Jack Lemmon, Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier on TCM

Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun

Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award winners Stan Laurel, Jack Lemmon, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Kirk Douglas will be celebrated by Turner Classic Movies with a four-film presentation beginning at 8 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 22, the night before TCM’s sister networks TNT and TBS present a live simulcast of the 2010 Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Of the four films — the short Tit for Tat, and the features The Out-of-Towners, A Raisin in the Sun, and Last Train from Gun Hill — I’ve only seen the moderately entertaining John Sturges Western Last Train from Gun Hill, whose most memorable feature is Carolyn Jones as the female lead [...]

Bea Arthur

Beatrice Arthur, the witty television star in the hit shows Maude and The Golden Girls, and a Tony winner, died today at her Los Angeles home. Arthur, who was suffering from cancer, was 86.
Born Bernice Frankel on May 16, 1922, (1923 according to some sources) in New York City, Arthur — generally known as Bea Arthur — first caught critics’ attention with her performance in the 1954 off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera. Also onstage, she originated the role of the matchmaker Yente in Fiddler on the Roof in 1964, and two years later won a Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for Mame, in which she plays Mame’s buddy [...]

Estelle Getty

Estelle Getty, best known for her role as the acid-tongued octogenarian Sophia on the 1980s television series The Golden Girls, died today at her Hollywood Boulevard home in Los Angeles. She was 84. Getty had been suffering from advanced dementia for several years.
The Golden Girls, quite possibly (by far) the wittiest US TV show of the ’80s, featured four female retirees sharing a spacious house in Miami. The show’s other three cast members were Beatrice Arthur, who played Getty’s daughter, Dorothy (in real life Arthur was actually older than her Golden Girls mother); Rue McClanahan as the seductress Blanche; and Betty White as the ditzy Rose. The series ran from 1985 to 1992.
Among Estelle Getty’s film appearances, mostly in small [...]