Culture Icons... R.I.P

Discussion in 'Art & Culture' started by R1D2, Aug 25, 2012.

  1. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Kofi Awoonor

    Kofi Awoonor (13 March 1935 – 21 September 2013) was a Ghanaian poet and author whose work combined the poetic traditions of his native Ewe people and contemporary and religious symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization. He started writing under the name George Awoonor-Williams. He taught African literature at the University of Ghana. Professor Awoonor was among those who were killed in the September 2013 attack at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, where he was a participant at the Storymoja Hay Festival

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Awoonor was born in Ghana when it was still called the Gold Coast. He was the eldest of 10 children in the family. He was educated at Achimota School and then proceeded to the University of Ghana. While at university he wrote his first poetry book, Rediscovery, published in 1964. Like the rest of his work, Rediscovery is rooted in African oral poetry. In Ghana, he managed the Ghana Film Corporation and founded the Ghana Play House. His early works were inspired by the singing and verse of his native Ewe people.

    He then studied literature at University College London, and while in England he wrote several radio plays for the BBC. He spent the early 1970s in the United States, studying and teaching at Stony Brook University (then called SUNY at Stony Brook). While in the USA he wrote This Earth, My Brother, and My Blood. Awoonor returned to Ghana in 1975 as head of the English department at the University of Cape Coast. Within months he was arrested for helping a soldier accused of trying to overthrow the military government and was imprisoned without trial and was later released. The House by the Sea is about his time in jail. After imprisonment Awoonor became politically active. he continued to write mostly nonfiction. Awoonor was Ghana's ambassador to Brazil from 1984 to 1988, before serving as his country's ambassador to Cuba. From 1990 to 1994 Awoonor was Ghana's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, where he headed the committee against apartheid. He was also a former Chairman of the Council of State.

    On 21 September 2013, Awoonor was among those killed in an attack at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. He was in Kenya as a participant in the Storymoja Hay Festival, a four-day celebration of writing, thinking and storytelling, at which he was due to perform on the evening of his death. His nephew Nii Parkes, who was attending the same literary festival, has written about meeting him for the first time that day. The Ghanaian government confirmed Awoonor's death the next day. His son Afetsi was also shot, but was later discharged from hospital.

    Awoonor's remains were flown from Nairobi to Accra, Ghana, on 25 September 2013.

    His body was cremated and buried at particular spot in his hometown at Weta in the Volta Region. Also there was no crying or mourning at his funeral all according to his will before death.

    Works

    PoetryRediscovery and Other Poems (1964)
    Night of My Blood (1971) – poems that explore Awoonor's roots, and the impact of foreign rule in Africa
    The House By the Sea (1978)
    The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems (to be published in 2014)

    Understanding and interpreting his works

    It is said that Awoonor wrote a great number of his poems as if he was envisioning his own demise. But he is a peculiar and unique writer, one who strives, almost too hard, to bring his ancestry and culture into his poems, sometimes even borrowing words from the local Ewe dialect. Being such a strong and avid practitioner of the traditional religion meant that he was of a relict species. Especially for one so highly educated, it was an even rarer phenomenon. That awareness, not only that he was a relict specimen as an individual, but that the entire culture was suffering entropy, may have come through his poems in a manner that would suggest at first that he was writing about his mortal end. Besides the personal and cultural lament, Awoonor also shrewdly decried what he would have considered the decadent spectre of Western influences( religions, social organisation and economic philosophy) on the history and fortunes of African people in general. He would lambast the thoughtless exuberance with which Africans themselves embraced such things, and gradually engineered what he would have considered a self-degradation that went far beyond a loss of cultural identity. He would often construct his writings to look at these things through the lens of his own Ewe culture.

    Novels

    This Earth, My Brother (1971) – a cross between a novel and a poem
    Comes the Voyager at Last (1992)
    Non-fictionThe Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literature of Africa South of the Sahara (1975), Anchor Press, ISBN 0-385-07053-5
    Ghana: A Political History from Pre-European to Modern Times (1990)
    The African Predicament: Collection of Essays (2006)

    Further reading

    Robert Fraser, West African Poetry: A Critical History, Cambridge University Press (1986), ISBN 0-521-31223-X
    Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates (eds), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Basic Civitas Books (1999), ISBN 0-465-00071-1 – p. 153
    Lauret E. Savoy (ed.), Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology, Eldridge M. Moores, and Judith E. Moores (Trinity University Press, 2006).
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Michel Brault

    Michel Brault, OQ (25 June 1928 – 21 September 2013) was a Canadian cinematographer, cameraman, film director, screenwriter, and film producer. He was a leading figure of Direct Cinema, characteristic of the French branch of the National Film Board of Canada in the 1960s. Brault was a pioneer of the hand-held camera aesthetic.

    In the 1960s, Brault collaborated with the French Nouvelle Vague, notably with Jean Rouch, and introduced the cinéma vérité techniques in Europe. He directed his first documentary short film for the National Film Board, the influential Les Raquetteurs in 1958. He was also the cinematographer for a number of key Canadian films of the 1970s such as Claude Jutra's Kamouraska and Mon Oncle Antoine and Francis Mankiewicz's Les Bons débarras.

    In 1974, Brault directed Les Ordres, about the 1970 October crisis and won the 1975 Cannes Film Festival award for best director and the 1975 Canadian Film Award for best direction. His 1989 film The Paper Wedding was entered into the 40th Berlin International Film Festival.

    Brault died of a heart attack on the afternoon of 21 September 2013, while en route to the Film North – Huntsville International Film Festival, where he was to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award. According to festival founder Lucy Wing, Brault had arrived at Pearson International Airport after a flight from his home in Montreal, accompanied by his son, Sylvain. Brault had begun the drive north to Huntsville by limousine when he began to feel ill, approximately one hour after his arrival in Toronto.



    Quebec film legend Michel Brault, known for cinéma-vérité style, dies By: Peter Howell Movie Critic, Published on Sun Sep 22 2013

    Acclaimed Quebec filmmaker Michel Brault has died at age 85, in the midst of weekend honours for his influential work as a director and cinematographer.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Acclaimed Quebec filmmaker Michel Brault, in the midst of weekend honours for his influential work as both director and cinematographer, has died at age 85.

    Brault succumbed to a heart attack Saturday afternoon while travelling on Highway 400 to the Film North festival in Huntsville, Ont. He was to receive the Bull’s Eye Lifetime Achievement Award for an award-winning career that included directing the 1974 October Crisis docudrama Les ordres and lensing the 1971 coming-of-age drama Mon oncle Antoine.

    Festival founder Lucy Wing praised Brault as “a champion of Canadian cinema and among Canada’s short list of trailblazing filmmakers of the 20th century.”

    Brault, known for his cinéma-vérité style of realistic filmmaking, has also been credited as a major influence on the Prisonerskidnap thriller Prisoners, the current No. 1 film at the North American box office.

    Prisoners director Denis Villeneuve, a fellow Quebecer, told the Star during the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month that he thought of Brault while making his film, which stars Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal.

    “There’s inner strength — kind of Nordic strength — and calm in his work,” Villeneuve said.

    “When I was designing the shots for Prisoners, I was thinking of Michel Brault. There’s a lot of confidence and simplicity and strength in his work, and a lot of ambition at the same time. I’m trying to reach that same kind of simplicity. Hollywood is a tough task, but as long as I can keep my identity and my signature, the rest is not important.”
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Peter Solan (25 April 1929 – 21 September 2013) was a Slovak film director and documentarian. He is considered part of the Czech New Wave movement.

    Solan was born in Banská Bystrica. He graduated from the Prague Film Academy of Performing Arts in 1953. He was given the Igric Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1994, and in 2004 he was awarded the Prize of the Slovak Minister of Culture for Extraordinary Creative Contribution to Slovak Cinema.

    Works

    TV and film

    The Devil Never Sleeps (Czech: Čert nespí) (1956)
    The Man Who Knocks (Czech: Muž, ktorý klope) (1956)
    The Man Who Never Returned (Czech: Muž, ktorý sa nevrátil) (1959)
    The Boxer and Death (Czech: Bozer a smrt) (1962)
    A Face in the Window (Czech: Tvár v okne) (1963)
    The Case of Barnabáš Kos (Czech: Prípad Barnabáš Kos) (1964)
    Before Tonight Is Over (Czech: Kým sa skoncí táto noc) (1966)
    Seven Witnesses (Czech: Sedem svedkov) (1967)
    ...and Be Good (Czech: ...A sekať dobrotu) (1968)
    Dialogues 20-40-60 (Czech: Dialóg 20-40-60) (1968)
    Famous Dog (Czech: Slávny pes) (1971)
    And I'll Run to the Ends of the Earth (Czech: A pobezim az na kraj sveta) (1979)
    Anticipation (Czech: Tušenie) (1982)
    About Fame and Grass (Czech: O sláve a tráve) (1984)

    Documentaries

    Negative Development Process (Czech: Negativní vyvolávací proces)(1951)
    Thou Shalt Not Steal (Czech: Nepokradneš) (1973)
    Why They Avoid School (Czech: Prečo chodia poza školu) (1976)
    Everything Has Its Time (Czech: Všetko má svoj čas) (1976)



    Tribute to Peter Solan

    A film testimony of the uniqueness of man

    Retrospectives of films by Peter Solan are always something of a dubious adventure. After years of being classified among the ideologically unreliable, after various phases of being cast into the spotlight and then marginalised, Solan maintains an ironic attitude towards annual awards ceremonies, honours and attempts to stage "major comebacks”. In the now forgotten film episode The Anniversary Day (Deň výročia, 1971), which he based on one of the many satirical short stories by dramatist and screenwriter Peter Karvaš on this theme, he reveals his conviction that a person’s life and work cannot simply be summarised or, indeed, taken for granted.

    In Solan’s case this is reflected in a gradual move to profile himself as someone who favours the creative quest and, on principle, rejects the idea of a one-way, ready-made career. "The moment we feel secure in what we’re doing, we will have lost the battle”, he stated in 1967, ten years after he began fighting the regime to retain his right to his own film beliefs, a time when he still had the enthusiasm to do so – for example, in The Boxer and Death (Boxer a smrť, 1962), subjected to four years of administrative sabotage, then in The Barnabáš Kos Case (Prípad Barnabáša Kosa, 1964), which took seven years to solve, or the film which suffered the longest delay, with eight years of approval and postponement, Before Tonight Is Over (Kým sa skončí táto noc, 1965). His strong definition of life attitudes and his distinctive creative signature, the persistent development of his own brand of film ethics – film as a statement of civil or social commitment – made him a "typical case” of a filmmaker with a question mark attached to his name. According to film critic Pavel Branko, during this particular period Solan was the most persecuted director in Slovak film.

    Despite enduring a regime of scrutiny and punishment throughout his career, Peter Solan was nevertheless responsible for several firsts in the history of Slovak cinema, particularly with regard to genre. He made the first Slovak film satire (The Devil Never Sleeps / Čert nespí, 1956), the first detective story (The Man Who Never Returned / Muž, ktorý sa nevrátil, 1959), and he established a name for himself with the first psychological drama set in a concentration camp, The Boxer and Death. Then, after a period of exile during the Normalisation era (working at the Short Film Studio from 1970) and after returning to features, he finally surprised the industry by turning out a children’s film, And I’ll Run to the End of the World (A pobežím až na kraj sveta, 1979). These works were suddenly placed in the spotlight on the strength of a series of films Solan had made by the year 1965, yet he refused to see them as competing against one another or transcending past masterpieces – in particular, The Boxer and Death and Before Tonight Is Over. Focus on unresolved (sensitive) ethical issues continued to be a fundamental parameter of Solan’s films, along with his discreet direction, cultivating an inconspicuous "style of tension” and intensifying the film testimony with a depiction of the strengths and weaknesses of people in extreme situations. He did not rely on effect, controversy or trends – he simply made quiet films.

    Peter Solan states that he became a filmmaker by accident, after interrupting his studies in medicine and also thanks to the post-war cinema in his native Banská Bystrica. There he was still able to absorb the impact of American film as well (Capra, Ford, Wyler). In 1949 he began studying film direction at Prague’s FAMU, where Soviet film was now discussed in more depth (Kalatozov). He graduated from the film faculty with a portrait of the writer Fraňo Kráľ (1954) and subsequently – after the death of Stalin and Gottwald – joined forces with the likes of Štefan Uher, Tibor Vichta and Martin Slivka to create the first "dangerous” wave of university educated filmmakers who, in their own country, inevitably came up against the parochial management and artistic sterility of Slovak film.

    After returning home from his studies, Peter Solan made several short compulsory exercises (documentaries, feature propaganda pieces) under the umbrella of the Documentary Film Studio, where novices would try their hand at feature film. With his transition to features and also with the risks involved in entering a new cinematic genre, Solan could only really be sure of a successful debut with the satire The Devil Never Sleeps (1956) if he teamed up with a filmmaker who already had some experience, namely František Žáček. The adaptation of three short stories from the book of the same name by Peter Karvaš not only provided Solan with an opportunity for legitimate criticism of society in a communal satire about the ills of Socialist building (young people’s accommodation problems, alcoholism in the workplace), but it also opened up his lifelong filmosophical theme, namely the quest for contradiction: resolution and ambivalence, the typical and the unique, or the normal and the stigmatised – all in relation to the individual and society. From 1957 onwards he extended his screenplay collaboration with his compatriot Karvaš to include a similarly intensive creative dialogue with Tibor Vichta which, however, was problematic right from the start, when they were working together on their first screenplay for Before This Day Ends (Prv než sa skončí tento deň). During the 1970s, after his ideologically motivated expulsion from the Feature Film Studio (together with Juraj Jakubisko), Solan was only allowed to team up with Vichta for harmless film commissions (Why They Avoid School / Prečo chodia poza školu); otherwise it was a case of embarking upon projects that were almost "illegal” (Nemecká Process/ Nemecká).

    Registered on file as a complicated case, Solan thus gradually developed his own form of film expression from the end of the 1950s onwards – his own micro-genre, film as a case. His reconstructions of social cases, often with references to court trials (A Face in the Window / Tvár v okne, …And Be Good / ... a sekať dobrotu!), were not accusatory or judgemental. Film as a case is, for Solan, above all a certain type of testimony. "I don’t want to be a prosecutor or judge. I simply want to be an honest and moral witness who is prepared to speak of what he knows about the case,” he declared in 1966. To testify through film means to take issue with the way things are – to call into question clear standpoints and quick judgements, to bring new contexts and contradictions into play and, by introducing several possible views, to prompt the audience to ask its own questions. Film ought to point to life’s limited options and forgotten consequences (Seven Witnesses / Sedem svedkov, Balcony Full of Nappies / Balkón plný plienok). Solan’s film testimonies document various "situations of choice”: when a decision has to be made, what, in fact, makes us decide? Commitment in Solan’s case is not about taking sides, but about defending true impartiality, i.e. multi-vocality.

    For Solan, film is an instrument which allows him to focus on his quest for uniqueness and spontaneity in human behaviour, decision-making and actions – whether this is the boxer Komínek (The Boxer and Death) or the mother who has to decide about the fate of her disabled child (Small Opinion Poll / Malá anketa). He strives to maintain an open (ambiguous) mind with regard to the state of things and constantly questions the boundaries of personal responsibility. The more films he made, the more the viewer sensed the true measure of his dedicated yet unobtrusive participation. Above all else, his perceptive, intimate film style reflects his respect for others and for the uniqueness of their life experiences (choices). This constitutes the defining mode of his film conception.

    Martin Kaňuch

    http://www.kviff.com/en/about-festival/history-past-years/2009/program/?s=296
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    René Solís Peña (July 25, 1925 - September 21, 2013) was a baseball pitcher who played in the minor leagues, for the Cuba national baseball team and in the Cuban League.

    Minor league career

    He played in the minor leagues from 1948 to 1952 and from 1954 to 1957, going 87-70 in 244 games. He pitched in the Brooklyn Dodgers system from 1948 to 1952, the New York Yankees system in 1955 and the Cincinnati Reds system from 1955 to 1956. He was with unaffiliated teams in 1954 and in Mexico in 1957.

    In 1949, with the Miami Sun Sox, he was 20-9 with a 2.98 ERA in 39 games.

    Cuban national team

    He was a member of the Cuban team that won a bronze medal in the 1946 Central American and Caribbean Games, earning a victory in the competition.

    Cuban league career

    He pitched for Almendares from 1948 to 1950-1951. He joined Cienfuegos partway through the winter of 1950-1951 and finished the season there. He returned to Cuban league play in 1954-1955 for the first time in three seasons, pitching briefly for Cienfuegos.

    As a member of Almendares, he won a game in the 1949 Caribbean Series. He was also on the Almendares squad for the 1950 Caribbean Series, but did not pitch in the series.

    He was born in Victoria de las Tunas Cuba and died the U.S. state of Florida at the age of 88.
     
  8. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Roman Vlad

    Roman Vlad (29 December 1919 – 21 September 2013) was an Italian composer, pianist, and musicologist of Romanian birth. Born in Cernauti, Bukovina, he studied with Titus Tarnawski and Liviu Russu in Romania earning a piano diploma. He moved to Rome in 1938 to study at the University of Rome and later the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. He eventually became an Italian citizen in 1951.

    Vlad's early career was as a performer and composer; he won the Enescu Prize in 1942 for his Sinfonietta, and the Silver Ribbon Award for his film music. He was the artistic director of Accademia Filarmonica Romana from 1955–58 and again from 1966-69. As well, he was the president of the Italian Society for Contemporary Music in 1960 and musical consultant for the third RAI national radio and television network. He was later a member of the Directory Council of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia and artistic consultant for the Ravenna Festival and the Spoleto Festival.

    Vlad was an eclectic composer whose works range from symphonies to operas to chamber music to "The Japanese Seasons, 24 Haiku." He was a noted composer of film music, including the score for René Clair's La Beauté du diable (1950) and Pictura: An Adventure in Art (1951).

    Vlad wrote significant books about music, including The History of Twelve-Tone Music (1958) and biographies of Stravinsky and Dallapiccola. Works for the general public include Understanding Music and "Introduction to Musical Civilization.

    Vlad died, aged 93, in Rome on 21 September 2013.
     
  9. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Walter Wallmann

    Walter Wallmann (24 September 1932 – 21 September 2013) was a German politician who has served as Lord Mayor of Frankfurt (1977–1986).

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Between 1986 and 1987 he was the first Federal Minister for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. The ministry was established by chancellor Helmut Kohl on June 6, 1986 in response to the Chernobyl disaster and formed from departments of the Ministries of the Interior, of Agriculture and of Health. Important state regulations during his tenure were the change of the car tax law for the introduction of low emission cars and the detergent Act of March 5, 1987.

    He left the Federal Ministry for Environment to become Minister-President of Hesse (1987–1991). As Minister-President he also served as President of the Bundesrat from May to October 1987. He was a member of the Christian Democratic Union.
     
  10. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Heiko "Ko" Wierenga (March 6, 1933 – September 21, 2013) was a Dutch politician and member of the Labour Party (PvdA). He served as the Mayor of the municipality of Enschede from September 1977 until April 1994.[1] Under Wierenga, artwork by Joop Hekman, called Het ei van Ko, was installed near Enschede's town hall in 1984.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Prior to becoming Mayor, Wierenga served in the House of Representatives from 1967 to 1977. He then worked for the Centraal Bureau voor de Arbeidsvoorziening as leaving the mayor's office in 1994.

    Wierenga was honored as a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion on April 29, 1987.

    Ko Wierenga died on September 21, 2013, at the age of 80.
     
  11. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Gary Brandner

    Gary Phil Brandner (May 31, 1930 – September 22, 2013) was an American horror author best known for his werewolf themed trilogy of novels, The Howling. The first book in the series was loosely adapted as a motion picture in 1981. Brandner's second and third Howling novels, published in 1979 and 1985 respectively, have no connection to the film series, though he was involved in writing the screenplay for the second Howling film, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf. The fourth film in the Howling series, Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, is actually the closest adaptation of Brandner's original novel, though this too varies to some degree.

    Brandner's novel Walkers was adapted and filmed for television as From The Dead Of Night. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1988 horror film Cameron's Closet.

    Born in the Midwest and much traveled during his formative years, Brandner published more than 30 novels, over 100 short stories, and also wrote a handful of screenplays. He attended college at the University of Washington where he was a member of Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. After graduating in 1955, he worked as an amateur boxer, bartender, surveyor, loan company investigator, advertising copywriter, and technical writer before turning to fiction writing. Brandner lived with his wife, Martine Wood Brandner, and several cats in Reno, Nevada.

    He died of esophageal cancer in 2013.

    Novels

    Walkers
    Hellborn
    The Brain Eaters
    Mind Grabber
    Living Off the Land
    The Boiling Pool
    Cameron's Closet (AKA Cameron's Terror)
    Cat People: A Novelization of the Film based on the story by DeWitt Bodeen
    Experiment
    Floater
    The Sterling Standard
    Offshore
    ROT
    Vitamin E: Key to Sexual Satisfaction
    Billy Lives
    Dressed Up for Murder
    Quintana Roo (AKA Tribe of the Dead)
    The Wet Good-Bye
    The Players
    A Rage in Paradise
    Carrion
    Saturday Night In Milwaukee
    Off the beaten track in London (A Nash travel guide)
    Doomstalker

    The Howling series

    1.The Howling
    2.Return of the Howling
    3.The Howling III: Echoes

    The Big Brain series

    1.The Aardvark Affair
    2.The Beelzebub Business
    3.Energy Zero



    Rest in Peace Author Gary Brandner By Steve Barton September 23rd, 2013

    Sad news has hit the literary world today as Gary Brandner, author of The Howling, has passed away. Details are a bit on the scant side at the moment, but you can read on for what we do know.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    The news came from a message from Brandner's wife over on his Facebook page.

    "From his wife, Martine, to all fans of Gary Brandner, I must tell you he died Sunday morning of cancer of the esophagus. All those marvelous e-mails and quips will no longer be forthcoming. A bright light has certainly gone out."

    Gary wrote several print sequels to The Howling, and that book spawned one of the greatest modern werewolf movies of our time, which was then turned into a lengthy film franchise. His contributions to the genre will always be appreciated, and he will be greatly missed. We here at Dread Central would like to take this time to offer our sincerest of condolences to Gary's friends, family, and constituents.

    Godspeed, good sir.
     
  12. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Jane Connell

    Jane Sperry Connell (née Bennett; October 27, 1925 – September 22, 2013) was an American character actress. She was born in Berkeley, California to Louis Wesley and Mary (née Sperry) Bennett.

    Connell began her career with her husband, Gordon, entertaining in San Francisco night clubs such as the The Purple Onion and The Hungry I. Eventually the couple moved to New York City, where Connell made her Off-Broadway debut in the 1955 revival of The Threepenny Opera, a long-running hit at the Theatre de Lys. In the London production of Once Upon a Mattress, Connell starred as Winifred, the role that Carol Burnett originated in New York.

    Connell's most prominent success came in 1966 when she was cast as Agnes Gooch in the original Broadway production of Jerry Herman's Mame. She recreated the role in the 1974 screen adaptation after the film's star, Lucille Ball, became dissatisfied with Madeline Kahn, who had been signed originally to play Gooch.

    Only four-foot-eleven, Connell was described as a master of the large comic gesture in The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, which described her as "a tiny woman with a giant, squeaking voice".

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Jane Connell was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance in Me and My Girl (1986). Additional Broadway credits include New Faces of 1956 (1956); Drat! The Cat! (1965); Dear World (1969), once again supporting Angela Lansbury; the short-lived 1983 revival of Mame, in which Lansbury reprised her 1966 lead role; Lend Me a Tenor (1989); Crazy for You (1992); and Moon Over Buffalo (1995), starring Carol Burnett. Her last Broadway appearance was in the role of pianist Jeannette Burmeister in The Full Monty, succeeding Kathleen Freeman, who died during her run in show.

    Jane and Gordon Connell enjoyed extensive theatre careers. They appeared together on Broadway in Lysistrata (November 1972), starring Melina Mercouri in the title role. She appeared in New York City Center Encores! production of Call Me Madam (February 1995), and the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall concert presentation of Noël Coward's Sail Away (November 1999).

    Jane Connell's film roles included Kotch and House Calls. Her television appearances included Bewitched, Green Acres, All in the Family, Love, American Style, M*A*S*H, Maude, Good Times and Law & Order.

    She married Gordon Connell, an actor and musician, in 1948. They remained married until her death in 2013.

    Jane Connell died on September 22, 2013, aged 87, at the Lillian Booth Actors Home of the Actors Fund in Englewood, New Jersey, from undisclosed causes. She is survived by her husband of 65 years and their two daughters, Melissa and Maggie.



    Jane Connell, Character Actress Known for Mame, Dies at 87 By Robert Simonson 24 Sep 2013

    Jane Connell, a career character stage actress who, despite her diminutive stature, commanded many a musical comedy stage—most notably, through her portrayal of the daffy Agnes Gooch in the original stage production of Jerry Herman's Mame—died Sept. 22. She was 87.

    Only four-foot-eleven, Ms. Connell was nonetheless a master of the large comic gesture. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre described her as "a tiny woman with a giant, squeaking voice." As the meek, frumpy Gooch in Mame, she was the mouse to Auntie Mame's lion, and the actress made the most of the comic difference between the characters. "Miss Connell…plays it better than it deserves," wrote Stanley Kauffmann in the New York Times, "with the caricature rather than character that it asks."

    So identified with the role did she become that, for a time, she was often cast in similar parts. "In recent years, she hasn't appeared often enough on the New York stage," complained Mel Gussow in The New York Times in 1971, "and when she has, she has tended to be type-cast. Would she always play Agnes Gooch to someone else's Auntie Mame?" It was a production of She Stoops to Conquer Gussow was reviewing at the time, and the critic found Ms. Connell conquered the assignment. "She strides through this production with grace and confidence, never playing for laughs, but getting most of them."

    Ms. Connell played Gooch again in a 1983 revival of the show, again opposite Angela Lansbury. She was also one of the few players from the original staging who reprised her part in the poorly received 1974 film version. (She replaced the fired Madeline Kahn.)

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


    Jane Connell in 1956

    She enjoyed a stage comeback and won a Tony Award nomination in 1987 for her performance as the snooty Dutchess of Dene in Me and My Girl.

    Jane Sperry Bennett was born in Berkeley, CA, on Oct. 27, 1927. She became Jane Connell when she married Gordon Connell, an actor and musician. She and her husband began their careers working at the famous San Francisco nightclubs The Purple Onion and The Hungry I. Upon moving to New York, Ms. Connell found work in the long-running revival of The Threepenny Opera at the Theatre de Lys. Not yet 30, she played the middle-aged Mrs. Peachum.

    She portrayed the hapless Princess Winnifred (the role that made Carol Burnett a star) in the London premiere of Once Upon a Mattress. She was part of the Leonard Stillman revue New Faces of 1956, alongside Maggie Smith and Virginia Martin, and in the short-lived musical Drat! The Cat!

    While never an above-the-marquee star or household name, Ms. Connell was respected in theatre circles. The actress also knew where her talents lay early on. "I was always eccentric, never a conventional beauty," she told the Houston Chronicle in 2004. "I grew up in the Depression, the youngest of four kids. I wanted to make people laugh, because making my family laugh helped us forget our concerns. And I found that I could do it."

    Following the success of Mame, Jerry Herman used her again in 1970's Dear World, a musical adaptation of The Madwoman of Chaillot. She found another champion in playwright Ken Ludwig. She starred in Ludwig's hit farce Lend Me a Tenor on Broadway in 1989. The writer was so impressed with her audition that he jumped over a row of seats to get the ear of the director, Jerry Zaks. She would return to work in Ludwig's less successful Moon Over Buffalo in 1995. In between, she was cast in director Mike Ockrent and choreographer Susan Stroman's revivifying treatment of the old Gershwin musical Crazy for You, which had a reworked book by Ludwig.

    Off-Broadway credits included The Golden Apple, No Shoestrings, Put It in Writing, Drat!, The Rivals and the one-person show The Singular Dorothy Parker in 1985.

    In 2001, after actress Kathleen Freeman died in the midst of the Broadway run of the musical The Full Monty, Jane Connell assumed her role of the salty, seen-it-all accompanist attempting to turn a group of blue-collar workers into credible male strippers.
     
  13. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Kenneth Eager (2 January 1929 - 22 September 2013) was a British stone sculptor, and wood carver, who was part of the guild established by Eric Gill in Ditchling, Sussex. From 1945 Eager was an assistant to Joseph Cribb at the guild, and remained at the Guild after Cribbs death in 1967, finally leaving at the guilds closure in 1989.

    Eager commuted daily to Ditchling from his home in Brighton. Notable work by Eager included the headstone at Clayton, West Sussex, for Sir Norman Hartnell, dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth II, the Pelham Memorial in Falmer's parish church, and he carved a baptismal font for Telscombe Catholic church.

    Eager married Audrey Sumner in 1954, they had a son. Sumner survived him at his death.
     
  14. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    David Hunter Hubel (February 27, 1926 – September 22, 2013) was a Canadian neurophysiologist noted for his studies of the structure and function of the visual cortex. He was co-recipient with Torsten Wiesel of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with Roger W. Sperry), for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system. For much of his career, Hubel was the John Franklin Enders University Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. In 1978, Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.

    Early life and education

    Hubel was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, to American parents in 1926. His paternal grandfather emigrated as a child to the United States from the Bavarian town of Nördlingen. In 1929, his family moved to Montreal, where he spent his formative years. His father was a chemical engineer and Hubel developed a keen interest in science right from childhood, making many experiments in chemistry and electronics. From age six to eighteen, he attended Strathcona Academy in Outremont, Quebec about which he said, "[I owe] much to the excellent teachers there, especially to Julia Bradshaw, a dedicated, vivacious history teacher with a memorable Irish temper, who awakened me to the possibility of learning how to write readable English." He studied mathematics and physics at McGill University, and then entered medical school there.

    Career

    In 1954, he moved to the United States to work at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as an assistant resident in Neurology. He was later drafted by the army and served at Walter Reed Hospital. There, he began recording from the primary visual cortex of sleeping and awake cats. At Walter Reed, he invented the modern metal microelectrode out of Stoner-Mudge lacquer and tungsten, and the modern hydraulic microdrive, for which he had to learn basic machinist skills to produce. In 1958, he moved to Johns Hopkins and began his collaborations with Wiesel, and discovered orientation selectivity and columnar organization in visual cortex. One year later, he joined the faculty of Harvard University.

    Research

    The Hubel and Wiesel experiments greatly expanded the scientific knowledge of sensory processing. The partnership lasted over twenty years and became known as one of the most prominent research pairings in science. In one experiment, done in 1959, they inserted a microelectrode into the primary visual cortex of an anesthetized cat. They then projected patterns of light and dark on a screen in front of the cat. They found that some neurons fired rapidly when presented with lines at one angle, while others responded best to another angle. Some of these neurons responded to light patterns and dark patterns differently. Hubel and Wiesel called these neurons simple cells." Still other neurons, which they termed complex cells, detected edges regardless of where they were placed in the receptive field of the neuron and could preferentially detect motion in certain directions. These studies showed how the visual system constructs complex representations of visual information from simple stimulus features.

    Hubel and Wiesel received the Nobel Prize for two major contributions: firstly, their work on development of the visual system, which involved a description of ocular dominance columns in the 1960s and 1970s; and secondly, their work establishing a foundation for visual neurophysiology, describing how signals from the eye are processed by the brain to generate edge detectors, motion detectors, stereoscopic depth detectors and color detectors, building blocks of the visual scene. By depriving kittens from using one eye, they showed that columns in the primary visual cortex receiving inputs from the other eye took over the areas that would normally receive input from the deprived eye. This has important implications for the understanding of deprivation amblyopia, a type of visual loss due to unilateral visual deprivation during the so-called critical period. These kittens also did not develop areas receiving input from both eyes, a feature needed for binocular vision. Hubel and Wiesel's experiments showed that the ocular dominance develops irreversibly[verification needed] early in childhood development. These studies opened the door for the understanding and treatment of childhood cataracts and strabismus. They were also important in the study of cortical plasticity.

    Furthermore, the understanding of sensory processing in animals served as inspiration for the SIFT descriptor (Lowe, 1999), which is a local feature used in computer vision for tasks such as object recognition and wide-baseline matching, etc. The SIFT descriptor is arguably the most widely used feature type for these tasks.

    Personal life

    Hubel married Ruth Izzard in 1953; she died February 17, 2013.[12] The couple had three sons and four grandchildren. He died in Lincoln, Massachusetts from kidney failure on September 22, 2013 at the age of 87.



    The David H. Hubel papers can be find at The Center for the History of Medicine at the Countway Library, Harvard Medical School.
    http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HMS.Count:med00112
     
  15. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Álvaro Mutis Jaramillo

    Álvaro Mutis Jaramillo (August 25, 1923 – September 22, 2013) was a Colombian poet, novelist, and essayist and author of the compendium The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. He was awarded the 2002 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

    Early life

    Mutis was born in Bogotá[3] and lived in Brussels from the age of two until eleven, where his father, Santiago Mutis Dávila, held a post as a diplomat. They would return to Colombia by ship for summer holidays. During this time Mutis' family stayed at his grandfather's coffee and sugar cane plantation, Coello. For Álvaro Mutis, the impressions of these early years, his reading of Jules Verne and of Pablo Neruda's Residencia en la tierra, and, especially, contact with "el trópico" (the tropics), are the mainspring of his work. Mutis studied high school in Bogotá under the tutelage of the Colombian poet Eduardo Carranza. Although he never finished school, he entered the literary world in Bogotá as a poet, a member of the Cántico group that emerged in 1940s. In 1948 Mutis and Carlos Patiño published a chapbook of poems called La balanza. He lived in Mexico City since 1956, gaining renown there as the result of Octavio Paz's positive reviews of his work.

    Literary career

    Mutis' poetry was first published in 1948 and his first short stories in 1978. His first novella featuring Maqroll, La nieve del Almirante (The Snow of the Admiral) was published in 1986 and gained him popular and critical acclaim. He has received many literary awards, including the Prix Médicis (France, 1989), Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras (Spain, 1997), Premio Miguel de Cervantes (Spain, 2001), and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (United States, 2002), for The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, a volume collecting all seven novellas about Maqroll the Gaviero.

    Mutis has combined his career as a writer of poetry and prose with a diverse set of non-literary occupations. Like his protagonist Maqroll, Mutis traveled widely in his professional roles including five years as Standard Oil's public relations director and over 20 years as sales manager for Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Pictures in their Latin American television divisions. Latin Americans first became familiar with his voice when he did the narration for the Spanish-language television version of The Untouchables.

    The late Octavio Paz was a champion of Mutis' early poetry. In the 1950s, Mutis spent 15 months in a Mexican prison as a consequence of his handling of money intended for charitable use by Standard Oil. His experience in prison had a lasting influence on his life and work, and is chronicled in the book Diario de Lecumberri.

    Critical reception

    Mutis' close friend, Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, called him "one of the greatest writers of our time."

    Mutis' works are most widely read in Latin America and Europe. Mutis is not well known in the anglophone world, probably because he is not easy to categorize. His literary work is not part of what is commonly understood in the American academy as "Latin American Literature". Maqroll, his most well-known character, is of indeterminate origin, nationality, age and physiognomy. He is not evidently from Latin America and does not represent anything particularly Latin American in character. Maqroll is a solitary traveler who brings a stranger's detachment to his encounters and his lovers; he searches for meaning in a time of violence and inhumanity. In this sense some literary critics has compared Maqroll to Sophocles' Oedipus.

    Awards and honors

    1988 Premio Xavier Villaurrutia
    1997 Premio Principe de Asturias
    1997 Reina Sofia de Poesía
    2001 Miguel de Cervantes Prize
    2002 Neustadt International Prize for Literature


    Tequila

    by Alvaro Mutis

    translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander


    —for María and Juan Palomar

    Tequila is a clean flame that clambers up the walls
    and shoots over tiled roofs, relief to despair.
    Tequila isn’t for sailors
    because it blurs the navigational instruments
    and dismisses the wind’s tacit orders.
    But tequila, on the other hand, enraptures those returning by train
    and those driving the train, because it stays faithful
    and blind in its loyalty to the rails’ parallel delirium
    and to hurried greetings in the stations
    where the train pauses to testify to
    its inscrutable destination, errant, subject to the inevitable laws.
    There are trees under whose shadow it is wonderful to drink it
    with the parsimony of those who preach in wind
    and other trees where tequila can’t stand the shade
    that dims its powers and in whose branches it stirs up
    a flower blue as the warnings on bottles of poison.
    When tequila waves its fringed, serrated flag,
    the battle halts and armies return
    the order they intended to impose.
    Often two squires accompany it: salt and lime.
    But it is always ready to start the conversation
    without any more help than its lustrous clarity.
    From the start, tequila doesn’t recognize borders.
    But there are propitious climates
    just as certain hours suggest it, knowing full well: to fix
    the time when night arrives at its stores,
    in the splendor of an afternoon without obligations,
    in the highest pitch of doubt and hesitation.
    It is then when tequila offers us its consoling lesson,
    its infallible joy, its unreserved indulgence.
    Also, there are foods that call for its presence:
    those springing from the ground from which it, too, was born.
    Inconceivable if they didn’t bond with millenary certainty.
    To break that pact would be a grave breach with dogma
    prescribed to allay the rough job of living.
    If “gin smiles like a dead girl,”
    tequila spies on us with the green eyes of a prudent sentry.
    Tequila has no history, no anecdote
    confirming its birth. It is so from the beginning
    because it is the gift of the gods
    and, usually, when they promise something they aren’t telling tales.
    That is the office of mortals, children of panic and habit.
    Such is tequila and so it will be
    keeping us company
    all the way to the silence from which no one returns.
    Praise be, then, until the end of our days
    and praise the daily effort toward denying that end.


    Alvaro Mutis was born in Bogota, Colombia, in 1923 and educated in Belgium. Since 1956 he has lived primarily in Mexico where he has worked for Columbia Pictures TV. Mutis has published several volumes of fiction, including The Adventures of Magroll. (1996)

    Forrest Gander’s most recent books of poetry are Deeds of Utmost Kindness and Lynchburg. With the poet C. D. Wright, he edits Lost Roads Publishers and works outside of Providence. (1996)
     
  16. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Luciano Vincenzoni (Italian pronunciation: [luˈtʃano vintʃenˈtsoni]; 7 March 1926 – 22 September 2013) was an Italian screenwriter, known as the "script doctor". He wrote for some 65 films between 1954 and 2000.

    Vincenzoni was born in Treviso, Veneto. He is probably best known in world cinema for his script writing of Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 1966, but he also wrote for a number of other Spaghetti westerns.

    He was capable on the business side of film making and his strong relations with popular and important people in the industry helped him to sell For a Few Dollars More to the European vice-president of United Artists. During the bargaining session, in front of Sergio Leone, he made an on-the-spot deal for the upcoming The Good the Bad and the Ugly, which was then just a vague idea in his mind at the time. Vincenzoni had started to develop the story all the way back from his earlier film, called La Grande Guerra (1959), about two Italian soldiers in World War I. The title The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was his idea, which he created on the spot.

    Filmography

    His screenwriting credits also include:

    Death Rides a Horse
    Malèna
    La vita agra
    The Birds, the Bees and the Italians
    Seduced and Abandoned
    Orca
    A Fistful of Dynamite
    Once Upon a Crime
    Raw Deal
    The Mercenary
     
  17. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Harry Goodwin (21 July 1924[1] – 23 September 2013[2]) was a British photographer, known for his images of pop musicians and sports personalities. He was the resident photographer of the BBC Television programme Top of the Pops from its inception in 1964 until 1973.

    Born in [Fallowfield], Manchester, Goodwin was the son of a bookmaker and grew up in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester. After being drafted into the R.A.F. in 1943, Goodwin's initial photography experience was loading cameras in reconnaissance planes flying over Japanese Territory in Burma. When his unit moved to Kuala Lumpur he borrowed the equipment to take photographs of the local girls to sell to his comrades. After the war ended he returned to Manchester and began taking pictures professionally on the beauty pageant and boxing circuits. His first celebrity subject was comedian Ken Dodd. In the 1960s a job as a scene-shifter at the BBC's Manchester Studios gave him the opportunity to shoot television personalities. When in 1964 the studio hosted Top of The Pops for its first 12-week run, producer Johnnie Stewart hired Goodwin to shoot the bands. He was paid ₤30 a week and given a credit at the end of the programme. His pictures were used as backdrops for non-appearing artists and the chart rundown. He continued until 1973, missing only six shows in that time, in the process photographing every single act that entered the Top 30 of the UK Singles Chart, except for Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Often he would be dispatched to get a shot of an absent act, and was known for his tenacity in gaining photo opportunities against all odds.

    Goodwin first photographed The Beatles in 1963 at The Apollo in Manchester, and went on to have a close relationship with the band. In 2007 Yoko Ono opened a permanent exhibit of Goodwin's photographs at the John Lennon Airport in Liverpool. The exhibit came about after the airport director, Neil Pakey chanced upon some of Goodwin's photographs on display in a Chorlton-cum-Hardy barber's.

    Trained as a boxer as a young man, Goodwin had a lifelong affinity for sports and boxing in particular. He gained accreditation with the British Boxing Board of Control photographing many champions including Muhammad Ali. His photograph of Sir Matt Busby was used for his plaque at Old Trafford.

    Goodwin was always reluctant to sell prints and only the later retrospective exhibits gave the public the opportunity to view his work.

    Several Goodwin prints are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London, as is a picture of him, with Muhammad Ali and John Conteh. The 1999 Icons of Pop exhibit included his photographs of Sandie Shaw and Tom Jones. In 2003, after John Lennon had been voted #10 (by national vote) from "one hundred Britons", a Goodwin portrait of Lennon was selected for inclusion in the NPG/BBC publication Great Britons: The great debate. The 2006 exhibit Beatles on the Balcony featured Goodwin's work.

    In 2004 the Museum of Lancashire in Preston mounted an exhibit Legends: The Photographs of Harry Goodwin. The exhibit moved to Lancaster City Museum in 2005 and returned to Preston in 2007.

    In 2008, a Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit about the costumes of The Supremes included his photographs, as did an accompanying book. The exhibit moved to The Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool before travelling on to Birmingham and Bristol.

    In December 2009, Goodwin was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Lord Mayor of Manchester.

    In 2010, the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted a major exhibit of his photographs My Generation: The Glory Years of British Rock – Photographs from Top of the Pops 1964–1973, and again published an accompanying book. In October 2011, My Generation: The Glory years of British Rock was displayed for free at The Public in West Bromwich.

    In 2012, the University of Salford mounted an exhibition of Goodwin's photographs in their Clifford Whitworth Library, after he donated an archive of his work to the university.

    In 2013 Goodwin became unwell, and was admitted to Trafford General Hospital. While there he received calls from Paul McCartney, Alex Ferguson, and Barry Gibb. Goodwin died in September 2013, aged 89.

    Books

    The Story of The Supremes, (Daryl Easlea) V&A Publishing (2008). ISBN 978-1-85177-552-1
    My Generation: The Glory Years of British Rock (w/Alywn W. Turner) V&A Publishing (2010), ISBN 978-1-85177-597-2
     
  18. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Anthony (Tony) Hawkins, the prolific actor who played Bob Morris in the long-running series Prisoner, died last week in a Kyneton hospital.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Although he was an actor for 50 years, as a young adult in the 1950s he was a police officer in London. He didn’t have a long stay in policing, feeling disillusioned with the justice system, and turned to acting. Ironically, many of his future roles involved playing members of the police force.
    His early acting career was in the United Kingdom, with his first Australian TV role in the 1973 series Ryan.
    He went on to appear in numerous dramas during the Seventies, including Matlock Police, Division 4, Homicide, Power Without Glory, Bluey, Against The Wind and Skyways.
    He first appeared in Prisoner in 1979 as a police officer. He then returned to the series the following year for the role of Bob Morris, father of one of the prison inmates and who later wed prison officer Meg Jackson (Elspeth Ballantyne). The role continued on a recurring basis for around two years.
    He had a lead role in the Crawfords police drama Special Squad in 1984. Other credits during the Eighties included Water Under The Bridge, The Last Outlaw, Women Of The Sun, Prime Time, Body Business, Carson’s Law, The Flying Doctors, Inside Running and The Magistrate.
    He later appeared in Ocean Girl, Tales Of The South Seas, The Damnation Of Harvey McHugh, Kelly, Bony, Janus, Mercury, Blue Heelers, Marshall Law and Saddle Club.
    His last credited role was in the ABC telemovie The Great Air Race.
    The funeral for Anthony Hawkins will be held in Lancefield on Monday, which would have been his 81st birthday.

    He died from cancer on 23 September 2013, aged 80.
     
  19. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Rex Hobcroft AM (12 May 1925 – 23 September 2013) was an Australian pianist, conductor, composer, teacher, competition juror and music administrator. He was the first Australian pianist to play the complete cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas in public; he directed both the Tasmanian and New South Wales State Conservatoria of Music; and he co-founded the Sydney International Piano Competition.

    Rex Kelvin Hobcroft was born in Renmark, South Australia in 1925. During World War II he flew aircraft in the RAAF, and after the war he was a commercial pilot for Ansett Australia for some time, while studying part-time at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, from which he graduated in 1948 with First Class Honours. He travelled to Paris for further study at the École Normale de Musique in 1949–50.
    In 1952 he became an Examiner for the Australian Music Examinations Board, and from 1952–56 he worked as a school music specialist with the Music, Speech and Drama Branch of the Western Australian Education Department.
    In July 1957 he wrote incidental music for a production in St George's Cathedral, Perth of T. S. Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral.

    In 1957 Rex Hobcroft was appointed foundation head of the keyboard department of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane. He was only the second pianist appointed to a full-time teaching position at a conservatorium in Australia. He retained this position until 1961.
    During these years he was also active as a solo, concerto and chamber music pianist and vocal accompanist, and travelled widely in Australia. He also presented a series of music appreciation programs on ABC Radio.

    In 1961 Hobcroft became Foundation Head of the Music Department of the University of Tasmania in Hobart. In 1962 he presented the complete cycle of piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven in a series of weekly recitals in Hobart, a first for an Australian pianist. Among the audience was the poet Gwen Harwood, and she was inspired to dedicate a number of poems to Rex Hobcroft (including Four Impromptus and Estuary). The following year, Hobcroft introduced Harwood to the composer Larry Sitsky, which proved to be the start of an artistic collaboration that eventually produced six operas: The Fall of the House of Usher (1965), Lenz (1970), Fiery Tales (1975), Voices in Limbo (1977), The Golem (1980, performed 1993), and De Profundis (1982)
    He organised a National Composers' Seminar in Hobart in 1963. This was attended by a majority of Australia's then recognised composers. In conjunction with a similar seminar in 1965, he conducted the world premieres of three Australian operas. These included The Fall of the House of Usher (19 August 1965, Theatre Royal, Hobart). He was later a co-founder and conductor of the Tasmanian Opera Company.

    In 1964, Rex Hobcroft was appointed the founding Director of the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music, a position he retained until 1971.
    During that time (1967), he travelled to the United States, Canada, England and Asia as a Tasmanian Churchill Fellow, studying music education methods.
    In 1968 he studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts.

    Hobcroft directed the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music (now known as the Sydney Conservatorium of Music) between 1972 and 1982. The year after he took over, the first jazz course to be offered by an Australian tertiary institution commenced there. This followed an approach by the jazz musician Don Burrows. He also oversaw the first courses in church music and electronic music, a rich visiting artists program, and the establishment of regional music centres. Other courses and activities expanded on an unprecedented scale, and Hobcroft's influence over ten years is considered as significant as that of Sir Eugene Goossens in the 1950s. During his leadership, the Conservatorium adopted the modern educational profile recognised today. His vision of a "Music University" was realised, in which specialised musical disciplines including both classical and jazz performance, music education, composition and musicology enriched each other.
    In 1973 he conducted Larry Sitsky's The Fall of the House of Usher in what was the first evening performance of an opera in the Sydney Opera House.
    From 1972 to 1982, he was President of the Federated Music Clubs of Australia.

    In 1976 Rex Hobcroft initiated and co-founded the Sydney International Piano Competition, along with Claire Dan and Robert Tobias. He was a jury member for the inaugural competition in 1977, and again for the 1981, 1985 and 1988 competitions. In that time he introduced many innovations that have been adopted by several other international competitions.
    In 1981, Peter Sculthorpe dedicated to Hobcroft his piano piece Mountains, which had been commissioned by the Piano Competition.[14] James Penberthy's Bedlam Hills for chorus and piano is dedicated "to horny Hobcroft".
    After retiring from the New South Wales Conservatorium, he returned to Perth, Western Australia. But formal retirement did not mean an end to his musical activities. He chaired the Western Australian State Government's Conservatorium Committee. This recommended the establishment of a Conservatorium of Music in that state, which was implemented in 1985 as the UWA School of Music.
    From 1992 to 1998 he was Patron of the Australian International Conservatorium.
    Hobcroft was a supporter of the Suzuki method of music teaching for many years. He introduced it to the Tasmanian and Sydney conservatoria, and was the Patron of the New South Wales and later the Western Australian arms of the Suzuki Talent Education Association of Australia.

    Rex Hobcroft was married and divorced three times, to Victoria, Loretta (Lory) Lightfoot and Perpetua Durack-Clancy. He was father of four children and grandfather of six.
    He wrote an unpublished autobiography, titled Australia's Con man. The manuscript forms part of the National Library of Australia's holdings of Rex Hobcroft papers.
    He died in Perth on 23 September 2013, aged 88.
     
  20. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Annette Kerr (born Catherine Annette Kerr Peacock; 2 July 1920 – 23 September 2013) was a Scottish actress of film, television and stage.

    During her childhood, Kerr moved with her family from her birthplace in Scotland to Watford, Hertfordshire, where he father worked as a physiotherapist. She made her theatrical debut at the Watford Palace Theatre, and later trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
    Frequent reference to Kerr is made in The Kenneth Williams Diaries (edited by Russell Davies). Kerr and Williams were close friends, and worked together in several stage productions. following their first meeting in 1949. At one point, Williams proposed to her.
    Her television appearances included roles in series such as UFO (1970), 2point4 children (1991-9, as Dora Grimes) and London's Burning (1992). Her last credited TV work was One Foot in the Grave (1995, as Ruth). This marked her second appearance in the series, following a minor part as "Lady in Teashop" (1992).
    She died at the actors' retirement home Denville Hall, where she had been resident, in London on 23 September 2013, aged 93.
    Selected filmography[edit]
     
  21. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Christopher John Koch AO (16 July 1932 – 23 September 2013) was an Australian novelist, best known for his 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously, which was adapted into an award-winning film. He twice won the Miles Franklin Award (for the The Doubleman in 1985, and Highways to a War in 1996). In 1995 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for contribution to Australian literature.

    Koch was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1932. He was educated at Clemes College, St Virgil's College, Hobart High School and the University of Tasmania. After graduating, he joined the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) as a cadet journalist. He left Hobart to travel in south Asia and Europe, and ended up in London where he worked for several years until he returned to Australia to avoid national service in the British Army. While working in London as a waiter and a teacher, Koch began working on his first novel, The Boys in the Island, which he left with his agent when he returned to Australia.
    Koch's first published works were several poems published in The Bulletin and the literary journal Southerly. While back at the ABC as a radio producer, The Boys in the Island was published in the UK, with the positive reviews encouraging Koch to eventually take up writing full-time in 1972. In the early 1960s, Koch was awarded a writing fellowship to Stanford University, where he taught literature and was associated with Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).
    His novel The Year of Living Dangerously, set in Jakarta during the fall of the Sukarno regime, was made into a film directed by Peter Weir and starring Sigourney Weaver, Mel Gibson and Linda Hunt. The book was loosely inspired by his brother's (Philip Koch) experience as an Australian journalist in Indonesia during that period.
    Koch died at his home in Hobart on 23 September 2013, aged 81. He had been diagnosed with cancer twelve months earlier.

    Koch married his first wife, Irene Vilnois, in 1959. Their son, Gareth Koch (born 1962), is a classical guitarist. He married his second wife, Robin Whyte-Butler, in the late 1990s, and she lived with him in Sydney and Tasmania,[3][6] and was with him when he died in 2013.

    Books
    Further reading
    Noel Henricksen, Island and Otherland: Christopher Koch and his books (Educare, 2003).



    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  22. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Paul Kuhn (12 March 1928 – 23 September 2013) was a German jazz musician, band leader, singer and pianist.[1] He was the band leader of the SFB Big Band, the orchestra of the Sender Freies Berlin, the TV-Station of West Berlin, part of ARD. He was the conductor of the German entry in the 1972 Eurovision Song Contest.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


    Kuhn was born a the son of a croupier in Wiesbaden. In 1936, at the age of 8, he had a public gig at the 'Funkausstellung' in Berlin, playing the accordion. Some years later, he discovered jazz music (which was frowned upon during the nazi time (1933-1945)). In 1944, he was in Paris and had some gigs to entertain soldiers of the Wehrmacht, who still occupied Paris.
    After V-Day (8 May 1945), the USA formed an occupation zone in parts of Germany, amongst them the region around Frankfurt. Kuhn was hired by AFN (American Forces Network), he was live on radio almost every day, alone or with his band. He adopted the style and sound of Glenn Miller (1904-1944).
    In the 1950s, he arranged and composed entertainment music. Around 1955, he increasingly launched pop songs, sung and played by himself. During the sixties, more and more west German households bought a TV; music shows, big bands and singers were very successful. In 1968, Kuhn was named head of the entertainment orchestra of Sender Freies Berlin.
    In 1980, this band was dissolved and Kuhn moved to Cologne and founded his own orchestra.
    Starting in 2000, he toured with Max Greger, Hugo Strasser and the Big Band of SWR (Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk).
    At the end of 2011, Kuhn travelled to San Francisco to record a CD (The L.A. Session, with John Clayton and Jeff Hamilton). The album was released in 2013.
    His most known hits were Der Mann am Klavier (1954), Es gibt kein Bier auf Hawaii (1963) and Die Farbe der Liebe (1958 in the charts).

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  23. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    Trevor Lummis (25 August 1930 - 23 September 2013) was an English writer and historian. He was Honorary Treasurer of the Oral History Society and held an Honorary Fellowship in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex.
    He spent ten years as an Able Seaman in the Merchant Navy, before resuming studies as a mature student at the New Battle Abbey College. He subsequently graduated from the University of Edinburgh, University of London and University of Essex. He specialised in 19th and 20th century social and oral history.
    Drew University listed Lummis among their faculty in 2011.
    Lummis was a historical consultant to the The Bounty Hunters, a television documentary on the work of a team from James Cook University, Queensland, which was diving on the wreck of HMS Bounty and doing other archeological work on Pitcairn Island. It was transmitted in March 1999 on Channel 4, British Television.
    At the University of Essex his research work was in social history through oral history methods. After working as research assistant on Family Life and Work Experience before 1918, he was senior research officer on The Family and Community Life of East Anglian Fishermen (Social Science Research Council grant HR 2656/1), which focused in particular on the working environment and its effect on industrial and community relations.
    He subsequently worked on The Systematic Analysis of Life Histories (Social Science Research Council grant HR 7841), which coded oral interviews for computer archiving and analysis. All projects were directed by Paul Thompson, and Lummis was the sole researcher on the two numbered projects. He is a past Honorary Treasurer of the Oral History Society and held an Honorary Fellowship in the Department of Sociology at Essex.
    During the above period he taught on the Social History courses both at undergraduate and graduate level. He also worked as a tutor-counsellor for the Open University Social Science Course. Other teaching was with the London Programme of Drew University, USA.
     

Share This Page