running Perry Mason television series. She reprised the role in 30 Perry Mason movies for television.

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The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist  but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.


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John Hurt had some heavy duty roles over the yrs, but l remember him best as the dragon in Merlin. I've always been partial to Camelot stories
Heart my 2 yr old Niece/yr old Nephew 2020 Heart
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Richard Hatch 71, actor, pancreatic cancer. The original Apollo from Battlestar Galactica, and the only main actor to star in the remake.
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(02-08-2017, 10:25 AM)Bad Dog Wrote: Richard Hatch 71, actor, pancreatic cancer. The original Apollo from Battlestar Galactica, and the only main actor to star in the remake.

I thought you meant this Richard Hatch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ha...ontestant)

Smile
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(02-08-2017, 03:28 PM)The Wonkette Wrote:
(02-08-2017, 10:25 AM)Bad Dog Wrote: Richard Hatch 71, actor, pancreatic cancer. The original Apollo from Battlestar Galactica, and the only main actor to star in the remake.

I thought you meant this Richard Hatch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ha...ontestant)

Smile

No, that was the Cylon...

NBC story:

http://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/tv/ri...71-n718136
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The Springfield MO ABC affiliate used to cancel the old Battlestar Galactica, and replace it with religious programming. They feared right-wing pressure.
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(02-08-2017, 04:07 PM)Bad Dog Wrote:
(02-08-2017, 03:28 PM)The Wonkette Wrote:
(02-08-2017, 10:25 AM)Bad Dog Wrote: Richard Hatch 71, actor, pancreatic cancer. The original Apollo from Battlestar Galactica, and the only main actor to star in the remake.

I thought you meant this Richard Hatch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ha...ontestant)

Smile

No, that was the Cylon...

NBC story:

http://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/tv/ri...71-n718136

-- yeah, he was on All My Children back in the day too
Heart my 2 yr old Niece/yr old Nephew 2020 Heart
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Michael "Mike" Ilitch, Sr. (July 20, 1929 – February 10, 2017) was an American entrepreneur, founder and owner of the international fast food franchise Little Caesars Pizza. He owned the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League and Detroit Tigers of Major League Baseball.

Ilitch was at the center of Detroit's downtown redevelopment efforts; he purchased and renovated the Fox Theatre and relocated his business headquarters (Ilitch Holdings) there. He also owned Olympia Entertainment. A first generation American of Macedonian descent,[2][3] he was married to Marian Bayoff Ilitch.

Much more here.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist  but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.


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RlP Al Jarreau
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(02-12-2017, 07:49 PM)Marypoza Wrote: RlP Al Jarreau

A class act, and a good person.  He'll be missed.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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The jazz guy. That sucks.
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RlP Clarence Wolf Gut, the last of the WW2 code talkers.
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