Tag: Obit

RIP – James Van Der Beek

Van Der Beek shot to fame in 1998 as Dawson Leery, the teenage film buff who was as obsessed with Steven Spielberg as he was with his neighbour and lifelong crush, Joey Potter (played by Katie Holmes). Later that year, he was voted one of People Magazine’s Most Beautiful People in the World. On the 25th anniversary of the show starting, Van Der Beek wrote: “Twenty-five years ago today, my life changed. Not gradually, not day-by-day … instantly. It was the culmination of five years of auditioning, hundreds of hours on stage, thousands of hours travelling, preparing, dreaming, hoping, hearing ‘no’ and making up reasons to keep going. But the shift was overnight.”

The intense pressures of celebrity proved difficult to cope with given his youth. After Dawson’s Creek became a smash hit, he said in an interview: “Walking around at that time was very tricky because one autograph could turn into a mob scene. So I walked around in fear of teenage girls.”

James Van Der Beek, star of Dawson’s Creek, dies aged 48
Actor who also starred in Varsity Blues and Rules of Attraction revealed in 2024 he had been diagnosed with cancer

From the last Dawson’s Creek recap on Television Without Pity:

…which Dawson picks up at the office in Los Angeles. “It’s us!” Pacey and Joey squeal, offering him their congratulations. “I can’t wait until next season,” Joey says, and Dawson tells them that he can’t wait for the next day. Because he’s meeting Spielberg. Whatev. Pacey and Joey, like good friends (and unlike me), are thrilled for him. The three of the yammer about what he ought to wear to the meeting, as the camera pans to framed photo of Pacey, Joey, Dawson, and Jen, framed on Dawson’s desktop. “Say goodnight, not goodbye,” the soundtrack sings.

And that’s it. We’re out. Thanks for coming along for the ride. It was long and occasionally painful, but I don’t regret a second of it. See you around.

Calling Dr. Love – Kiss – RIP Ace Frehley

RIP Ace Frehley

Ace Frehley, the original lead guitarist and founding member of the glam rock band Kiss, who captivated audiences with his elaborate galactic makeup and smoking guitar, died Thursday. He was 74.

Frehley died peacefully surrounded by family in Morristown, New Jersey, following a recent fall, according to his agent.

Ace Frehley, Kiss’ original lead guitarist and founding member, dies at 74

Ha!
They call me (Dr. Love)
They call me Dr. Love (Calling Dr. Love)
I’ve got the cure you’re thinking of (Calling Dr. Love)

Ooh, they call me (Dr. Love)
I am the doctor of love (Calling Dr. Love)
I’ve got the cure you’re thinking of (Calling Dr. Love)

RIP – Marcel Ophuls

Filmmaker Marcel Ophuls has died at the age of 97. Recognized as one of the great documentarians of his era, he died on Saturday, as confirmed by his grandson, Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert.

Ophuls demanded — and commanded — his audience’s attention, in 4 plus hour documentaries like The Sorrow and The Pity and Hôtel Terminus.

Ophuls knew that by creating hours-long documentaries, he ran the danger of “not only seeming pretentious, but being pretentious.” But, as he told NPR in 1978, “there’s a relationship between attention span and morality. I think that, if you shorten people’s attention span a great deal, you are left with only the attraction of power.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/26/683323335/marcel-ophuls-dead

RIP – Athol Fugard

The South African playwright and director Athol Fugard, whose works included the play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and the novel Tsotsi, has died at the age of 92. The actor John Kani paid tribute on X on Sunday, saying “I am deeply saddened by the passing of my dear friend”. The mayor’s office in Cape Town said: “Athol Fugard was not just a luminary in the world of theatre; he was a teller of profound stories of hope and resilience about South Africa.”

A major political dissident playwright of the 20th century, Fugard wrote more than 30 dramas including Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (in 1972) and “Master Harold” … and the Boys (1982). Both of those drew upon the time in the 1950s when he could only find employment as a clerk in one of the courts where black South Africans were charged (and inevitably convicted) of breaches of the “pass laws”, designed to control the movements of a racially segregated population under the apartheid system. There, he witnessed hourly the dehumanisation of those who had chosen the “wrong” streets or people.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/mar/09/athol-fugard-south-african-political-dissident-playwright-dies-aged-92

RIP – Carl Weathers

Carl Weathers, who starred as Apollo Creed in the first four “Rocky” films opposite Sylvester Stallone, died Thursday, his manager Matt Luber confirmed to Variety. He was 76.

Weathers also starred in 1987’s “Predator” and had a memorable role in Adam Sandler’s “Happy Gilmore.” He was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for his work in the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian.”

Variety

RIP Michael Gambon, Anecdote from Anthony Sher book

Michael Gambon, Dumbledore in the ‘Harry Potter’ Films, Dies at 82
After he made his mark in London in the 1970s, he went on to play a wide range of roles, including Edward VII, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill.

Below from, Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook, by Antony Sher. Gambon talking about his audition for Olivier, where he did Richard III.

Gambon: `Shall I start again?’
Olivier: `No. I think I’ve got a fair idea how you’re going to do it. You’d better get along now. We’ll let you know.’

Gambon went back to the engineering factory in Islington where he was working. At four that afternoon he was bent over his lathe, working as best as he could with a heavily bandaged hand, when he was called to the phone. It was the Old Vic.

`It’s not easy talking on the phone, Tone. One, there’s the noise of the machinery. Two, I have to keep my voice down ’cause I’m cockney at work and posh with theatre people. But they offer me a job, spear-carrying, starting immediately. I go back to my work-bench, heart beating in my chest, pack my tool-case, start to go. The foreman comes up, says, “Oy, where you off to?” “I’ve had bad news,” I say, “I’ve got to go.” He says, “Why are you taking your tool box?” I say, “I can’t tell you, it’s very bad news, might need it.” And I never went back there, Tone. Home on the bus, heart still thumping away. A whole new world ahead. We tend to forget what it felt like in the beginning.’

RIP – Teresa Taylor

She eventually dropped out of high school and met the singer Gibby Haynes and the guitarist Paul Leary, who had founded Butthole Surfers in San Antonio in 1981, while renting them space in the downtown Austin warehouse where she was living. In 1983, they invited her to join the band on a tour of California.

During Ms. Taylor’s tenure, which lasted much of the 1980s, the band never scored a hit record. although it eventually found success atop Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart with the song “Pepper” in 1996. But mainstream acceptance was very much not the point — as their name made clear.

Mixing a taste for Dadaism and Nietzsche with a cyclone-force howl, Butthole Surfers proved audacious even by punk standards. Concerts featured transgressive elements like naked dancers, bullhorns, garbage fires and morbid films of surgeries. “Their live shows were an assault on the senses,” the music site Rock and Roll True Stories observed in a 2021 retrospective.

Teresa Taylor, Butthole Surfers Drummer and a Face of Gen X, Dies at 60
In addition to playing with the audacious Texas band, she helped define the image of an aimless generation with her role in the 1990 film “Slacker.”

IMDB – Slacker

RIP Tina Turner

Tina Turner (born Anna Mae Bullock; November 26, 1939 – May 24, 2023) was an American-born and naturalized Swiss[a] singer, dancer, actress, and author. Widely referred to as the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll“, she rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue before launching a successful career as a solo performer.

Turner began her career with Ike Turner‘s Kings of Rhythm in 1957. Under the name Little Ann, she appeared on her first record, “Boxtop“, in 1958. In 1960, she debuted as Tina Turner with the hit duet single “A Fool in Love“. The duo Ike & Tina Turner became “one of the most formidable live acts in history”.[5] They released hits such as “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine“, “River Deep – Mountain High“, “Proud Mary“, and “Nutbush City Limits“, before disbanding in 1976.

In the 1980s, Turner launched “one of the greatest comebacks in music history”.[6] Her 1984 multi-platinum album Private Dancer contained the hit song “What’s Love Got to Do with It“, which won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and became her first and only number-one song on the Billboard Hot 100. Aged 44, she was the oldest female solo artist to top the Hot 100.[7] Her chart success continued with “Better Be Good to Me“, “Private Dancer“, “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)“, “Typical Male“, “The Best“, “I Don’t Wanna Fight“, and “GoldenEye“. During her Break Every Rule World Tour in 1988, she set a then–Guinness World Record for the largest paying audience (180,000) for a solo performer.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Turner

RIP Martin Amis

Martin Amis, British author of era-defining novels, dies at 73

Influential British author Martin Amis has died at his home in Lake Worth, Fla., of esophageal cancer. He was 73.

His agent, Andrew Wiley, and his publisher, Vintage Books, confirmed his death on Saturday.

This is from Ron Rosenbaum, in his book The Secret Parts of Fortune:

As more and more bodies crammed themselves into the sweaty mosh pit of the Benetton basement, and the wait for the now overdue author went on, I began revolving around in my mind a theory about Mr. Amis’s work, why exactly I find his vision so powerful. Why it represents to me something more than addictively entertaining, acidly sophisticated dark comedy. The way it seems to me to embody as well a perversely spiritual vision, a brilliant heretical counterstatement to the Grand, Overinflated secular religion of our culture: the Religion of Self-Esteem. What Mr. Amis does is counterpose to the doctrine of self-esteem as the be-all and cure-all of the human condition what might be called the Virtue of Self-Loathing, the spiritual Discipline of Self-Disgust.

Here are a couple of his books that I am a fan of:
Money

Money is the hilarious story of John Self, one of London’s top commercial directors, who is given the opportunity to make his first feature film—alternately titled Good Money and Bad Money. He is also living money, talking money, and spending money in his relentless pursuit of pleasure and success. As he attempts to navigate his hedonistic world of drinking, sex, drugs, and excessive quantities of fast food, Self is sucked into a wretched spiral of degeneracy that is increasingly difficult to surface from.

Experience

The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley’s life. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis’ portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others. Not since Nabokov’s Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.