Anthony Franciosa, Peter Benchley, Fayard Nicholas
by Andre Soares
Actor Anthony Franciosa, 77, died of a massive stroke this past Friday, Jan. 20, at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Franciosa’s career in films began auspiciously in 1957, with key roles in Robert Wise’s This Could Be the Night, George Cukor’s Wild Is the Wind, Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, and culminating in his Best Actor Academy Award nomination for Fred Zinnemann’s A Hatful of Rain, in which he recreated a role he had performed on Broadway.
Yet, major stardom proved elusive. Franciosa was cast in several important productions of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Clifford Odets’s The Story on Page One (1959) and George Roy Hill’s A Period of Adjustment (1962), but those failed to impress either critics or audiences — or both. Franciosa had better luck on television, acting in several TV series, most notably Matt Helm (1975-76). One of Franciosa’s four wives was actress Shelley Winters, who died on Jan. 14.
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In the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, Sharon Kemp and Aaron Shohet Kemp remember “My Friend, Shelley Winters.” A brief quote: “This past Aug. 18, Shelley celebrated her 85th birthday by entertaining 300 people, including many past acting colleagues and friends like Martin Landau, Jane Russell, Red Buttons and Elliott Gould, among others. The crowning event of the evening was when Shelley took the stage with a band, threw on a pair of dark sunglasses and sang a few jazz numbers — Blues Brothers style!”
Shelley Winters died this past Jan. 14.
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Music composer Akira Ifukube, 91, best known for his work on the cult horror classic Godzilla (1954) and its myriad sequels, died of multiple organ failure on Feb. 8 at a Tokyo hospital. A graduate of Hokkaido University, Ifukube learned music composition on his own. Among his more than 250 film scores are those for Akira Kurosawa’s A Silent Duel (1949), Kaneto Shindô’s Children of Hiroshima (1952), and Kon Ichikawa’s Academy Award-nominated The Harp of Burma (1956). In 2003, the composer was awarded one of Japan’s highest honors, the Person of Cultural Merit.
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Author Peter Benchley, 65, whose 1974 novel Jaws became a literary sensation, has died at his home in Princeton, N.J. Benchley had been suffering from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and ultimately fatal scarring of the lungs.
A year after its success in book form, Jaws – the tale of a white shark with an insatiable appetite - went on to become one of the biggest box-office blockbusters ever. (According to Box Office Mojo, when adjusted for 2006 ticket prices, Jaws is the seventh most successful motion picture in history, with the U.S./Canada gross topping US$819 million.)
Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film adaptation (by Benchley and Carl Gottlieb) starred Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw. It won four Academy Awards (best editing, Verna Fields; Best Original Score, John Williams; and Best Sound), and was nominated for Best Film. Inevitably, there were several sequels though none was nearly as successful - whether commercially or critically — as the original.
Benchley also wrote both the novel and the screenplay for the dreadful The Island (1980), and wrote the novel on which the inconsequential The Deep (1977) was based. (Benchley co-wrote the screenplay with Tracy Keenan Wynn).
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Fayard Nicholas, 91, who tap danced alongside his brother Harold on Broadway and in Hollywood films, has died. Among the Nicholas Brothers’ sporadic film appearances — almost invariably in specialty dance numbers — are those in the Eddie Cantor vehicle Kid Millions (1934), and in several Fox musicals of the early 1940s, including Tin Pan Alley (1940), Sun Valley Serenade (1941), and Stormy Weather (1943).
In 1989, Nicholas was a co-winner of the Best Choreography Tony Award for Black and Blue. Harold Nicholas died of heart failure in 2000.
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Actor Chris Penn, 43, Sean Penn’s brother, has died at his residence in Santa Monica, Calif. According to a Los Angeles ABC television affiliate, there were no signs of foul play. Among Penn’s films are At Close Range (1986), in which he played opposite his brother; Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), and more recently, The Darwin Awards (2005).
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The Independent reports that Kenyan police have arrested two suspects in the murder of British naturalist and wildlife filmmaker Joan Root, who was shot dead on Jan. 13 at her lakeside home in Naivasha, 56 miles northwest of Nairobi. The murder may have been triggered by Root’s efforts to stop illegal fishing in the Rift Valley lake. In past years, she collaborated with her husband, Alan Root, in the making of several documentaries about African wildlife, including Balloon Safari and Two in the Bush.
For more information on Alan Root’s work in East Africa, check out View Finders Limited.
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The Aspen Times reports that Katharine Thalberg, 70, daughter of MGM’s Boy Wonder Irving Thalberg and actress Norma Shearer (The Divorcee, Marie Antoinette) died yesterday evening at the Aspen Valley Hospital. Thalberg, who was married to former Aspen mayor Bill Stirling, had been suffering from cancer for a couple of years.
Born in Santa Monica, Calif.,she moved to Aspen in the mid-1970s. Her bookstore, Explore Booksellers, is one of the Colorado resort’s local institutions. One her previous husbands was actor Richard Anderson (of the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman), with whom she had three children.
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Actress and socialite Annette Stroyberg, best known for having married director Roger Vadim (Et Dieu… créa la femme / And God Created Woman, Barbarella), died of cancer on Dec. 12, 2005, in Copenhagen. Stroyberg made a few film appearances in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most notably (credited as Annette Vadim) as the innocent victim of connivers Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe in Vadim’s modernized version of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1959).
Among her other films — working under her real name — are Roberto Rossellini’s Anima nera (1962), co-starring with Vittorio Gassman and Nadja Tiller, and Ivan Govar’s Un soir… par hasard / Agent of Doom (1963).
With the assistance of journalist Henry-Jean Servat, she published her memoirs, Les Liaisons scandaleuses.
According to the Guardian obit, Stroyberg was 69 years old (born on Dec. 7, 1936), whereas the IMDb info has the actress dying at the exact age of 71 (born on Dec. 12, 1934).
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Mr. Franciosa was a solid professional actor who brought great life and often a playful energy to his roles.
He will be missed.