Rolling Obituary Thread 2023

:( What a man.

RIP :(

Ugh. Some of us did a deep dive into his catalog and read his memoir in recent years. One special thing about that book is that he gives his exes a voice, so there is a lot from Angie about their relationship and their daughter. RIP.

94 is a pretty good run! loved his cameos in the Austin Powers films, very unexpected

Hugh Hudson, 86

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/10/hugh-hudson-director-of-chariots-of-fire-dies-aged-86

Carlos Saura

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/10/spanish-filmmaker-carlos-saura-director-of-ay-carmela-has-died-aged-91

This year will not let up. :((

The Garden of Delights and Cria Cuervos are two of Saura's great films. I'd actually say he had a stronger run in the 70s than his countryman Buñuel.

I may go back and rewatch Chariots of Fire (never have). Curious how it would hold up. Definitely a key film in putting an end to the New Hollywood era.

I'm curious: was Chariots' BP win an upset? Like, looking at the nominations, I suspect that On Golden Pond seemed like the surest bet that year (or maybe Reds).

I had to enquire why they didn't have no chariots in the movie?!?

Mon Capitaine, it's only February!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Welland: "Welland won the award for Best Original Screenplay for Chariots of Fire (1981) at the 1982 Academy Awards, and his acceptance speech included the phrase: "The British are coming!"[11][12] (a quotation from Paul Revere).[10]"

I seem to recall "Reds" as being the '81 favourite for BP, and Fonda/Hepburn favoured for the lead acting roles

Yeah, I think it would have been Reds.

Ugh. RIPs. Yes to Cría Cuervos.

Praying this isn’t true but seeing people saying DLS’s Trugoy has passed

Oh no :(

Fuck, it's confirmed

https://thegrio.com/2023/02/12/breaking-trugoy-founding-member-of-de-la-soul-dead-at-54/

that site is down but yes -- https://allhiphop.com/exclusives/de-la-souls-trugoy-the-dove-has-died/

i hate this

Goddammit. And right before the big De La re-entry/rediscovery etc. Just terribly sad.

Well, that’s depressing as all hell. RIP.

RIP Trugoy

RIP
My autocorrect apparently doesn't know the names of any of the members of De La Soul.

Friedrich Cerha, Austrian composer, 96.

The DJ Nathan Coles, part of Tech House originators, Wiggle has died.

https://ra.co/news/78521

horribly sad end to a life, RIP

Good riddance etc

you probably remember this photograph. it's one of the more iconic of the awful images of the nazi torch march at UVA on august 11, 2017.
on august 12, the man in the center was elated to see himself on the cover of papers across the county.
today, i can tell you he is dead. pic.twitter.com/ti5c1c0LT0

— molly conger (@socialistdogmom) February 14, 2023

that he was arrested for smuggling fentanyl over the border is just too perfect a detail

Good extended excerpts of interviews on Fresh Air this week:

Bacharach, who died Feb. 8, wrote hits in the '60s and early '70s with longtime collaborator Hal David. We listen to a 2010 interview with them, and a '98 interview with Bacharach and Elvis Costello.

Also: bigass The Songs of Bacharach and Costello out Mar. 3:
https://www.elviscostello.com/the-songs-of-bacharach-costello/

Even better from where I sit:

https://realgonemusic.com/collections/upcoming/products/dionne-warwick-the-complete-scepter-singles-1962-1973-3cd-set

Huey 'Piano' Smith :(

Yeah, damn shame but what a life!

https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/new-orleans-rock-n-roll-pioneer-huey-piano-smith-dies/article_1a451915-0f9f-5e14-a98d-c1372185dc62.html

Rest in power to a legend there

I always thought he was, like, a 1940s swing/jump blues guy who lucked into a couple of hit records at the dawn of the rock 'n' roll era, so I assumed he'd died in the 80s or something.

Raquel Welch, 82.

https://www.tmz.com/2023/02/15/raquel-welch-actress-model-dead-dies-82/

RIP. Was just watching Bedazzled last night. Be careful of the prickles!

Watching The Last of Sheila the other month was a treat. (And learning she and Herbert Ross did not get along, well then.)

https://render.fineartamerica.com/images/rendered/medium/poster/5.5/8/break/images-medium-5/flareup-us-poster-raquel-welch-1969-everett.jpg

Too bad she’s not holding a horribly distended guitar for the full effect.

Beyond iconic growing up.

I interviewed her some years back, and this is what she had to say about the iconic "One Million Years" poster:

I always felt, when I analyzed that poster, that it had such a primitive feeling to it. People called it a bikini, but what it was was something made out of animal skin, and torn. The stance itself was totally different from any of the sex symbols we’d had up until that point. This was a much more athletic, aggressive woman. I’m fighting for my survival, ready for some kind of adversity coming over the mountain. I was primitive woman. I was the anti-Marilyn. I was part of the next generation of women who would be much more forthright.

She deserves to be better known by me, but according to Letterboxd I've only seen her in four movies: 100 Rifles, Myra Breckinridge, Naked Gun 33 1/3, and Legally Blonde (I didn't mark it as "watched," but I have vague memories of seeing bits of The Magic Christian on TV when I was young). A lot of her work seems very sixties-specific, for lack of a better term. She is also credited as appearing in The Flintstones: Hollyrock a Bye Baby (1993), in which I can only assume she played "Rock-el Welch."

I remember buying two posters at a local fair in the early '70s--the One Million Years B.C. poster, and a Paul Newman poster. My generation of straight men is being very careful about the words they choose on social media right now. I just messaged a friend that, as an adolescent, she was the most sexual woman I could even fathom--and then I remembered that she actually made a movie called Fathom. And now I'm going to shut up.

Another quote from my archives:

We had to get up at some ungodly hour and drive out into the middle of nowhere. I remember box lunches, and that it was snowing. I got terribly sick, because everyone else was all bundled up and I was out there in the middle of nowhere, on the top of this volcano in the Canary Islands, and it was really rugged to be out there every day. The rock was all sharp, and you could get cut. It was so uncomfortable. I had the most fun when we went back to the studios in London to do the fight sequences. But when I got off the plane the world was just a different place. Apparently that still of me had gone out from location. All of a sudden everyone knew who I was!

That costume used to shift around a lot, because I had to go into the water with it, and it would get stretched out and dry funny. As the movie went on, it seemed to get draped more provocatively each time. Some of the censors were apparently writing telegraphs in. "Ms. Welch’s costume is shifting this way and that way."

Once again, Brigitte Bardot smiles at the sky and lights another Gauloise in her pool cabana

One of the more bleak but funny details of in Steven Bach's Final Cut is United Artists' enthusiasm for an ultimately unrealized project wherein Welch was going to do her first proper nude scene.