R.i.p. 2012

[hammerfan]

Joe Paterno, former head football coach at Penn State, of lung cancer.

[_____V_____]

James Farentino Dead; Actor Dies Of Heart Failure At 73

01/24/12 11:18 PM ET

LOS ANGELES — Actor James Farentino, who appeared in dozens of movies and television shows, died Tuesday in a Los Angeles hospital, according to a family spokesman.

He was 73.

Farentino died of heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Hospital after a long illness, said the spokesman, Bob Palmer.

Farentino starred alongside Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen in the 1980 science fiction film "The Final Countdown." The movie featured a modern aircraft carrier that travels back in time to Pearl Harbor hours before the Japanese attack.

Farentino also starred opposite Patty Duke in 1969's "Me, Natalie."

In 1967, he won a "Most Promising Newcomer" Golden Globe for his performance in the comedy "The Pad and How to Use It."

He also had recurring roles on "Dynasty," "Melrose Place," "The Bold Ones: The Lawyers" and "ER," playing the estranged father to George Clooney's character.

In 1978, he was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Saint Peter in the television mini-series "Jesus of Nazareth."

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1938, Farentino is survived by two sons, David and Saverio.

[ZombieDrone]

RIP James Farentino

Although to me he'll always be remembered for starring in the Video Nasty Dead & Buried.

[_____V_____]

Excalibur Star Nicol Williamson Dies
Exorcist III actor was 73

25 January 2012 | Source: The Daily Telegraph

Scottish actor Nicol Williamson has died aged 73, reports The Daily Telegraph. According to his son Luke, the stage and screen actor died of esophageal cancer on December 16. He was best known for his roles in Excalibur and The Exorcist III, as well as a long and much acclaimed stage career.

Williamson was a star turn as Merlin in John Boorman's dark folk fantasy Excalibur, in which he was reluctantly cast alongside former lover Helen Mirren. Boorman's mischief-making paid off: the pair share the best scenes in the film, with Mirren's Morgana and Williamson's wizard playing wittily off against each other. Williamson and Mirren had worked together once before, although much less auspiciously, in a radical staging of Macbeth.

The Hamilton-born actor made his name in John Osbourne's Inadmissible Evidence for which he received great acclaim and, later, a Tony award on Broadway. Osborne later described him as the greatest actor since Brando, a claim another playwright, Samuel Beckett, would corroborate. He was an actor, said Beckett, "touched by genius".

Williamson's last screen outing came in 1997’s comic-book noir Spawn in which he played a demon-cum-mentor to Michael Jai White's superhero. "By the time he'd made Spawn, he was done with it," Luke Williamson told Empire. More recently, he'd worked with his son on musical collaborations that showcased his diverse interests.

The actor's rich and occasionally tempestuous life took him not just to Hollywood, but into the corridors of power. Harold Wilson was so impressed by his performance in Tony Richardson's Hamlet that he commended him to Richard Nixon. The result was an invitation to perform at one of the president's 'Evening at the White House' series.

But Williamson was prouder of his performance as a different kind of politician, in the movie-length adaptation of The Resistable Rise Of Arturo Uri. He played a Hitler-like protagonist in the BBC's potent take on Bertolt Brecht's rise-of-the-Nazis parable. He also spoke fondly of a rare bad guy role alongside Sidney Poitier and Michael Caine in 1975 thriller The Wilby Conspiracy. Richard Lester's Robin And Marian, meanwhile, brought a much-valued opportunity to work with Audrey Hepburn.

The actor, who was known as a straighforward, private man, leaves his son, Luke. "He was the most honest, funny and intelligent man I have ever had the pleasure of knowing," writes Luke on Williamson's official website. "He was my father and words cannot adequately express how proud I am of him."


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/f...in-penury.html

[Fearonsarms]

Ditto ZombieDrone he was awesome in that RIP-also to Nicol Williamson Exorcist three is fantastic .

[fortunato]

Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos died yesterday after being hit my a motorcycle.



http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/theo-...ulos-1935-2012

[hammerfan]

"Welcome Back, Kotter" actor Robert Hegyes, who portrayed Juan Epstein, has died of an apparent heart attack at age 60.

http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/...es-dies-at-60/

[newb]

Originally Posted by hammerfan

"Welcome Back, Kotter" actor Robert Hegyes, who portrayed Juan Epstein, has died of an apparent heart attack at age 60.

http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/...es-dies-at-60/

damn....he was 60 already.....I'm getting old

RIP

ALSO James Farentino....a staple of 70s & 80s TV

AND Nicol Williamson.....Great in Excalibur

[neverending]

I'm amazed that none of Nicole Williamson's obits mention The 7% Solution. He made a great Sherlock Holmes.

[_____V_____]

Eiko Ishioka, Multifaceted Designer and Oscar Winner, Dies at 73
January 26, 2012

Eiko Ishioka, a designer who brought an eerie, sensual surrealism to film and theater, album covers, the Olympics and Cirque du Soleil, in the process earning an Oscar, a Grammy and a string of other honors, died on Saturday in Tokyo.

She was 73.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, her studio manager, Tracy Roberts, said.

Trained as a graphic designer, Ms. Ishioka was for decades considered the foremost art director in Japan; she later came to be known as one of the foremost in the world.

Ms. Ishioka won an Academy Award for costume design in 1992 for “Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’ ” directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Her outfits for the film included a suit of full body armor for the title character (played by Gary Oldman), whose glistening red color and all-over corrugation made it look like exposed musculature, and a voluminous wedding dress worn by the actress Sadie Frost, with a stiff, round, aggressive lace collar inspired by the ruffs of frill-necked lizards.

These typified Ms. Ishioka’s aesthetic. A deliberate marriage of East and West — she had lived in Manhattan for many years — it simultaneously embraced the gothic, the otherworldly, the dramatic and the unsettling and was suffused with a powerful, dark eroticism. Her work, whose outsize stylization dazzled some critics and discomforted others, was provocative in every possible sense of the word, and it was meant to be.

Ms. Ishioka was closely associated with the director Tarsem Singh, for whom she designed costumes for four films. In the first, “The Cell” (2000), she encased Jennifer Lopez, who plays a psychologist trapped by a serial killer, in a headpiece that resembled a cross between a rigid neck brace and a forbidding bird cage.

“Jennifer asked me if I could make it more comfortable,” Ms. Ishioka told The Ottawa Citizen in 2000, “but I said, ‘No, you’re supposed to be tortured.’ ”

For Mr. Singh, she also costumed “The Fall” (2006), an adventure fantasy, and “Immortals,” a violent tale of ancient Greece released last year. Their fourth collaboration, “Mirror Mirror,” an adaptation of “Snow White,” is set for release in March.

Ms. Ishioka’s other film work includes the production design of “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” Paul Schrader’s 1985 film about the doomed writer Yukio Mishima. That year the Cannes Film Festival jury awarded her — along with the film’s cinematographer, John Bailey, and its composer, Philip Glass — a special prize for “artistic contribution.”

For the Broadway stage, Ms. Ishioka designed sets and costumes for David Henry Hwang’s 1988 drama “M. Butterfly,” for which she earned two Tony nominations, and, most recently, costumes for the musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

She won a Grammy Award in 1986 for her design of Miles Davis’s album “Tutu,” whose cover is dominated by an Irving Penn photograph of Mr. Davis, shot in extreme close-up and starkly lighted.

In other work, Ms. Ishioka designed uniforms and outerwear for selected members of the Swiss, Canadian, Japanese and Spanish teams at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. She was also the director of costume design for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Ms. Ishioka’s portfolio extended to the circus and a magic show. She designed costumes for Cirque du Soleil’s “Varekai” (2002) and was the visual artistic director of the illusionist David Copperfield’s 1996 Broadway show, “Dreams and Nightmares.”

She also designed costumes for the singer Grace Jones’s “Hurricane” tour in 2009 (they were noteworthy even by Ms. Jones’s lofty standards for the outré) and directed Bjork’s music video “Cocoon.” Her books include “Eiko by Eiko” (1983) and “Eiko on Stage” (2000), both available in English.