Alternative Film Guide

Julie Ege, Miss Norway 1962 and the leading lady in several B movies of the 1970s, has died. Ege, who had been suffering from cancer, was 64.
Born in the Norwegian town of Sandnes on November 12, 1943, Ege made her screen debut in 1967 in a couple of bit parts. After a brief appearance [...]

Hazel Court, the leading lady of numerous B-horror movies of the 1950s and 1960s, died of a heart attack at her home near Lake Tahoe, California, on April 15. She was 82.
I’m unfamiliar with Hazel Court’s work as an actress, but I’m quite familiar (by way of film stills and clips) with her [...]

For an actor of such limited range, Charlton Heston, who died earlier this evening at the age of 84, had a pretty remarkable career.
He starred in several of the biggest blockbusters of the 1950s and 1960s, among them The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Ten Commandments (1956), The Big Country (1958), Ben-Hur (1959), [...]

Benedict Nightingale’s "Paul Scofield: an overlooked acting great" in The [London] Times:
"Why didn’t most theatregoers think of Paul Scofield in the way they thought of Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson? After all, he had pretty well all the qualities, from Olivier’s danger through Gielgud’s grace to Richardson’s soul, that we admired in the 20th century’s most [...]

Anthony Minghella, who won an Oscar for directing The English Patient (above, 1996), died after suffering a brain hemorrhage earlier this morning at Charing Cross Hospital in London, where he had undergone an operation for cancer of the tonsils and neck. He was 54.
"It was a very hard job to get someone to give [...]

Screenwriter Malvin Wald, who received an Academy Award nomination for The Naked City (right), Jules Dassin’s 1948 mix of neo-realism and film noir, died Thursday at a hospital in the Los Angeles suburb of Sherman Oaks. He was 90.
The Brooklyn native (born in 1917) wrote several feature-film screenplays and adaptations, most notably helping to transfer [...]

Cinematographer David Watkin, best known for his Oscar- and BAFTA-winning work on Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa (above, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford) and on Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire, died of cancer this past February 19 at his home in Brighton, England. He was 82.
Watkin’s career as a feature-film cinematographer spanned nearly four decades [...]

John Ireland and Marsha Hunt in Anthony Mann’s 1948 film noir Raw Deal.
 
This past October 17th, my dear friend, actress and social activist Marsha Hunt turned 90 years old. Her past few months have been a constant state of activity as the tributes to her seemed never-ending.
Turner Classic Movies honored her with a [...]

Author Norman Mailer, as well known for his books as for his convoluted private life, died early today of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He was 84.
Born on Jan. 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey, Mailer decided to become a writer while attending Harvard University in the early [...]

Actor-singer Robert Goulet died Tuesday (Oct. 30) morning while waiting for a lung transplant at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Goulet had been suffering from interstitial pulmonary fibrosis, reportedly a rare lung disease. He was 73.
Born on Nov. 26, 1933, in Lawrence, Mass., Goulet spent much of his youth in Canada. He became a [...]

Actress Lois Maxwell, the devoted and perennially infatuated secretary Miss Moneypenny in a string of James Bond movies, died of cancer at the Fremantle Hospital in Perth, Western Australia, on Saturday, Sept. 29. She was 80.
Maxwell began playing Miss Moneypenny in 1962, in Sean Connery’s first James Bond movie, Dr. No. (She had been [...]

Mime artist Marcel Marceau died in Paris on Saturday, Sept. 22, at the age of 84. The cause of death was not immediately known.
The Strasbourg-born Marceau’s most famous character was Bip, a melancholy clown with a limp red flower in his hat. According to reports on his death, the mime’s artistic inspirations were the [...]

Miyoshi Umeki, the first Asian performer to win an Academy Award, died of complications of cancer on Aug. 28 in Licking, Missouri. She was 78.
Umeki won a best supporting actress Oscar for her beautifully nuanced performance as an innocent Japanese maiden in love with American serviceman Red Buttons in the 1957 melodrama Sayonara.
Born on [...]

Michelangelo Antonioni, the film master of modern alienation, despair, and ennui, was the third important personage of world cinema to die in the last three days — Ingmar Bergman and Michel Serrault were the other two. Antonioni, who had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1985, died on Monday, July 30, in Rome. He was 94.
Italian [...]

I was in mid-teens when I first watched Edouard Molinaro’s 1978 film adaptation of La Cage aux folles. I found it hilarious; surely one of the best comedies I’d ever seen — and I’d seen a number of them by that time.
What a difference ten years make.
I was in my mid-20s when I [...]

Ingmar Bergman, one of the most influential and respected filmmakers of the 20th century, died today, July 30, at his home in Faro, Sweden. He was 89.
During his four-decade film career, Bergman created some of the most complex, most adult films ever made. Some of those were simply mind boggling, others were emotionally stirring, [...]

Stage, film, and television actor Ulrich Mühe, winner of last year’s European Film Award for best actor, died of stomach cancer at his home in Walbeck, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, on July 22. He was 54.
Mühe’s European Film Award was recognition for his excellent performance as a Stasi agent who, while spying on a [...]

Bernard Gordon, a blacklisted screenwriter during the McCarthy era and a leader of the protest against the honorary Oscar awarded director (and informant) Elia Kazan, died Friday, May 11, at his home in the Hollywood Hills after a long battle with bone cancer. He was 88.
Gordon was born on Oct. 29, 1918, in New Britain, [...]

Curtis Harrington, best known as the director of numerous stylized horror films, died on Sunday evening, May 6, at his Hollywood Hills home. Harrington had never fully recovered from a stroke he suffered in 2005. He was 80.
Born in Los Angeles on Sept. 17, 1926, Harrington grew up in Beaumont, Calif. His first cinematic [...]

Emmy- and Tony-nominated actor Roscoe Lee Browne died of cancer on Wednesday, April 11, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Born on May 2, 1925, in Woodbury, N.J., Browne began acting in the mid-1950s. In 1961, he starred in the English-language version of Jean Genet’s play The Blacks, and two years later he was the [...]

Satirical novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr, author of the bestselling anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, died Wednesday, April 11. According to his wife, photographer Jill Krementz, Vonnegut had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago.
The Indianapolis-born (on Nov. 11, 1922) author, a “fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker,” wrote about 25 novels, in addition [...]

If someone asked me to name a truly tough film star, I’d never think of naming John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart, or any of those male performers whose toughness mostly consists of caressing assorted weaponry while posing for the camera.
With rare exceptions — Edward G. Robinson’s gangsters [...]

Actress Betty Hutton, the spunky star of numerous Paramount musicals and comedies of the 1940s, died last night.
In addition to her Paramount work in the ’40s, Hutton also starred in Annie Get Your Gun at MGM (replacing Judy Garland) and in Cecil B. DeMille’s Academy Award-winning 1952 circus melodrama The Greatest Show on Earth.
Betty Hutton [...]

If remembered at all, the name Franchot Tone usually comes up only when someone lists Joan Crawford’s series of husbands. Never mind the fact that Franchot Tone appeared in about 60 films, countless plays, and dozens of television shows.
Though never a major Hollywood star, Franchot Tone (born in Niagara Falls on Feb. 27, 1905) was [...]

Swedish actress Maj-Britt Nilsson, best known for her roles in three Ingmar Bergman films of the early 1950s, died this past Dec. 19 in Cannes. She was 82. No cause of death was announced.
Nilsson’s three Bergman films are Till glädje / To Joy (1950), in which she is an orchestra player whose husband (Stig Olin) [...]