Solo, Farewell, Auf Weidersein, Good Night

Or

Say U.N.C.L.E.

(Props to Monty)

 

Or

Dirt Napoleon

 

Or

Battling Beyond the Stars

(Meritorious mention for Don)

Robert Vaughn, who played a samurai in the Old West and in space, has died of leukemia at the age of 83. The last surviving member of The Magnificent Seven, Vaughn played Lee, the cowardly mercenary, then came back in essentially the same role for Battle Beyond the Stars, Roger Corman’s update on The Seven Samurai theme. Apparently he wasn’t available for A Bug’s Life. Vaughn’s star-making turn was the Symbol Maker’s son in Teenage Caveman, a Roger Corman cheapie with a twist ending that it was earth all along that eventually made fine MST3K fodder. He parlayed that into a role as an injured war vet wrongfully accused of murder in the melodramatic twaddle The Young Philadelphians, for which he earned an Academy Award nomination in 1960. He starred as suave spy Napoleon Solo in the tongue-in-cheek spy caper series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And after that, he settled into a long career of shadowy intimidating authority figures: billionaire Ross Webster in the franchise-destroying Superman III; crooked politician Walter Chalmers in Bullitt; billionaire king maker Carl Anderton on Law & Order, who decides to cut off Adam Schiff’s campaign funds; White House Chief of Staff Gordon Cain who decides re-election is more important than aliens and heroic astronauts in another MST3Ked schlocker Hanger 18; and General Hunt Stockwell, the man who did what Col. Decker couldn’t – capture the A-Team and force them to work for him in the shark jumping final season. 

Stay Down

Or

Naked Gun 4/5: The Smell of Ed Hocken

Former Breath Assure spokesman George Kennedy has found a more permanent cure for his halitosis, succumbing to heart disease at the age of 91. The sturdy character actor spent ample time as both heavy and hero: He was the hired gun in town to off The Sons of Katie Elder and the major at HQ who figures out a way for The Dirty Dozen to prove their merits, even if he did get knocked off an ambulance for is trouble. He hunted down The Boston Strangler and beat the crap out of Cool Hand Luke, a role for which he won the 1967 Best Supporting Actor Oscar. He was Joe Patroni, Mr. Everything when it comes to airplanes, graduating from mechanic in Airport to the VP of Operations who saved the Karen Black-piloted plane in Airport 1975 and the submerged plane in Airport ’77 and then pilot in The Concorde: Airport ’79, where he made the word “again” more disturbing than it’s ever been when he was nailing Bibi Andersson by a roaring fire. The Airport series begat the parody Airplane, and Kennedy was tapped to play McCroskey, but that was the wrong week to turn his back on a steady paycheck and the role went to Lloyd Bridges instead. He was more accommodating the next time the Zucker Brothers came calling and took the role of Ed Hocken, Frank Drebin’s cuckolded partner in the Naked Gun series. He also spent a few seasons in Dallas as Carter McKay, Southfork’s neighboring rancher who stirs up a range war 100 years late as a ruse to force the Ewings to sell an oil-rich parcel in a plot devised by long-time rival Jeremy Wendell, who is caught in the ensuing sting operation, costing him his spot as head of WestStar Oil, a position that is then assumed by McKay. In the final season, JR sets his sights on WestStar, a larger company than his Ewing Oil, and so great a prize he is willing to jeopardize the family company to get it. In the end, McKay outfoxes JR, taking WestStar for himself and turning Ewing Oil over to arch-nemesis Cliff Barnes, which leaves JR considering suicide in some sort of nod to Hays Code-era morals that the bad guy always has to pay. Other roles included walking stereotype – down to the black and white striped shirt – Big Frenchy in a few episodes of McHale’s Navy, Clint Eastwood’s traitorous former partner in The Eiger Sanction (it’s a 40-year-old spoiler, bite me), good guy cop in Earthquake, an avenged shopkeep in Creepshow 2, the bank robber who corrupts John Wayne’s sons in Cahill, US Marshall and for reasons surpassing understanding, host of Saturday Night Live in 1981 episode. 

The Quiet Woman

Maureen O’Hara, who brought the sizzle to Only the Lonely, has died at the age of 95. The Irish-American actress was one of the last stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, pairing toughness and humor with her stunning good looks, most notably in films with John Ford and/or John Wayne, like The Quiet Man, Rio Grande, The Wings of Eagles, How Green Was My Valley and McLintock! She spent nearly all her career opposite strong men, starting in her big break as the beauty to the beastly overacting of Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. When the screen was awash in swashbucklers, she rode The Black Swan with Tyrone Power and sampled Douglas Fairbanks, Jr as one of the first Sinbads. And of course, she went toe-to-toe with the biggest of them all, Kris Kringle, in the only version of Miracle on 34th Street worth watching, where she did a lousy job raising Natalie Wood. With the end of the black and white era, O’Hara became the Queen of Technicolor as the film process showed off her rich red hair, bright green eyes and flawless peaches-and-cream complexion. Unfortunately her non-Ford/Wayne roles seemed more interested in using her as scenery, and she retired for more than 20 years, when the prospect of protecting John Candy from the feminine wiles of Ally Sheedy in Only the Lonely proved too much to resist. Not that the woman who played the fiery Mary Kate Danaher could ever be satisfied baking cookies and making macramé flower pot holders. Her second husband was the founder and head of the U.S. Virgin Islands airline Antilles Air Boats, and after his death in a plane crash, she was elected CEO and president of the airline, making her the woman president of a scheduled airline in the U.S.

Into Each Life, Rainer Must Fall

Or

Rainer in Pain Falls Mainly Where She’s Lain

Or

When it Rainers, it Pours

(Meritorious mention for Monty)

Or

Returning to the Good Earth

(Additional accolades for Monty)
Luise Rainer, about whom it is often said, "Winning an Oscar isn't so difficult. After all, they gave Luise Rainer two" has died of pneumonia at the age of 104. Rainer was starting to emerge as a stage and film star in Austria and Germany when she skipped out during Hitler’s rise to power to find fame in Hollywood. There, she made 9 movies, winning back-to-back Oscars for Best Actress in 1936 (for The Great Ziegfeld) and 1937 (for The Good Earth). As the heartbroken Anna, Ziegfeld’s common-law wife, Rainer scored the Oscar for one telephone call, smiling through tears and struggling for composure as she congratulated Ziegfeld on his marriage to Billie Burke, then hung up and dissolved in sobs, the kind of over the top histrionics early voters loved. The German-born child of Jewish parents repeated by playing O-Lan, the stoic Chinese peasant wife of Wang Lung from the Pearl S. Buck novel. Having won in a biopic and for faking an accent, all Rainer needed was to have played a crip to complete the Hollywood hat trick of Oscar bait, but MGM president Louis Mayer decided that it made more sense to put his two-time Oscar winner in subpar melodramas rather than the more serious roles she craved. Rather than kowtow, Rainer gave up the business, opting instead to aid orphaned refugees of the Spanish Civil War, appearing at war bond rallies in the United States, entertaining Allied troops during World War II, and appearing in a few plays and TV appearances. A role was developed specifically for her in La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini, but Rainer still had a bit of diva-ishness in her that led Fellini to cut the role and the aggravation.

Death to Smoochy II: The Quickening

Or

Dead Poets Society

(Admittedly, a little spot on, but how can you not?)

Or

Shazbot

Robin Williams, who turned a short attention span into an empire that funded his ex-wives’ spending, has joined the dead poet’s society at the age of 63. Long suspected of being a manic depressive, Williams finally reached the end of his rope. For a man so wildly inventive in his stage performances, his star-making role as Mork, his bravura performance as the Genie in Aladdin, being revealed as a “crying on the inside” type of clown was a disappointingly trite cliché. If he could survive Popeye, you’d have thought nothing would do him in. For his undeniable comedic skill, and his surprising dramatic chops in The World According to Garp, Awakenings and Good Will Hunting, he proved staggeringly inept at selecting quality projects – as evidenced by Man of the Year, Bicentennial Man, Jumanji, RV, Patch Adams and Old Dogs.

Truman Kaput

Philip Seymour Hoffman, best remembered as the inept police officer of North Bath, New York who gets punched by Paul Newman in Nobody’s Fool, has died of a drug overdose at the age of 46. Other memorable roles included a tornado chaser in Twister, part of the con job support staff in Leap of Faith, a prep school stool pigeon in Scent of a Woman, Patch Adams’ med school roommate, a human barbecue in Red Dragon, a porn shoot hanger-on and closeted gay fan of Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights and Art Howe in Moneyball. While these roles were ignored, he won a Best Actor Oscar for Capote, and  Best Supporting Actor nominations for Charlie Wilson’s War, Doubt and The Master and Tony nominations for True West, Death of a Salesman and Long Day's Journey into Night.

Judgment at the Pearly Gates

(Kudos to Monty)

 

Or

Schell-om

Maximilian Schell, best remembered for the heavy-handed irony of his abandonment by his young wife on the eve of the apocalypse mirroring his own betrayal of his wife and child years before in Deep Impact, the talkiest disaster movie ever, has died of a sudden illness at the age of 83. Schell also played faux cooker of endangered species Larry London in The Freshman and the mad scientist at the edge of The Black Hole. But the reason he’ll get a prime spot in the Academy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ necrology is his Oscar for Best Actor for playing a German defense attorney in Judgment at Nuremberg, just his second acting role in a US film. Schell’s ability to speak German earned him roles in a number of other Nazi-themed movies, ironic given that he and his family fled Austria when it was annexed by Germany in 1938. Schell scored two other Oscar nominations for The Man in the Glass Booth and Julia. Schell was also noted as being one of the best Hamlets ever, with his performance being singled out by Mike, Crow and Tom Servo in a 1999 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

 

de Winter’s Bones

Or

Damsel in Distress

Joan Fontaine finishes first again, dying at the age of 96. Denied the use of even her own last name by her mother, who favored first-born Olivia de Haviland, Fontaine nonetheless was a two-time Oscar nominee for 1940’s Rebecca and 1941’s Suspicion, for which she won, the only actor to win an Academy Award while being directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She racked up a third nomination for 1943’s The Constant Nymph. Her film career petered out in the 1950s, but she received a plethora of good notices for her stage work, and she even scored an Emmy nomination for her work on the soap opera Ryan’s Hope in 1980. Fontaine and de Haviland’s relationship was strained from childhood, with de Haviland tearing up clothes earmarked as hand-me-downs for Fontaine. When Fontaine won her Oscar in 1942, one of the losers was de Haviland, whose efforts to congratulate her sister at the awards ceremony were rebuffed. Several years later at another event, the positions and the snubbery were reversed. Fontaine claimed that the last straw came the sisters disagreed on de Haviland’s decision for their 88-year-old mother to undergo surgery to treat her advanced cancer. When their mother died, de Haviland did not bother to find out where her sister was, sending a telegraph that arrived at Fontaine’s next stop with a touring play some 2 weeks later. The two reportedly hadn’t spoken since 1975. Fontaine once said, "I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did, and if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it."

Stopped Motion

Ray Harryhausen, who offered movie-goers more engaging experiences than any CGI technician can dream of, has died at the age of 92. The visual effects pioneer learned at the side of Willis O’Brien, the man who brought King Kong to life. After serving in World War II in the special services corps under Colonel Frank Capra and alongside composer Dimitri Tiomkin and Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, Harryhausen and O’Brien collaborated on Mighty Joe Young and won an Academy Award for special effects. Dealing with tiny budgets for what were considered “B” pictures at the time, and have long since eclipsed the “A” pictures considered superior at the time, Harryhausen revolutionized movie-making with his form of stop-motion miniature model animation known as “Dynamation” that in many scenes allowed actors to interact with the models to add a greater sense of realism. He started with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, based on a short story by his lifelong friend Ray Bradbury. The third member of their decades-long geek triumvirate was sci-fi historian Forrest J. Ackerman. Among his more famous creations are the dueling skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts; the 6-armed (due to budget) octopus that attacked San Francisco in It Came From Beneath the Sea; Ymir, the Venusian that terrorized Rome in 20 Million Miles to Earth; Gwangi, from a reboot of Mighty Joe Young with an allosaur instead of a monkey; the Kraken from Clash of the Titans (we will not speak of the stupid owl); and the destruction of Washington, DC in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. His influence on other filmmakers was profound, with Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and Nick Park of Wallace and Gromit fame all admitting to standing on the shoulders of his genius. Among the tributes paid him are the stop-motion animated monster Nesuahyrrah at the end of Flesh Gordon, a sushi restaurant in Monsters, Inc named Harryhausen’s, a Celtic secret society book in Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed that included "Harry Hausen" as a previous owner; a piano listed as being a Harryhausen brand in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride; and by Burton again with Mars Attacks!, especially a scene in which one of the aliens knock down the Washington Monument.

The Way He Was

(Props to Monty)

Or

Stung

Or

Nobody Does it Better, but Plenty Have Done it Longer

Or

One, Who Is Feeling No Sensation

Marvin Hamlisch, godfather of sampling, has died after a brief illness at the age of 1968. At the age of 7, he was the youngest ever admitted to the Julliard School and to the end he had the appearance of the band room geek who never outgrew it. Unlike the band room geeks left dangling from atomic wedgies, Hamlisch hit his stride, winning three Oscars, four Emmys, four Grammys and a Pulitzer (one of only 2 to claim PEGOTs), while emerging as an engaging personality who could visit Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin and not send viewers to the bathroom. In addition to ripping off Scott Joplin to Fareed Zakaria his way to an Oscar for the score to The Sting, he filled countless elevators with misty water-colored memories after writing Barbra Streisand’s signature song The Way We Were (another Oscar winner), gave James Bond one of his best theme songs with Nobody Does it Better, and composed Theme Song for Peaboy for Late Night with David Letterman.

Holm’s Deep

Or

She’s Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say Anything

Celeste Holm, best remembered as Ted Danson’s mom in Three Men and a Baby, has died at the age of 95. She got her big break as the horny hick, the flirt of flyover country, the randy ruralite Ado Annie in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, the girl who just cain’t say no to the menfolk. She soon found the big screen, earning an Oscar for supporting actress as the puncturer of hypocrisy in Gentleman’s Agreement, Hollywood’s assault on anti-Semitism, and she followed up with two more nominations as a French nun in Come to the Stable and as Margo Channing’s well-meaning but dim friend who introduces her to Eve in All About Eve. And after 3 nominations in 4 years, she coasted for 50 years. Along the way she also lost Frank Sinatra to Grace Kelly in High Society, the musical version of The Philadelphia Story. She never really left the stage, taking rolls in The King and I, Mame and Anna Christie between movie rolls, and at the age of 73 tried to nail John Barrymore’s ghost in I Hate Hamlet.

Not so McHale or McHearty

Or

Resuscitation is Futile

Ernest Borgnine, who had a thing for white cotton panties, has died of renal failure at the age of 95. After sending Frank Sinatra’s Maggio From Here to Eternity as Fatso Judson, Borgnine was the logical choice to play the painfully shy, gentle butcher with mommy issues in Marty. Borgnine won the Best Actor Oscar, ironically beating Sinatra (from The Man with the Golden Arm) again, and in the days before carelessly throwing your life away guaranteed you an Oscar, James Dean. He sent The Dirty Dozen to certain doom, escaped certain doom on the Poseidon, got strangled in Ice Station Zebra, got eaten by rats in Willard, got shot down with the rest of The Wild Bunch, got blown up in Escape from New York, fell victim to panic (and a far too form-fitting uniform) and crashed a spaceship in The Black Hole, and got mauled by something as the Celebrity Dad on the Junior Campers father-son rubber-rafting trip on The Simpsons. The former Navy man reached a new audience as Quinton McHale, commander of the PT-73, a lovable band of wacky misfits who happened to be very good at killing Nips, back before that was a racist term – so good that they took the incomprehensible reverse trip from the South Pacific to Italy for the unsuccessful last season of McHale’s Navy. He later rejoined Tim Conway as Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy on SpongeBob SquarePants. In 2009, he helped close out the last 2 episodes of ER as a husband saying goodbye to his dying wife, earning an Emmy nomination more than 50 years after his TV career began with him trying to kill Captain Video and his Video Rangers.

I Won’t Have What She’s Having

(Props to Terry)

Or

Lifeless on the Lower East Side

Nora Ephron, purveyor of sentimental twaddle, has died of leukemia at the age of 71. A brilliant essayist, Ephron turned to the silver screen, earning an Oscar nomination for original screenplay for Silkwood and being cruelly denied for the same for My Blue Heaven. She even made the rom-com tolerable with When Harry Met Sally… and the most memorable diner scene ever. Ephron then gave all that up to write and direct Sleepless in Seattle, a shameless rip-off of An Affair to Remember, which wasn’t that good to begin with, brought Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan back together again for the even worse You’ve Got Mail, with the John Travolta as angel mess Michael for bad measure. She then shoveled mud on the grave of Julia Child, not to mention Amy Adams’ career, with Julie and Julia. Ephron’s second marriage was to Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame; it ended in divorce after his affair with a British politician. She used the marriage and affair as grist for her quill in the screenplay for Heartburn, where she referred to a man who “would have sex with a Venetian blind.” Bernstein threatened to sue, but as a journalist, he was well aware that the truth is absolute defense against libel. She died before she could malign her third husband, crime writer Nicholas Pileggi, but she did turn his Wiseguy into the aforementioned classic My Blue Heaven, the Dr. Strangelove to his Fail Safe.

With Great Death Comes Great Burial

Or
Can You Hear Me Now?

Or
Sorry Charly

Or
Come Back, Shame
Hollywood snitch Cliff Robertson has died at the age of 88. Robertson won the Oscar in 1969 playing the titular Charly, continuing Hollywood’s tradition of soothing its guilt over mocking the handicapable by handing out Oscars to every non-special actor who does a half-way decent job depicting a differently abled character. Even then, Robertson was careful not to go full retard in his depiction of Charly, a “just a little slow” bakery employee who undergoes experimental surgery to become smarter and finds that hyperintelligent people are rapey goateed douchebags. Other gigs included the Batman baddie Shame, a Shane-less parody of the Alan Ladd classic, the Twilight Zone classic creep out “The Dummy,” which single-wooden-handedly established the omniscient ventriloquist dummy genre, and “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim,” where he wanders from 1847 Ohio into 1961 New Mexico in search of penicillin for his ailing son. Robertson spent four years as persona non grata after turning in Columbia Pictures president David Begelman for forging his name on a check. Begelman was head of MGM before the justice-obsessed Hollywood elite had let Robertson out of the doghouse for turning on one of their own. Most recently, he spent 10 years hawking AT&T and guiding Spider-Man from beyond the grave as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben.

Guess we can get that gun now

(An epitaphany shared most closely with Mark, with similar sentiments from Shawn and Joe)

Or
Soylent Green is Heston
(Another popular epitaphany suggested in various forms by Mark, longtime observer Tammy, Joe and Monty)

Or
I'll see you in hell you damn dirty apes
(Kudos to Peter)

Or
Heston is Restin'
(Whoop whoop for Monty)

Or
Guns and Moses
(Stolen from politico.com by Michelle H)
Right wing, gun toting ham and book on tape narrator for Madonna’s Sex Charlton Heston was killed in the family’s weekly gunplay last Saturday at his Beverly Hills, California home at the age of 84. Heston’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease was ironic, given that he made his career playing historical figures no one remembered, like El Cid, Ben Hur, Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Richelieu… Moses. In nearly 100 movies, Heston portrayed the same forceful big block of granite – I mean really, was there any difference between Robert Neville in The Omega Man, Will Penny and Brad Braden in The Greatest Show on Earth? Add in a loathing for mankind and you’ve got Taylor from Planet of the Apes. Add in a couple dozen wives and you’ve got Brigham Young in The Avenging Angel. When not rewriting history or overseeing the end of mankind, he ventured into the disaster genre, getting lowered into Karen Black’s cockpit in Airport ’75 and drowning himself rather than stay with Genevieve Bujold in Earthquake, and battling ants in The Naked Jungle. Along the way, the man who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. on Washington decided that the real problem with America was that 7 days was far too long to wait to be able to shoot 24 kids at a time in a high school and became the president of the NRA. It was his decision to go on with the show when the NRA had scheduled its annual meeting in Denver the week after the Columbine massacre. He was elected to serve as president of the NRA for the 4th time in 2001, after the association revised its constitution to allow him to serve more than twice, so apparently it is possible to revise a constitution. His 4th term also came about a year after he had entered alcohol rehab, which he apparently started because he was afraid of spilling beer into his gun barrel.

There were only 8 men on a dead man's Cheston, who take 2.5 points apiece: Ern’s Closing Soon at a Theater Near You moves into 5th, My Better Late Than Never takes 8th, Michelle’s Lights, Camera, Casket climbs into 11th, while Aimee, Shawn’s Team Old, Peter, Joy’s Cold as Ice – no longer just an observer, and Jen inch into 29th. Matt is now our pole sittah, coming up on the anniversary of his last hit: Kitty Carlisle Hart.

Blacklisted for Good This Time

(Props to Kirsti)

Or
Cool Jules
(Additional accolades for Kirsti)

Or
Never Again on Sunday
(Bonus bon mot from Kirsti)

Or
R.I.P.-fifi
(Kirsti strikes again)

Or
He Who Must Die (Because I've Got Five Bucks Riding on It)
(Another one from Kirsti, who apparently has been looking forward to this day for some time)
Commie director Jules Dassin has died at the age of 96. A successful director of noir films including Brute Force, The Naked City and Night and the City, considered his masterpiece, the godless Bolshevik’s Communist Party membership was revealed to the House Un-American Activities Committee by true patriots Edward Dmytryk and Frank Tuttle and he couldn’t direct traffic. Like most people who hate America, he ended up in France, where he overcame his inability to understand French by including a 30-minute robbery scene without music or dialogue in Rififi, for which he won a best director award at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. Soon thereafter, he wrote and directed “Never on Sunday,” and with Joe McCarthy having been slandered by Edward R. Murrow, Dassin scored two Oscar nominations. The lifelong troublemaker was also accused later of trying to overthrow the Greek government, apparently figuring it was a little easier to knock off. He also badgered the British government about returning the Elgin Marbles, sculptures looted from the Parthenon 200 years ago.

After 5 years of waiting, Greg finally scores on Dassin, and his Team Quincy moves into 13th, but more importantly Mrs. Greg cherry picks and the death of Jules crowns her Geri(atrics) and the Pacemakers as our new leader with 3 hits.

Kiss of Death

(An epitaphany shared with Monty)

Or
Maker's Widmark
Richard Widmark, poster boy for compassionate elder care, has died at the age of 93. Widmark debuted in 1947’s Kiss of Death as Tommy Udo, a sociopath who shoved the mother of a man he thought had ratted him out down a flight of stairs in a wheelchair, all the while giggling maniacally. Udo is still remembered as one of the most frightening characters in film history and Widmark earned Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination. The role cemented Widmark as a heavy in a serious of noir films before he became the cranky, craggy reluctant hero as a doctor in Panic in the Streets, Major General Thalius Slater – a man at war with killer bees in The Swarm, Jim Bowie in John Wayne’s The Alamo, prosecuting attorney Col. Tad Lawson in Judgment at Nuremberg, and an Army captain in Cheyenne Autumn, John Ford’s apology for three decades of cinematic Indian killings. In another Ford movie, Widmark starred opposite Jimmy Stewart. Both actors were hard of hearing, and needed the hair-making help of the make-up department. Ford, a notorious prick, would position himself too far for the actors to hear him, and when they threw up their hands in exasperation, Ford announced that after 40 years in movie-making, he was reduced to directing 2 deaf toupees. Other roles included evil hospital head Dr. Harris in Coma, nuclear war inciting naval officer Eric Finlander in The Bedford Incident, racist creep Ray Biddle in No Way Out, and for a while, Sandy Koufax’s father in law.

While not quite a swarm, there were 3 of us to predict this one: Monty’s Dead? No, Acting, takes 5th, while Nancy and my Better Late Than Never move into a 14th place tie. Of special note, that is Nancy’s first hit since November 2006, though she did take 2007 off, meaning that the cheese standing alone is Joy, nose pressed to the glass since March 6, 2007.

Tangled up in Blue

Edward Bunker, a convicted criminal who became an acclaimed writer and so-so actor, has died at the age of 71. A young man with a genius IQ, Bunker was the Doogie Howser of crime, starting law breaking at the age of 3, and was the youngest person to take up residence at San Quentin prison, where he ended up after stabbing a guard at the L.A. County Jail. His numerous bank heists and drug arrests earned him a spot on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. In prison, he wrote his first novel, No Beast So Fierce, which became the basis for the 1978 movie Straight Time. He later wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated film Runaway Train. He served as a technical advisor on prison life in a number of films and played small roles in such films as Tango & Cash, but is best known for playing Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs, an experience he used as the title for his memoirs: Mr. Blue, Memoirs of a Renegade.

Withering Sight

Or

Enough is Enough, Arthur. Bury the Bitch!
(Props to Monty for both)

Geraldine Fitzgerald, whose starring film career was thwarted by her temper in the 1940s has died at 91. Fitzgerald held her own with Bette Davis in "Dark Victory," then won an Oscar nomination for playing Isabella in "Wuthering Heights," but her frequent rebellions at Warner Bros. earned her a number of suspensions and derailed her career. She had originally come to the U.S. to act with Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater, and returned to the stage after her film career turned to character roles, winning a Tony nomination in 1982. Fitzgerald also played Arthur’s mother Martha in "Arthur" and is the third "Arthur" co-star to become caught between the moon and New York City this year, following Barney Martin and Stephen Elliott.

The Stagnant Smell of Decay

The Stagnant Smell of Decay

Or

Due South

Ernest Lehman, the screenwriter behind such classics as “North by Northwest” and “The Sweet Smell of Success,” better hope somebody up there likes him, as he has died at the age of 89. Lehman also inflicted the problem like Maria on the world and all of that van Crapp about singing past the Nazis in “The Sound of Music.” A versatile writer, Lehman’s other films included the musicals “The King and I” and “West Side Story,” the romantic comedy “Sabrina,” the drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” the biography “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” the black comedy “Family Plot” and the adventure “Black Sunday,” and his skills were sought by directors Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder. Lehman was nominated for four Oscars and won a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2003.