Category: people

A British actor who replaced Mario Lanza in MGM’s The Srudent Prince, Purdom starred in the Hollywood costume epics The Egyptian and The Prodigal, then went on to a career in Italian sword-and-sandal epics.

“Donald E. Westlake, a prolific, award-winning mystery novelist who pounded out more than 100 books and 5 screenplays on manual typewriters during a career of nearly 50 years, died on Wednesday night. He was 75.”

“Even by conceptual-art standards, Willoughby Sharp’s work stood out. There was his gestational spin in a clothes dryer. There was the curious affair of the talcum powder, the teddy bear and the tab of LSD. And there was the Oklahoma Gun Incident, which members of the art world still discuss, with a mixture of horror and awe, more than 30 years later.”

“The sculptor Robert Graham, whose massive bronze works are seen on civic monuments across the United States, including the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington and the Duke Ellington Memorial in New York,” has died in Los Angeles at age 70. (He is survived by his wife, actress Anjelica Huston.)

“He seems to have given very precise instructions. I believe the funeral will be carried out to his instructions.” Broadway theatres dimmed their lights to honour Pinter, who wrote 32 plays, one novel and 22 screenplays.

“Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused.”

The troubled Village Voice laid off three employees Tuesday, including Nat Hentoff, the prominent columnist who has worked for the paper since 1958, contributing opinionated columns about jazz, civil liberties and politics.

In Her Majesty’s New Year’s Honours, Discworld novelist Terry Pratchett is knighted, Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant and jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine get CBEs, and actor Michael Sheen (of Frost/Nixon), gets an OBE.

Québec’s most famous export is promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest honour. Tenor Ben Heppner is also made a Companion, while Montreal dancer Louise Lecavalier, television host Suzanne Lapointe and poet Don McKay are named to the Order.

“Ann Savage, who earned a cult following as a femme fatale in such 1940s pulp-fiction movies as Detour, has died at 87. […] Her Hollywood career had largely been over since the mid-1950s, but she had a resurgence over the past year with a starring role in Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg.”