Charlton Heston died at his home in Beverly Hills Saturday with Lydia, his wife of 64 years, at his side. The legendary actor who won an Academy Award for his role in 1959’s Ben-Hur was 84 years old.
Heston’s career spanned six decades with notable films including The Ten Commandments (1956), Touch of Evil (1958), Planet of [...]
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Blacklisted writer/director Jules Dassin died Monday in Athens at the age of 96. A cause of death hasn’t been given.
Some will remember him best for his post-exile works starring future wife Melina Mercouri, Never on Sunday (1960) and Topkapi (1964). Others will treasure his earlier noir films Brute Force (1947) the prison escape drama with [...]
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Actor Richard Widmark died Monday at age 93. Nominated for an Academy Award and winner of a Golden Globe for his first screen performance as the revenge-seeking psychopathic killer, Tommy Udo, in Kiss of Death in 1947, Widmark may be best remembered for the scene where he pushes the mother of his victim down the stairs in her [...]
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British stage and screen actor Paul Scofield, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man For All Seasons, died Wednesday at a hospital near his home in England following a battle with Leukemia. Despite his Oscar, Scofield appeared in only a few movies, most notably [...]
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Renowned science fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke died Wednesday (Sri Lanka time) after suffering breathing problems. This isn’t strictly film news, but of course Clarke collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey based on Clarke’s story The Sentinel. In the film, it was Clarke’s inspiration to have HAL 9000 singing Daisy [...]
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Anthony Minghella died suddenly Tuesday morning of a brain hemorrhage while convalescing at a hospital following a neck operation. The Oscar winning director of The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley was 54 years old.
Source: Variety
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Kon Ichikawa, the Japanese post-World War II director best known for his films The Burmese Harp (1956), Fires on the Plain (1959) and the documentary The Tokyo Olympiad (1965) died today of pneumonia.
Frequently overshadowed in the West by his countryman Akira Kurosawa, Ichikawa’s career nonetheless spanned 7 decades and contributed several masterpieces to world cinema.
Inspired [...]
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75-year-old Roy Scheider, the Academy Award nominated actor best remembered for his role as Chief Martin Brody in the blockbuster movie Jaws, died this afternoon of complications from a staph infection. Scheider suffered from multiple myeloma, a form of plasma cell cancer that effects the immune system.
My first conscious memory of Scheider was in
The Seven-Ups, the [...]
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Sad news. Several sources including the New York Times are reporting that actor Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain, I’m Not There) was found dead this afternoon in a SoHo apartment.
According to The Times, Ledger was found by the housekeeper unconscious on a bed.
Few details have yet been made available though the inevitable speculation has already begun.
The 28-year-old Australian leaves [...]
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Brad Renfro has died of unknown causes. The actor who became famous as a child starring in the John Grisham thriller The Client was found unresponsive in his home on the morning of Tuesday the 15th. Paramedics were summoned, but the 25-year-old was later pronounced dead by the coroner.
The Knoxville, TN, native also starred in Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil and the cult favorite [...]
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Maila Nurmi achieved a brief moment of fame and a certain cult status in the 1950s for making goth sexy as Vampira, the hostess of a short-lived late-night horror show on Los Angeles’ KABC. She is probably best remembered to modern audiences for her role in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, regarded lovingly by many as The Worst [...]
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Lois Maxwell has died in Australia at age 80. She was suffering from cancer. Though she appeared in over 50 films, it is the role of Miss Moneypenny in the long-running James Bond franchise for which she’ll be remembered to movie fans. The men who played Bond would come and go, but for over 20 [...]
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Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni died yesterday, the same day as Ingmar Bergman. He was 94.
If the Swedish filmmaker was a cornerstone of 1950s international cinema, the same applies to Antonioni in the 1960s. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and others, Antonioni was one of the filmmakers who helped expand the conventions of movie making. [...]
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Another giant of foreign cinema is gone. Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman has died at age 89.
Between Kurosawa, Fellini and Bergman, the three ‘big ones’ who helped reintroduce American movie audiences to foreign film 1950s, I came to Bergman last. I discovered Kurosawa in high school, probably because so many of his films had an approachable action bent. [...]
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The first thing I saw when I logged on this morning was that Hungarian born cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs had passed away.
A graduate of Budapest’s Academy of Drama and Film Art, Kovacs came to Hollywood in 1956, fleeing the Hungarian revolution. He had his first notable success working for producer Roger Corman on Hell’s Angels on [...]
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