DEATHS ; Notable Passings; The Thread to Pay Last Respects

[Foofoogal]

Jimmy Boyd

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F96ztVnMSVI

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=31495

classic song. RIP.

 

[blacklagoon]

R.I.P Natasha Richardson

R.I.P Natasha Richardson

 

[KilroyCD]

A tragic loss. She will be missed.

 

[Tomasso]

Just a shame.

 

[carter]

Our thoughts and prayers go out to her husband, Liam Neeson, and their sons, Michael and Daniel, as well as her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and sister, Joely Richardson.
She will be missed.

 

[HadleyH]

This is so sad and sudden

 

[KY Gentleman]

Gone too soon. RIP.

 

[skyvue]

Redding composer Jack Lawrence dies at 96; wrote "Beyond the Sea"
By Susan Tuz

REDDING -- Songwriter Jack Lawrence, whose "Tenderly" launched the career of Rosemary Clooney and put Bobby Darin on the map with "Beyond the Sea," has died at the age of 96.

Lawrence fell Saturday in his Redding home, fracturing his pelvic bone. He died Sunday at Danbury Hospital from complications of the injury.

Lawrence's name may not be as widely known as those of his contemporaries Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and George Gershwin, but his melodies and lyrics launched the careers of at least a dozen top stars.

In addition to Clooney and Darin, Frank Sinatra had his first solo hit with "All or Nothing at All" and "If I Didn't Care" launched The Ink Spots.

According to his Web site, http://www.jacklawrencesongwriter.com/home.html, he's just written a song with Quincy Jones called "The Color Blue Remains."

Lawrence was a prolific writer. At his death, he was working on songs and he had just published a book, "Between the Sheets: The Stories Behind My Songs," with photographs, intimate stories and his hit lyrics from the 1930s through 2008....

More here:

http://www.newstimes.com/localnews/ci_11931828

 

[dr greg]

too cold

Is it just me, or does it seem that a lot of famous people get killed skiing?
A dangerous biz by the sound of it.

 

[Mike in Seattle]

Is it just me, or does it seem that a lot of famous people get killed skiing?
A dangerous biz by the sound of it.

When I read the reports yesterday - a simple fall, she was returned to the lodge, and then an hour later, had a headache and then helicoptered to one hospital and then another, I thought "She's had it, poor thing!"

And I believe it was Lucille Ball, who took a serious fall skiing, broke a leg, but more seriously, had the point of a ski-pole nearly hit her heart or a major artery in that fall, say afterwards on Johnny Carson, something along the line of being whisked away to the ER and thinking, "I'm sliding down a hill on ice going over 50 mph and I'd never even try it bone dry in the summer in a 4-wheel drive vehicle going no more than 5 mph, and at the bottom, I see a line of ambulances waiting...and I'm think what fun, this is recreation, this is great!"

 

[dr greg]

and more

Sonny Bono, at least one Kennedy, various royals in Europe etc etc, I'm glad it don't snow here!

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Years ago..Clint Walker who starred in the TV series "Cheyenne" fell on a ski pole...running it through his chest...surviving only by inches.
HD

 

[Foofoogal]

R.I.P Natasha Richardson
I always thought she had the prettiest unique smile.

Feeling extremely sorry for myself this last year for many varied personal reasons but deaths like hers sure puts it in perspective. Noone is promised tomorrow.
Praying for her entire family and loved ones.

 

[Carlisle Blues]

Very sad

 

[Classydame]

Natasha Richardson, such a tragic and sudden loss. I feel so badly for her family and her children. I think these kind of deaths remind us how fragile life is and we need to make the best of it each day. I think she did, she had such sweet smile and a warmth about her, which came through on screen. She will be greatly missed!

 

[dhermann1]

Talking with a friend at work whose mother in law smashed herself up skiing at around age 40, and was on Vicodin for 30 years, he said his wife gave up the sport at 40. She said that after that age you just don't have the reflexes. I've always loved cross country skiing. It's much safer, good for your heart, and every bit as much fun, in a different way.
Yes, what an awful, flukey tragedy.

 

[Fletch]

Rich, famous, important, and/or beautiful people: PLEASE STOP SKIING!!!

Or wear a helmet for f*¢!!'s sake. They can save your life.

 

[Feraud]

Blacklisted actress Betsy Blair passed away
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090320/ap_en_ce/eu_britain_obit_betsy_blair

By DAVID STRINGER, Associated Press Writer David Stringer, Associated Press Writer
Fri Mar 20, 7:53 am ET

LONDON – Betsy Blair, the Oscar-nominated actress and teenage bride of Gene Kelly, has died in London at the age of 85, her publisher said on Thursday.

The New Jersey-born actress, who later married film director Karel Reisz, suffered from cancer and died on March 13.

Mark Searle, at Elliot & Thompson, the British publishers of Blair's 2003 autobiography, confirmed her death.

Blair swapped suburban high school for life as a nightclub dancer in New York, where she met Kelly, then a choreographer on the brink of success.

Blair and Kelly married in 1941 and moved to Hollywood, where he became a major star. She was 17 and he was 29. The couple divorced in 1957.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Blair took parts in "The Guilt of Janet Ames," and "A Double Life." But her movie career stalled after her enthusiasm for leftist causes landed her on Hollywood's blacklist.

"To be very left-wing in Hollywood was to work for the unions, to work for the blacks, the ordinary things that are social democratic principles," Blair told Britain's The Guardian newspaper in an interview in 2001.

Following a part in "Kind Lady" in 1951, Blair struggled to win new movie roles for several years, focusing instead on caring for the couple's daughter, Kerry.

In 1955, Blair took her most famous role, in "Marty," playing a dowdy school teacher who captures the heart of a lonely Italian-American butcher. The movie brought Academy Award nominations for both leading actors_ but Blair lost out on the best supporting actress award, though her co-star, Ernest Borgnine, won for best actor.

Two years later, Blair and Kelly separated. She rarely discussed their split in public, and refused to criticize Kelly, who died in 1996. "I have nothing bad to say about Gene in any way ... We were married 16 years and it just came to an end," she told The Guardian in 2001.

Finding herself more popular in Europe than in the U.S., Blair moved to Paris and took roles in movies in France, Spain and Italy.

Blair later moved to London and in 1963 she married respected Czech filmmaker Reisz, director of the 1960 movie "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning."

For several years, she worked mainly in theater and television and briefly halted her acting career to train as a speech therapist.

However, in 1988 — three decades after her last Hollywood film, Blair returned to the United States to star in "Betrayed" alongside Tom Berenger. A year later, she took a part in the television series "Thirtysomething."

British comedian Arabella Weir, a friend of Reisz's children, said she developed a close bond with Blair.

"She was a tremendously loving, loyal and ceaselessly supportive friend — and really good, often wicked, fun. You could talk to her about absolutely anything — nothing shocked her," Weir told The Guardian newspaper.

Blair was offered a role in 2002 in "The Hours" alongside Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore, but turned down the part to care for Reisz, who died in the same year.

She is survived by her daughter, Kerry, from her marriage to Kelly.

 

[Feraud]

March 30, 2009
Helen Levitt, Who Froze New York Street Life on Film, Is Dead at 95
By MARGARETT LOKE
Helen Levitt, a major photographer of the 20th century who caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York, died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on Sunday. She was 95.

Her death was confirmed by her brother, Bill Levitt, of Alta, Utah.

Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” A man handles garbage-can lids like an exuberant child imitating a master juggler. Even an inanimate object — a broken record — appears to skip and dance on an empty street as a child might, observed by a group of women’s dresses in a shop window.

As marvelous as these images are, the masterpieces in Ms. Levitt’s oeuvre are her photographs of children living their zesty, improvised lives. A white girl and a black boy twirl in a dance of their own imagining. Four girls on a sidewalk turning to stare at five floating bubbles become contrapuntal musical notes in a lovely minor key.

In Ms. Levitt’s best-known picture, three properly dressed children prepare to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask; a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a graceful step down, while another boy, also masked, lounges on a lower step, coolly surveying the world.

“At the peak of Helen’s form,” John Szarkowski, former director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, once said, “there was no one better.”

The late 1930s and early ’40s, when Ms. Levitt created an astonishing body of work, was a time when many noted photographers produced stark images to inspire social change. Ms. Levitt also took her camera to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, where people treated their streets as their living rooms and where she showed an unerring instinct for a street drama’s perfect pitch. In his 1999 biography of Walker Evans, James R. Mellow wrote that the only photographers Evans “felt had something original to say were Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt and himself.”

Helen Levitt was born on Aug. 31, 1913, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Her father, Sam, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, ran a successful wholesale knit-goods business; her mother, May, was a bookkeeper before her marriage.

Finding high school unstimulating, Ms. Levitt dropped out during her senior year. In a 2002 interview with The New York Times in her fourth-floor walk-up near Union Square, she said that as a young woman she had wanted to do something in the arts though she could not draw well.

Her mother knew the family of J. Florian Mitchell, a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx, and in 1931 Ms. Levitt began to work for him. “I helped in darkroom printing and developing,” she said. “My salary was six bucks a week.”

With a used Voigtländer camera, she photographed her mother’s friends. Through publications and exhibitions, she knew the documentary work of members of the Film and Photo League and of Cartier-Bresson, Evans and Ben Shahn.

In 1935 she met Cartier-Bresson when he spent a year in New York. On one occasion she accompanied him when he photographed along the Brooklyn waterfront. She also trained her eye, she said, by going to museums and art galleries. “I looked at paintings for composition,” she said. In 1936, she bought a secondhand Leica, the camera Cartier-Bresson favored.

Two years later, she contacted Evans to show him the photographs she had taken of children playing in the streets and their buoyantly unrestrained chalk graffiti. “I went to see him,” she recalled, “the way kids do, and got to be friends with him.” She helped Evans make prints for his exhibition and book “American Photographs.”

Both the quintessentially French Cartier-Bresson and the essentially American Evans influenced Ms. Levitt. Cartier-Bresson had a gift for catching everyday life in graceful, seemingly transparent flux; Evans had a way of being sparingly, frontally direct with his commonplace subjects. Ms. Levitt credited Shahn, whom she had met through Evans, with being a greater influence than Evans. Photographs Shahn took of life on New York sidewalks in the ’30s have an unmediated, gritty spontaneity.

James Agee, a good friend, was also a major influence. She had met him through Evans, who noted, “Levitt’s work was one of James Agee’s great loves, and, in turn, Agee’s own magnificent eye was part of her early training.”

The kind of pictures Ms. Levitt took demanded a photojournalist’s hair-trigger reflexes. But photojournalism didn’t interest her. She was too shy, she said, and lacked the technical proficiency that is a must for any practicing photojournalist. “I was a lousy technician,” she said. “That part bored me.”

Fortune magazine was the first to publish Ms. Levitt’s work, in its July 1939 issue on New York City. The next year her Halloween picture was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department. In 1943 she had her first solo show at the Modern.

To support herself, Ms. Levitt worked as a film editor. Her friend Janice Loeb, a painter, introduced her to Luis Buñuel, who hired her in the early ’40s to edit his pro-American propaganda films. By 1949, and for the next decade, Ms. Levitt was a full-time film editor and director.

With her friends Agee, who was also a film critic, and Ms. Loeb, she started filming “In the Street” in the mid-’40s. Ms. Loeb was financially well off and was for a time married to Bill Levitt. Mr. Levitt survives his sister, as do several nieces and nephews.

“In the Street,” released in 1952, is the way one imagines Ms. Levitt’s photographs would look if they were to spring to life. The 14-minute documentary of Spanish Harlem, with a piano playing on the soundtrack, is antic, droll, artless and dear.

When Ms. Levitt returned to still photography in 1959, it was to work in color; she was among the first notable photographers to do so. She was helped in this project by Guggenheim fellowships that she received in 1959 and 1960. But much of this early color work was lost when her apartment was burglarized in the late ’60s. In the ’90s she gave up color, she said. She had to go to special labs to get prints made, and the colors weren’t always what she wanted.

Intensely private, Ms. Levitt shunned the limelight and seldom gave interviews. Comprehensive surveys of her career were held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1980 and at the Laurence Miller Gallery in 1987. But she remained little known to the general public even as late as 1991, when the first national retrospective of her work was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to major museums.

From the 1930s through the 1990s, Ms. Levitt permitted the publication of only a few books of her images, among them “A Way of Seeing” (Duke University Press, 1965), which includes an essay by Agee; “In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938-48” (Duke University Press, 1987); and “Mexico City” (Norton, 1997), revisiting her one trip abroad.

Recently, though, PowerHouse Books has published several volumes of her work: “Crosstown” (2001); “Here and There” (2004), black-and-white work not previously published; “Slide Show” (2005), showcasing her color work; and “Helen Levitt” (2008).

Ms. Levitt stopped making her own black and white prints in the 1990s, she said, because of sciatica, which prevented her from standing for long. The sciatica also made carrying the heavy Leica difficult, and in recent years she used a small automatic Contax. She had other health problems. Her lungs were scarred by a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in the 1940s or ’50s, she said. And she was born with Meniere’s syndrome, an inner-ear disorder. “I have felt wobbly all my life,” she said.

Changes in neighborhood life also affected her work. “I go where there’s a lot of activity,” she said. “Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty. People are indoors looking at television or something.”

Despite her many pictures of children, she had always been “an animal nut,” Ms. Levitt said. Driving in New Hampshire in summer 1985, she recalled, she asked a man near a barn if he had any animals. They’re coming in now to feed, she was told. Sure enough, an enchanting trio traipsed single file down the country road: a thoughtful-looking Shetland pony, a sedate sheep and a frisky mountain goat. She took the picture.

“It was luck,” she said. “Luck, as James Agee said in an essay, is very important in this kind of stuff.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/arts/design/30levitt.html?_r=3&hpw

 

[HadleyH]

Maurice Jarre 1924-2009- The film composer best known for his award winning music scores for David Lean's films Lawrence of Arabia - and - Dr Zhivago

Big loss. His wonderful music will always be remember.