Languish.org

Quote from: Solmyr on January 03, 2025, 05:00:47 AM"Catwoman" Jocelyn Wildenstein kicks off the year.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/01/style/jocelyn-wildenstein-death-cec/index.html

Quote from: Darth Wagtaros on January 03, 2025, 09:17:42 PMThey started production?

Quote from: Sheilbh on January 14, 2025, 12:55:40 PMI think only Brits will know him - but RIP Tony Slattery :(

Brilliant interview from Hadley Freeman a few years ago:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/29/tony-slattery-had-very-happy-time-went-slightly-barmy

When I was growing up I thought he was the funniest man on TV.

Quote from: viper37 on January 14, 2025, 01:04:20 PMOnly older Québécois like me will remember Kim Yaroshevskaya. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Yaroshevskaya)

A Russian emigrant, daughter of revolutionary Russians who fled Stalin's purges in 1933 at age 10.

She created a character named Fanfreluche, a doll who read stories and then interacted with the stories by entering the books to change it for a better ending.  I loved that as a young kid, which were reruns by then.

Died this week at 101 years old.

Quote from: Josephus on January 16, 2025, 01:44:22 PM:(

In my 20s he was movie God.

Quote from: Josephus on January 30, 2025, 02:10:52 PMMarianne Faithfull... a true legend.

Quote from: mongers on January 30, 2025, 03:03:34 PM

Quote from: Josephus on January 30, 2025, 02:10:52 PMMarianne Faithfull... a true legend.

That's a good innings and range of stroke played in it, especially considering her at times to the max lifestyle.  :bowler: 

QuoteActor Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa found dead in their New Mexico home, police say

Actor Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa have been found dead in their home in New Mexico, the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office told CNN.

Their cause of death has not been confirmed but it is not believed to be foul play, Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Denise Womack-Avila said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Quote from: Razgovory on February 27, 2025, 11:34:13 AM100-1 odds: suicide by cop.

Quote from: PJL on February 27, 2025, 11:50:50 AM

Quote from: Razgovory on February 27, 2025, 11:34:13 AM100-1 odds: suicide by cop.

This.

Quote from: HVC on February 27, 2025, 06:10:24 PMBut only one of three dogs.

Quote from: grumbler on February 27, 2025, 06:09:57 PMIt looks like Hackman died of natural causes/heart attack, and his despairing wife subsequently killed herself and their dog.

QuoteThe causes of deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, were revealed by authorities on Friday, more than one week after the couple was mysteriously found dead in their Santa Fe, New Mexico, home.

Hackman, 95, died of cardiovascular and Alzheimer's disease likely around Feb. 18, about one week after his wife died from a rare syndrome, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, on about Feb. 11, officials said.

Hackman's death was from "hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with Alzheimer's disease as a significant contributory factor," Dr. Heather Jarrell, chief medical investigator for the state's Office of the Medical Investigator, announced at a news conference.

"Mr. Hackman showed evidence of advanced Alzheimer's disease," she said. "He was in a very poor state of health. He had significant heart disease, and I think, ultimately, that is what resulted in his death."

Arakawa, 65, died from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare disease transmitted through rodent urine, droppings or saliva, officials said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the disease "initially causes flu-like symptoms that can progress to more severe illness where people have trouble breathing."
Those who contract hantavirus after being exposed to rodent excrement often feel ill for roughly three to six days, Jarrell said.

"Then they can transition to that pulmonary phase, where they have fluid in their lungs and around their lungs," she said. "And at that point, a person can die very quickly, within 24 to 48 hours, roughly speaking, without medical treatment."
Hackman was likely home with his deceased wife for one week before he died, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said. There was no food in his stomach, which means he had not eaten recently, but he had also no evidence of dehydration, officials said.

Hackman "was in an advanced state of Alzheimer's, and it's quite possible that he was not aware that she was deceased," Jarrell said, adding that the "question is difficult to answer."

The Academy Award-winning actor and his wife were found dead during a Feb. 26 welfare check, with no obvious signs of how they died, the sheriff's office said.

Authorities said last week that the couple tested negative for carbon monoxide. The New Mexico Gas Company also concluded its investigation for carbon monoxide at the home, saying there were "no significant findings" of leaks.

Authorities said last week that their deaths were "suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation," according to a search warrant affidavit.

Hackman was discovered on the floor in the mud room and it appeared he fell suddenly, according to the search warrant.
Hackman suffered from "severe heart disease, including multiple surgical procedures involving the heart, evidence of prior heart attacks and severe changes of the kidneys due to chronic high blood pressure," Jarrell said.

The actor's "initial pacemaker data revealed cardiac activity on Feb. 17, with subsequent pacemaker interrogation demonstrating an abnormal rhythm of atrial fibrillation on Feb. 18, which was the last record of heart activity," Jarrell said.
Hackman tested negative for hantavirus, officials noted.

Arakawa was found lying on her side on the floor in a bathroom, with a space heater near her body, according to the search warrant. Her body showed signs of decomposition; there was mummification to her hands and feet, the document said.

On the counter near Arakawa was an opened prescription bottle, with pills scattered, according to the search warrant. The pills were determined to be thyroid medication that was being taken as prescribed and did not appear to have any contribution to her death, officials said on Friday.

One of the couple's three dogs was found dead in a crate about 10 to 15 feet from Arakawa's body, officials said.

But their two other dogs were found alive. It appeared they had access to a doggy door; one dog was found near Arakawa's body and the other was located outside, according to Mendoza.
The sheriff on Friday outlined Arakawa's final days.

On Feb. 9, Arakawa picked up one of their three dogs -- the dog who was later found dead in the home with the couple -- from a vet hospital after a procedure, which may explain why the dog was discovered in a crate when the bodies were found, the sheriff said.

On the afternoon of Feb. 11, Arakawa went to a farmer's market, CVS and a pet food store, and entered her gated community at 5:15 p.m., the sheriff said.

There's no evidence she had any communication after Feb. 11, the sheriff said, saying all of her emails were unread after that date.

It's possible the dog died from lack of access to food and water, said Dr. Erin Phipps, veterinarian with the New Mexico Department of Health, but officials are awaiting results of the necropsy.
Dogs do not get sick from hantavirus, she noted.

There were 864 cases of hantavirus in the U.S. from 1993 to 2022, according to the CDC.

Quote from: Maladict on March 08, 2025, 05:40:44 AMWhy are all these personal details made public by the authorities? It's none of anyone's business. I get that dead people don't have privacy rights, but there's also no reason to do it other than entertaining the public's morbid fascination.

Quote from: Maladict on March 08, 2025, 05:40:44 AMWhy are all these personal details made public by the authorities? It's none of anyone's business. I get that dead people don't have privacy rights, but there's also no reason to do it other than entertaining the public's morbid fascination.

Quote from: Grey Fox on March 08, 2025, 01:39:31 PM

Quote from: Maladict on March 08, 2025, 05:40:44 AMWhy are all these personal details made public by the authorities? It's none of anyone's business. I get that dead people don't have privacy rights, but there's also no reason to do it other than entertaining the public's morbid fascination.

Gotta stop the conspiracies with transparency.

Quote from: Maladict on March 08, 2025, 05:40:44 AMWhy are all these personal details made public by the authorities? It's none of anyone's business. I get that dead people don't have privacy rights, but there's also no reason to do it other than entertaining the public's morbid fascination.

Quote from: crazy canuck on March 10, 2025, 03:24:40 PM

Quote from: Maladict on March 08, 2025, 05:40:44 AMWhy are all these personal details made public by the authorities? It's none of anyone's business. I get that dead people don't have privacy rights, but there's also no reason to do it other than entertaining the public's morbid fascination.

Two reasons.  One, it alerts the public to a health concern about the virus being present in that area.  Second, there was some suspicion of foul play, which is now answered in the negative.

Quote from: Josquius on March 11, 2025, 11:56:15 AMThat's terrible for him.
But got to ask as it stands out - THEIR lake?

Quote from: Syt on March 11, 2025, 03:21:47 PMI'm sorry, mongers :(

Quote from: Maladict on March 21, 2025, 06:21:38 AMRIP Eddie Jordan

QuoteOleg Gordievsky obituary
Russian spy who was the highest ranking KGB officer to defect to Britain
Richard Norton-Taylor
Fri 21 Mar 2025 18.23 GMT

(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d9f43fd1dfc21256ee3554a621e1644a8a98beae/0_1658_2563_1536/master/2563.jpg?width=1900&dpr=2&s=none&crop=none)
Oleg Gordievsky was smuggled out of Russia in the boot of a car driven by an MI6 officer. Photograph: Richard Wayman/Alamy

For more than a decade the senior KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who has died aged 86, spied for MI6 before escaping execution by being dramatically smuggled out of the Soviet Union in the boot of a car. He was the highest ranking KGB officer to defect to Britain, and his most important contribution as a spy was to warn Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan of the Soviet leadership's paranoia at a time when the world was moving dangerously close to nuclear war.

Gordievsky first came to the notice of MI6 after a tip-off from a Czechoslovakian spy, Standa Kaplan, who had defected to Canada. Kaplan mentioned Gordievsky as an old friend from the KGB academy, where they would together question the direction the Kremlin was taking. By then Gordievsky was a KGB officer attached to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen; in 1972 he responded favourably to delicate approaches made by MI6 officers in the Danish capital, after phone taps revealed that in calls to his wife in Moscow he had expressed growing concern about the Kremlin's actions, specifically mentioning the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He began spying for Britain when he returned to Moscow in 1974.

He continued to do so when – to the delight of British intelligence – he was moved in 1982 to London, where he was eventually appointed the KGB rezident, its head of station. However, in 1985 Soviet suspicions about him surfaced following a tip-off from Aldrich Ames, a senior CIA officer who was spying for the KGB. Gordievsky was summoned back to Moscow for questioning and, after four months of being closely watched, escaped in an episode that might have come straight out of the pages of spy fiction.

Over his many years of spying, Gordievsky's most valuable achievement was reassuring the Kremlin that a major annual Nato exercise in Germany, code-named Able Archer 83, was not the precursor to a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. It was a period of heightened cold war tension between the two superpowers, which was made worse by Reagan's rhetoric and the paranoia of the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, who came to power in 1982. In 1981, when he was head of the KGB, Andropov had launched Operation Ryan, which dispatched KGB officers around the world to gather evidence of US plans for a first strike. Gordievsky later described how KGB officers in London were ordered to find out whether NHS hospitals were stocking up supplies of blood and to watch the windows of the Ministry of Defence and other Whitehall departments to see if their lights were burning through the night.

Through his MI6 handlers, Gordievsky warned Thatcher, who in turn warned Reagan, that the Kremlin's concern about what the US and Nato were up to was genuine. With the KGB hierarchy in Moscow reluctant to dismiss Andropov's paranoia, it was left to Gordievsky to reassure the Kremlin that Nato had no intention of launching nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. Later, Gordievsky's other valuable role was assuring western leaders, notably Thatcher, that the new Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a genuine reformer who should be taken seriously.

Gordievsky was born in Moscow. His father, Anton, was a highly committed officer of the NKVD, the KGB's precursor, and an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin's purges, but his mother, Olga, a statistician, hinted privately to Oleg that she held Soviet communism in contempt. While his elder brother, Vasily, was establishing a career in the KGB, Oleg studied at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

He subsequently joined the Russian foreign service and was posted to East Berlin in 1961 just as the wall was being constructed. He accepted an invitation to join the KGB in 1963 and was posted to Copenhagen. After his second tour there, when he was recruited by MI6, he returned in 1978 to Moscow, where he threw himself into brushing up his English and learning about British politics. Helped by a shortage of KGB British experts, he was rewarded in 1982 with a posting to London.

In London Gordievsky regularly met his MI6 handlers at a safe house in Bayswater. Thatcher was told about him, but she knew his identity only as "Mr Collins". MI6 officers passed him chickenfeed – snippets of low-grade intelligence – to keep Moscow Centre happy with his work. Among information he fed MI6 was material about Britain he saw in the KGB's vast archives.

It included, he said, reports that the KGB regarded Michael Foot as an "actual agent" and made regular payments to the future Labour leader, whom they codenamed "Agent Boot". However, Gordievsky's claims about Foot, which he said MI6 believed, were inconsistent, and sit oddly with Foot's longstanding record of opposing the Soviet Union and its policies. After the Sunday Times published allegations in 1995 that he was a Soviet "agent of influence", Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages.

Gordievsky did, however, identify one individual with the potential to inflict real damage to British interests. He was Michael Bettaney, an unstable MI5 officer who had been sent to trouble-torn Northern Ireland, where various traumatic incidents led him into heavy drinking and a nervous breakdown. Confused and embittered, in June 1983 Bettaney had stuffed a batch of highly sensitive internal MI5 documents, including the names of senior MI5 staff, into the letter box of the London house of the KGB rezident, Arkady Guk.

Suspecting a trap, Guk consulted Gordievsky, who at the time was his deputy. Gordievsky told Guk he was clearly the victim of a set-up, before informing, as quickly as he could, his MI6 controllers. Bettaney became the first MI5 officer to face trial under the Official Secrets Act and was sentenced to 23 years in jail, while the exposure of Guk during the trial enabled the UK government to expel him, conveniently paving the way for Gordievsky to take over as the KGB's head of station in London.

Shortly afterwards the KGB got wind, through Ames, that one of their senior officers was a mole working for British intelligence. Various checks, allied to the way the Bettaney affair had panned out, soon pointed to Gordievsky as being that mole.

In May 1985 he was summoned back to Moscow and taken to a KGB safe house, where he was drugged and interrogated. Although he was released, he knew it would only be a matter of time before he would be interrogated again. Under a plan worked out in advance by MI6, at 7.30pm every Tuesday its officers would keep a watch on a certain bread shop in Moscow. In case of emergency, Gordievsky was told to turn up there wearing a grey cap and holding a plastic bag with the bright logo of Safeway supermarket.

An MI6 officer would then walk past him munching a Mars bar or a KitKat – a signal that would confirm the triggering of an operation, codenamed Pimlico, to smuggle him out of Russia. In July 1985 he activated the plan by visiting the bakers with his Safeway bag, and the next day caught a train to Leningrad (now St Petersburg), where he took another train to a Russian town close to the Finnish border.

In the course of an extraordinary day in which KGB teams tried to track down two cars driven by MI6 officers and their families, he was eventually shoved into the boot of one of them. After the tensest of moments, Soviet border guards, whose dogs were distracted by the smell of soiled nappies in Gordievsky's car, let through the two vehicles, which had diplomatic plates. Gordievsky emerged in Finland and was flown to Britain via Norway. In Moscow he was sentenced to death, in absentia, for treason.

MI6 quickly found him a house near Godalming in Surrey, where his identity was protected. But he was without his family and lonely, and suffered the withdrawal symptoms that spies so often experience once the excitement of their secret life and defection has died down. Aware of the dangers, MI6 encouraged Gordievsky to write a history of the KGB with the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew. The KGB: The Inside Story was published in 1990, and the following year Gordievsky produced Instructions From the Centre, a book that described how he and fellow KGB officers conned Moscow headquarters into believing their intelligence reports were the result of expensive lunches with valuable British contacts.

His autobiography, Next Stop Execution, was published in 1995, accompanied by the claims about Foot.

In 2007, Gordievsky was appointed CMG, for "services to the security of the UK".

Later that year he was rushed to hospital where he spent 34 hours unconscious. He claimed he was poisoned with thallium by "rogue elements in Moscow", a contention that was never proved but led him to criticise MI6 for not looking after him properly.

His first marriage, to Yelena Akopian, a KGB officer, ended in divorce. In 1979 he married Leila Aliyeva, whom he met in Copenhagen, where she worked for the World Health Organization. They had two daughters, Maria and Anna.

Gordiesvky told neither of his wives that he was a double agent, to protect them if they were subjected to interrogation if he was caught or fled. Leila and his daughters were on holiday in Azerbaijan at the time of his escape. Under pressure from the KGB, Leila divorced him. In 1991, she and their daughters were allowed to join him in Britain. But forced separation and the knowledge that Gordievsky had led a double life meant their relationship could not be restored. She soon returned to Russia. Their daughters, who do not use their father's name, are believed to still live in Britain.

Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky, intelligence officer, born 10 October 1938; death announced 21 March 2025

Quote from: mongers on March 11, 2025, 08:42:22 AMWell on Sunday by brother had to pull the body of his father-in-law out of their lake. He's was found floating face down in the water after being absent for a couple of hours.
Presumably the coroner will determine if it was a heart attack/ stroke etc.

Grim for my brother and his family, and a reminder of just how fleeting life is, even when it's not a celebrity.

Quote from: Duque de Bragança on March 30, 2025, 09:34:10 AMRichard Chamberlain, actor. Known for Shogun and the first to play Jason Bourne, on a TV mini-séries. Died the the day before his 91st birthday.

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/richard-chamberlain-dead-dies-shogun-thorn-birds-1236351970/ (https://variety.com/2025/film/news/richard-chamberlain-dead-dies-shogun-thorn-birds-1236351970/)

QuoteTop Gun and Batman actor Val Kilmer dies aged 65

Hollywood actor Val Kilmer, known for his roles in some of the biggest movies of the 1980s and 90s, including Top Gun and Batman Forever, has died aged 65.

He also starred in 1991's The Doors - playing the band's frontman Jim Morrison - plus the Western Tombstone and crime drama Heat.

Kilmer died of pneumonia on Tuesday in Los Angeles, his daughter Mercedes told US media. She said her father had been diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 but later recovered.

Tracheotomy surgery affected his voice and curtailed his acting career, but he returned to the screen to reprise his role as fighter pilot Iceman alongside Tom Cruise in 2022's Top Gun: Maverick.

"See ya, pal. I'm going to miss you", American actor Josh Brolin wrote alongside a picture of himself and Kilmer on Instagram.

"You were a smart, challenging, brave, uber-creative firecracker. There's not a lot left of those", he added.

In 2021, Kilmer released a documentary chronicling the highs and lows of his life and career. Val, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, features 40 years of home recordings, including him speaking with a voice box post-cancer surgery.

Born Val Edward Kilmer on 31 December 1959, Kilmer grew up in a middle-class family in Los Angeles.

His parents were Christian Scientists, a movement to which Kilmer would adhere for the rest of his life.

Aged 17, he became the then-youngest pupil to enrol at the Julliard School, in New York, one of the world's most prestigious drama conservatories.

Kilmer had two children with his ex-wife, actress Joanne Whalley.

Quote from: Valmy on April 02, 2025, 08:32:33 AMRIP Doc Holliday.

Quote from: Sheilbh on April 02, 2025, 08:38:14 AMOh RIP :(

Quote from: Sheilbh on April 02, 2025, 08:38:14 AMOh RIP :(

This news made me sadder than I expected or is normally the way with celebrities' deaths. A lot of his films were regular watches when I was a kid.

Quote from: Josquius on April 21, 2025, 03:08:21 AMSooo.....JD Vance killed the Pope.

Quote from: DGuller on April 21, 2025, 10:04:59 AMI saw the news yesterday of the Pope meeting with JD Vance, and was surprised, because I thought he was supposed to be dying.  Turns out he was.  How awful for him that JD had to be one of the last things he saw.

Quote from: Tamas on April 21, 2025, 03:54:14 AM

Quote from: Josquius on April 21, 2025, 03:08:21 AMSooo.....JD Vance killed the Pope.

The elderly should be saved from having to meet these idiots. First Truss and the Queen, now this.

Quote from: mongers on April 21, 2025, 03:41:26 PM

Quote from: Tamas on April 21, 2025, 03:54:14 AM

Quote from: Josquius on April 21, 2025, 03:08:21 AMSooo.....JD Vance killed the Pope.

The elderly should be saved from having to meet these idiots. First Truss and the Queen, now this.

Guys you are aware that Vance's middle name is Damien?  :ph34r:

Quote from: Admiral Yi on May 01, 2025, 08:36:58 AMTommy Lee Jones is dead.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on May 01, 2025, 08:36:58 AMTommy Lee Jones is dead.

Quote from: Sheilbh on May 20, 2025, 05:33:55 PMRIP George Wendt :(

(Honestly did not know he was still alive and astonished to discover he was only 76 - and in his mid-30s when he was in Cheers :blink:)

Quote from: Razgovory on May 17, 2025, 10:16:20 PMJoe Don Baker died.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECupIhIuei0

Quote from: Sheilbh on May 20, 2025, 05:33:55 PMRIP George Wendt :(

(Honestly did not know he was still alive and astonished to discover he was only 76 - and in his mid-30s when he was in Cheers :blink:)

Quote from: Tonitrus on May 20, 2025, 06:16:44 PMNorm!  :(

Quote from: crazy canuck on May 30, 2025, 03:20:42 PMHot Lips has passed

Quote from: Savonarola on June 09, 2025, 03:14:58 PMRIP Sly Stone (https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/09/entertainment/sly-stone-death)

Quote from: HVC on June 13, 2025, 12:14:25 PMHarris Yulin. He's was one of those faces you saw in a lot of movies and shows. He was also in one of my favourite DS9 episodes.

Quote from: Josephus on July 22, 2025, 01:28:55 PMOzzy Osbourne.

Glad he made it for his last gig.

When I was 16, way back when, he was all the rage. I remember buying his first two albums. His second, Diary of a Madman, certainly influenced my later purchases as I matured musically.

Quote from: Josephus on July 22, 2025, 01:28:55 PMOzzy Osbourne.

Glad he made it for his last gig.

Quote from: Zanza on July 22, 2025, 03:11:03 PMLegendary. Had his farewell concert two weeks ago, raising 200 million for charity. Can't go out better as a rock star.

Quote from: Josephus on July 24, 2025, 11:42:15 AMNah, he's just pretending. Soon, he'll get up, put his hand to his ears, hear the crowd cheer him on and rise up to vanquish the Undertaker.

Quote from: Sheilbh on July 22, 2025, 02:22:31 PM

Quote from: Josephus on July 22, 2025, 01:28:55 PMOzzy Osbourne.

Glad he made it for his last gig.

Not really to my taste at all but I very much enjoyed the photos and clips of him at his last gig:
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4bb2d215f58d6ce13a67e5647360804ec2a1a389/0_0_3868_2579/master/3868.jpg?width=1010&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=2251f614a3b68f1d78d9f29df3edc3a1)

RIP :(

Quote from: Savonarola on July 28, 2025, 03:51:46 PMRIP Tom Lehrer (https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/american-musical-satirist-tom-lehrer-183226199.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKtcKFlyBOkXI8MGTLoLBJocwRNC-ogUQefhji55FdCGRYJP3x5n6lHtlUGhaPAppZajHg14Mi4_nPq5tfHWB10WlhxqZhFL4_EfSSTWJW4uxBNX5ddELMW_PinNAYdu27uU3Dmf1V8DA_fLnbwOHDE6zgQhwOvUA-xI4ITqRz2w), he took us on wings of song and helped us forget, for a while, our drab, wretched lives.

Quote from: frunk on July 28, 2025, 04:14:25 PMRIP Tom Lehrer.  I think we should all pour one out for the inventor of the Jello Shot.  Supposedly he also cited Lobachevsky in one of his recently unclassified papers for the NSA.

Quote from: Savonarola on July 28, 2025, 05:13:05 PM

Quote from: frunk on July 28, 2025, 04:14:25 PMRIP Tom Lehrer.  I think we should all pour one out for the inventor of the Jello Shot.  Supposedly he also cited Lobachevsky in one of his recently unclassified papers for the NSA.

It would have been better if he hadn't cited him and just used the quote.

QuoteIn 1957, while working for the National Security Agency, Lehrer coauthored a paper in which he snuck in the song's line "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" into the reference section as an uncited and unpublished paper by Lobachevsky.

Quote from: frunk on July 28, 2025, 05:20:36 PM

Quote from: Savonarola on July 28, 2025, 05:13:05 PM

Quote from: frunk on July 28, 2025, 04:14:25 PMRIP Tom Lehrer.  I think we should all pour one out for the inventor of the Jello Shot.  Supposedly he also cited Lobachevsky in one of his recently unclassified papers for the NSA.

It would have been better if he hadn't cited him and just used the quote.

QuoteIn 1957, while working for the National Security Agency, Lehrer coauthored a paper in which he snuck in the song's line "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifolds" into the reference section as an uncited and unpublished paper by Lobachevsky.

QuoteAllan Ahlberg obituary: prolific children's author
Mischievous writer, who with his illustrator wife Janet produced more than 150 books including Peepo! and The Jolly Postman, dies aged 87
The Times
Thursday July 31 2025, 6.28pm, The Times

"Back then to Paddington/ Weather wet and mild/ Brand-new mother/ Second-hand child."

This was how the children's poet and writer Allan Ahlberg described the day his adoptive mother collected him from his Croydon orphanage. Born in 1938 to a young single mother unable to cope, Allan, still a baby, then became part of a poor but upright working-class family living in the Black Country town of Oldbury. There were no books — apart from Allan's regular Sunday school prizes to come — and not much conversation. But there was stability, care and affection however sternly administered. He went on to write many lovingly detailed poems on the smells, textures, tastes and toys of his childhood. His only adult book, The Bucket, based on these memories, is a mini-masterpiece of the nostalgic genre.

Aged ten, he discovered he was adopted after being taunted by a fellow pupil passing on comments heard at home. Angry with his parents for keeping this from him, he came to feel something of a cuckoo in the nest, reading avidly and dreaming of becoming a writer rather than watching television with his parents.

(https://www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fb01a7f2a-ee6a-4b27-af4e-68b1896a1b5c.jpg?crop=1987%2C1787%2C0%2C0&resize=1181&format=webp)
Peepo! was a baby's view of the world

His abiding passion for football was not shared by his younger brother Andrew, also adopted. With little else in common, the two never got on and remained separate as adults. Ahlberg eventually appreciated his parents' love and was at his mother's bedside when she died. His father, a gentle, hard-working labourer, died earlier. An affectionate but remote figure, he was described by Ahlberg in a poem as My Invisible Dad.

Leaving Oldbury Grammar School aged 17 with A-level passes in science, he opted for three years of National Service which meant he could send more pay to his mother, no longer working as a house and office cleaner. He was briefly a postman, gravedigger and plumber's mate before deciding aged 22 to overcome his shyness and become a primary school teacher. While at Sunderland Teacher Training College learning his future craft, he met Janet Hall, a talented artist. They married in 1969.

A natural and popular teacher, Ahlberg loved his job. Still too shy herself to take up teaching, Janet illustrated make-and-do junior craft books but longed to try stories instead. When he was ten years into his successful career in the classroom, she asked her husband to write her one. This he did, surprising himself with how easily it came. Determined to do more, he gave up teaching. Many rejection slips were to arrive in the next anxious 18 months before three titles were accepted in one week, all by different publishers.

Burglar Bill, the pick of the bunch, was based on a story Ahlberg had once told his class. It features a benign middle-aged thief who steals everything, including fish and chips, cups of tea and finally, by accident, a baby. Everything ends happily, with Bill now together with Burglar Betty, the baby's mother, returning everything he had previously stolen to start a new life. Janet's watercolour illustrations, firmly outlined in pen or pencil, expertly bring to life favourite details from their joint past. The rounded faces and ready smiles of her characters amply reflect the high good humour of Ahlberg's text.

The illustrations for their next joint effort, Each Peach Pear Plum, won Janet the Kate Greenaway Medal for 1978. Ahlberg's deceptively simple poems here combine simplicity of form with his unique brand of quirky humour. They describe characters from nursery rhymes and fairy stories playing I Spy with each other from page to page, with Janet's luminous illustrations the perfect accompaniment.

This book was later chosen as one of its ten best titles on the award's 50th anniversary. Finding the stories behind nursery rhymes and putting the rhymes into fairy stories worked brilliantly at a time, sadly no longer true, when most children were still familiar with such traditional fare. Its success gave the couple much needed financial security for their future as the most productive and creative husband and wife team yet in British children's literature.

Peepo! was also a bestseller. It affectionately details the typical domestic sights a baby might once have witnessed at a time of tin baths, coal buckets and cluttered front rooms. Told in verse, a circular punched-out hole on the middle of each page gives readers a glimpse of what's to come once they turn over. It is still wartime, with Dad wearing his army uniform as he kisses his baby son good night. Written in about four weeks, it took Janet many more months to get the illustrations right for historical detail. The book came out to ecstatic reviews.

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He revisited his childhood in The Boyhood of Burglar Bill

By now there was daughter Jessica, who early on showed great interest in a Mothercare catalogue. Thinking outside the box once again, the couple came up with The Baby's Catalogue, published in 1982. Illustrated pages on a variety of Mums, Dads, Pets, Teas, Prams and other child-friendly entries accompany numerous pictures of five different babies breastfeeding, on their potties, in the bath and otherwise getting on positively with their young lives apart from the moment when one of them is pictured in mid-howl. Fully involved in the publishing and printing process, advising on type size, paper quality, colour reproduction, covers and even binding, the Ahlbergs were now in a position to make sure they were always listened to.

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The Jolly Christmas Postman, illustrated by Janet Ahlberg, 1991

Jessica also had a hand in an even greater success. Watching his daughter in her high chair playing with the morning post, pulling out letters and then forcing them back into their envelopes, Ahlberg came up with the idea for The Jolly Postman, or Other People's Letters. This took little time to write but up to three years of experimenting with paper-engineering before it was completed. Real letters in real envelopes stuck onto the page accompany short, easy-rhyming poems which include Goldilocks apologising to the Three Bears and Jack taunting the Giant over his beanstalk exploits. There is also a threatening solicitor's letter written on behalf of Little Red Riding Hood warning off the Big Bad Wolf. Superbly illustrated in full comic vein and selling over six million copies, its sequel The Jolly Christmas Postman won Janet the Kate Greenaway Medal for the second time.

Many more joint publications followed as well as individual efforts, with Ahlberg working with other illustrators including Fritz Wegner and Raymond Briggs. He also brought out two collections of verse, Please Mrs Butler and I Heard it in the Playground, both drawing on his memories of teaching. But their work together stopped in 1994 with Janet's death from breast cancer at 50 years old.

Working through his initially disabling grief, Ahlberg found relief in bringing out Janet's Last Book, a privately printed personal selection from her lifetime of creativity. Going on to work on two books with his daughter Jessica, now also an illustrator, he eventually found happiness again after marrying Vanessa Clarke, formerly his editor at Walker Books. Slim, mild-mannered and boyishly handsome to the end, he is survived by Vanessa, Jessica, two stepdaughters, Saskia and Johanna, and two granddaughters.

In 2014 he declined the Booktrust's Lifetime Achievement Award because it had Amazon as its main sponsor. Moving from Bath to Lewes, East Sussex, to be near his Brighton-based daughter, he still wrote in his shed every day despite the onset of Parkinson's disease. My Brother's Ghost and The Boyhood of Burglar Bill both memorably revisit his childhood, this time in story form. But as in a late poem, there were more times now when "The phone rings/ But never long enough/ For the Slow man."

His readership remained huge. In the Philippa Pearce Lecture given in Cambridge in 2016 he quoted a letter received from Mia, a child aged he guessed about seven. "I love all the books that you make. I really love them all and they are so good. I love them all." She spoke here for all the many other young fans of his over 150 titles.

(George) Allan Ahlberg, children's poet and writer, was born on June 5, 1938. He died on July 29, 2025, aged 87

Quote from: Syt on September 16, 2025, 08:07:26 AMRIP Robert Redford, age 89.

Colleague's response (mid-20s): "I don't know him."

Quote from: Syt on September 16, 2025, 08:07:26 AMRIP Robert Redford, age 89.

Colleague's response (mid-20s): "I don't know him."

Quote from: Solmyr on September 16, 2025, 08:12:36 AMHe was in the MCU. :ph34r:

Quote from: Maladict on September 23, 2025, 06:08:24 PMRIP Claudia Cardinale

Quote from: Syt on September 24, 2025, 12:55:17 AM:(

Time to rewatch one of my favorite westerns, I guess. :(

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Quote from: Savonarola on October 10, 2025, 06:55:53 PMRIP John Lodge (https://www.nme.com/news/music/the-moody-blues-john-lodge-dies-suddenly-and-unexpectedly-aged-82-3898580).  No one remains of the Moody Blues original line up, only Justin Hayward is left from their classic period and Patrick Moraz from their comeback era.  I'm glad I got to see them a couple of times, I wish I could have seen them with Mike Pindar, but I was six when he left the band.

Quote from: Duque de Bragança on October 11, 2025, 02:32:46 PMDiane Keaton, 79.

RIP

Quote from: Duque de Bragança on October 11, 2025, 02:32:46 PMDiane Keaton, 79.

RIP

Quote from: Admiral Yi on October 15, 2025, 07:01:48 PMFor a while I was thinking I had missed two Indiana Jones flicks.  :wacko:

Quote from: Sheilbh on October 28, 2025, 09:43:33 AMOh RIP Prunella Scales :(

Quote from: Duque de Bragança on October 31, 2025, 02:42:36 PMTchéky Karyo, 72.

Actor known, for instance, the Bear and Nikita.

RIP

Quote from: viper37 on October 31, 2025, 04:42:46 PM

Quote from: Duque de Bragança on October 31, 2025, 02:42:36 PMTchéky Karyo, 72.

Actor known, for instance, the Bear and Nikita.

RIP

Also known as the Frenchman in every American movie. ;)

That's not very old :(

QuoteSir Tom Stoppard obituary: playful and prolific playwright
A popular and exotic figure, Stoppard was known for his dandyish appearance as well as his wit and eloquence
Saturday November 29 2025, 6.00pm, The Times
Comedy
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Tom Stoppard in 1994, aged 57
BRIDGEMAN IMAGES

With his Jim Morrison mane and Mick Jagger pout, Tom Stoppard looked more like a brooding rock star than one of Britain's most critically acclaimed and commercially popular playwrights. Although he came to prominence at a time of excitement in the theatre when John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter were producing some of their best work, and the generation of David Hare and David Edgar was emerging, his writing and his concerns were utterly distinctive and personal. And just as every cultured person more or less knows what is meant by Pinteresque, so the adjective Stoppardian entered the language as a shorthand for wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence.

Incorporating multiple timelines and visual humour, his work was generally optimistic and good-natured at a time when others were investigating squalor, degradation, silence and anomie. "I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours," he explained.

He rarely aimed for realism, least of all the gritty kind. His theatre is a place of carnival, where the extraordinary happens and ideas are taken to absurd logical extremes, and he had a wonderful ability to combine disparate elements beneath a dazzling surface. In his early career he was criticised, after the immense success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Jumpers, for failing to portray people convincingly and for the lack of social conscience. His reply was that much of his dialogue was "simply stuff which I've ping-ponged between me and myself".

"I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown," he said, "and I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself."

Accordingly, his younger years were amusing and productive, but as he grew older part of him was determined to write about darker matters, and to investigate what he really thought and felt. He was genuinely interested in the life of his times, but in its intellectual rather than its social manifestations.

For his own part Stoppard affected indifference to his high reputation. In 2010, when asked what he thought Stoppardian meant, he said "another hapless, feckless, fatuous episode in my life, brought on by my own forgetfulness or incompetence".

He was born Tomas Straussler in 1937, the younger son of Eugen, a doctor employed by Bata shoes, and Martha in Zlin in Czechoslovakia. The exotic way he rolled his Rs as he spoke hinted at his Bohemian origins. The family moved to Singapore two years later to escape the threat of Nazism (a great-grandparent was Jewish), only to find themselves in danger again, in 1942, from the Japanese invasion. His mother took him to India while his father stayed behind, only to be killed in a Japanese bombing raid.

After the war, his mother married a British army officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard, and returned to England with her two sons, who took their stepfather's name. Tom went to boarding schools in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, the latter of which, Pocklington, he hated.

He left school at 17 to become a reporter for the Western Daily Press. Four years later he moved to the Bristol Evening World, where he stayed until 1960. It was during this period that he worked, he claimed, as the only motoring correspondent who could not drive. "I used to review the upholstery," he said. He was also a second-string theatre critic.

He continued to work as a freelance journalist until 1963, when his first play, A Walk on the Water, was produced on television. He then devoted himself to full-time writing, which meant living in some poverty — though not without flamboyance — until, in 1967, his fortunes were transformed by the popularity of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The play's premiere had been given by an Oxford University drama group at the Edinburgh Fringe the previous year, and after a favourable review it was snapped up by Kenneth Tynan for the National Theatre at the Old Vic, where it stayed in repertory for four years. It was also seen on Broadway and in translation around the world.

The task of translation must have been made harder by the piece's dependence upon recognition of Shakespeare's lines. The play is a kind of backstage Hamlet, in which the leading players become bit parts and the minor characters take the key roles, finding, as in the tragedy, that their world has been turned inside out. A further clever conceit is Stoppard's identification of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a Hamlet for the 20th century. The dialogue of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is a comic take on that of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, which had been the theatrical revelation of the previous decade; and just as these anti-heroes are assimilated by Stoppard, so are the enigmatic Prince and the elusive Mr Godot.

Beckett never saw or read Stoppard's play, but the next best thing was a friendly telegram from another playwright, Pinter. It was signed "PINTA" and Stoppard recalled: "I thought that in some curious way it was connected with the Milk Marketing Board."

In 1968 A Walk on the Water was recycled for the stage as Enter a Free Man, a minor piece, and The Real Inspector Hound opened at the Criterion Theatre in the West End. Inspector Hound is an ingenious satire on the traditional murder mystery, in which two theatre critics become entangled. Stoppard pokes fond fun at the mechanics of the genre, as when Mrs Drudge answers a phone she happens to be dusting with the ultra-informative words: "Hello, the drawing room of Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early spring."

Three years later, the one-act After Magritte showed Stoppard's talents for wordplay and for brilliantly surreal but infallibly logical plotting. These were to reach their height in 1972 in Jumpers, a play about a moral philosopher wrestling to demonstrate that there are objective values while his wife, a musical comedy star, suffers a breakdown and his university becomes a sort of intellectual gymnasium.

At one point, for entirely evident reasons, the philosopher answers the door to a policeman while covered in shaving foam and holding a tortoise, with the words: "I'm sorry, I was expecting a psychiatrist."

Jumpers was a huge success, being at once entertaining and cerebral. In Stoppard's rollicking style it addresses a profound question and the author's sympathies are clearly with the flailing philosopher, but the treatment itself is facetious even when Stoppard is deploring the unseriousness of trendy academia. Like most of his pieces it is something of an exercise. Very often, Stoppard's lines are designed for a palpable but momentary effect: in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for instance, Rosencrantz idly muses on the growth of the fingernails after death solely as a cue for the convulsingly theatrical line: "The toenails, on the other hand, never grow at all."

Between major plays, Stoppard wrote one-acters, scripts for radio and television (including a version of Three Men in a Boat, starring Michael Palin), film scripts (including Graham Greene's The Human Factor and JG Ballard's Empire of the Sun), and translations and adaptations (Federico Garcia Lorca, Arthur Schnitzler, Anton Chekhov). He also contributed anonymously to Steven Spielberg scripts, which were sent to him privately. Some of these seemed to be chips from the workshop, but all contained memorably hilarious lines.

His next stage play was Travesties (1975), in which Lenin, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and James Joyce meet in Zurich during the First World War and become involved in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Again, Stoppard was spurred or enabled to write by a classic work, already familiar to his audience, around which he played his variations and cerebral games.

Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth (1979) also used this technique, spinning ideas (this time out of Wittgenstein, about the nature of language) around an immediately recognisable framework. When he attempted something freestanding, as in Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land (1976) or Night and Day (1978), the results were less happy. In 1980 he admitted that some of the excitement of the theatre had worn thin, saying: "When I started, I wrote a play because I wanted to be a playwright. Now I write plays because I am a playwright." He was by now one of the most successful in the world, and in 1979 he became "lord" of Iver Grove, a Palladian-style house in Buckinghamshire.

In that year he also wrote Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a play with full on-stage orchestra, with music by André Previn. This remarkable hybrid concerned the plight of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, and featured a sane man put in a mental hospital for saying that sane men were being put in mental hospitals. This was the kind of ramifying conundrum on which Stoppard had always thrived, but now the comedy was poignant because the pressing truth was so tragic.

Stoppard had now exhausted the vein of travesty, and his significant output slowed considerably, with perhaps a really good new play emerging each decade. One answer to his dependency problem was to adapt little-known foreign work. Undiscovered Country (1979) was from Arthur Schnitzler; On the Razzle (1981), at the National Theatre with Felicity Kendal playing the lead, was a sublimely funny, fast-moving version of a comedy by Johann Nestroy. Rough Crossing, at the National in 1984, was adapted from Ferenc Molnar, and concerned the writing of a Broadway musical set on a ship by a composer and its two stars as they are sailing to New York. This was Stoppard's "sine qua nonchalance" at its best.

His most substantial plays of the 1980s and 1990s were The Real Thing, Arcadia and The Invention of Love. The title of The Real Thing (1982) referred to the sincerity or otherwise of art and love, but also contained a defence of language used well which may be taken as an attack on the use of blunt propaganda in the theatre by some of Stoppard's more radical contemporaries.

Whether the play itself was the real thing or merely a tale of adultery among theatre folk, with Stoppard's fizzing language disguising some fairly trite comparisons, is hard to say. Reality took a bow shortly afterwards when Stoppard and his leading lady, Kendal, left their respective spouses for each other. He would later describe her as his muse. She starred successively in On the Razzle, Jumpers, Hapgood, Arcadia and Indian Ink (which drew on her early years in India) at the National or in the West End.

Arcadia (1993) was classic Stoppard: a story of love and literature, philosophy and coincidence. Ranging from the age of Byron to that of chaos theory, it combined the suspense of The Aspern Papers with the excitement of the most speculative modern science. "It's the best possible time to be alive," declares one character in the present, "when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong." Like his characters, Stoppard was dancing for joy at what lesser minds would find a frightening prospect. For him, the infinite permutations of life were a cause for celebration.

The Invention of Love (1997) was a far more sombre piece: a profile of AE Housman as a classicist who has perhaps failed to seize the day. Once again, Stoppard had done his research, and transformed it into something much more remarkable than a critical biography. Set on the banks of the Isis and the Styx, the play had coincidental appearances in Stoppard's most elastic manner by Oscar Wilde, Benjamin Jowett and Frank Harris; yet the staging was unrelievedly drab. There was pathos and an impassioned speech about the importance of truth, and the run was a sell-out, but audiences probably left the theatre knowing more than they cared to about the editing of Latin poetry.

Stoppard's care for English had something in common with Housman's care for Latin. It was not his first language — he had spoken only Czech until he was taught English at school in India at the age of five — and he seemed to interrogate language rather than merely use it. Of all his interests, ranging from cricket to mathematics, the tricks of language was the most absorbing.

Between stage work, Stoppard continued writing for the cinema and won an Oscar for the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, a witty and entertaining piece in which the young Will (Joseph Fiennes) falls for Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow), the daughter of a wealthy merchant.

Stoppard shared the writing credit with an American screenwriter, Marc Norman, who had the idea for the film in the 1980s. Norman's draft screenplay failed to impress and Stoppard was brought in to improve it.

In 2002 came his most ambitious stage work to date, The Coast of Utopia, a sprawling trilogy about Russia's 19th-century romantic exiles, Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev and Mikhail Bakunin, and their intellectual and personal preoccupations. Directed by Trevor Nunn at the National, it had a mixed reception, with even favourable critics finding it uneven and flawed. Revived five years later at the Lincoln Center in New York, it enjoyed a decent run and won seven Tony awards.

In 2006 the Royal Court asked Stoppard for a play to mark the 50th anniversary of the English Stage Company. As Stoppard had no previous connection with the theatre, he was a controversial choice, but Rock 'n' Roll was good enough to win the opposition over. Partly it was about a Czech rock group's ability to challenge an autocratic regime through its music, but it was also a wider discourse on liberty, in Britain as much as in communist eastern Europe.

He spent three years, more or less, working on the well-received TV adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End but then he seemed to slip back into writer's block until 2015 when he produced The Hard Problem, his first script in nine years. The Guardian's critic thought it suffered from "information overload", while the Telegraph deemed it a "major disappointment". If he was upset he hid it well behind a façade of levity. When asked whether he found it difficult to talk about work in progress, he said: "Not at all. I'm normally so thrilled to have had an idea at all I tell everyone, even people who have no interest in hearing."

Four years later it was announced that he had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna, which he described as his most personal play and perhaps his last.

Stoppard's only novel was Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), which he claimed to have written in two days.

He won innumerable theatrical awards, and was appointed CBE in 1978, knighted in 1997 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 2000. He gave a number of academic lectures, but they were amusements and insights into his own practice rather than revelations about other writers.

His first wife (1965-72) was Jose Ingle, and his second (1972-92) was Miriam Moore-Robinson, the agony aunt, broadcaster and anti-smoking campaigner (Stoppard was a dedicated smoker). There were two sons by each marriage. Oliver is a postman in Norfolk, having abandoned a doctorate in physics for a simpler life; Barnaby runs a restaurant in London; Ed is a successful Shakespearean actor and Will manages his wife, the celebrated violinist Linzi Stoppard. It was while married to Dr Miriam Stoppard, as she was better known, that he embarked on his affair with Kendal. That ended in 1998 and, 16 years later, he married the television producer and heiress Sabrina Guinness, a one-time It girl and who dated Prince Charles. They lived in Dorset.

Stoppard always claimed that he wasn't engaged enough politically to be able to know where to place himself, on the left or right, yet he and Margaret Thatcher had a soft spot for each other and he once attended a literary dinner held in her honour. Of his politics he said he felt a bit sheepish. It did not stop him becoming one of the founders of the political magazine Standpoint in 2008, just as his own lack of formal university education did not stop him becoming a visiting professor in theatre at Oxford in 2017.

He couldn't wait to be out of education aged 17. "It was years and years before I felt I missed out on something," he said. "I began to have certain kinds of regret about it. There are probably aspects of the autodidact's life that compensate. The thing you have to understand is that, as a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas."

A sense of insecurity and a tendency towards self-deprecation may explain his unwillingness to help posterity by keeping a diary, or indeed most of his papers. "I keep some letters," he said. "I have a couple from Laurence Olivier and one from John Steinbeck, but the rest of my life I destroy as I go along."

And perhaps insecurity, or at least a nervousness about being exposed as an intellectual impostor, may also account for what he called his cheap side, his love of cheap gags: "The days of the digital watch are numbered," as one of his characters says, or "if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music, and of aviation".

His sense of humour even extended to his own obituary. Asked in later life what he imagined the first line of his would be, he replied: "Tom Stoppard, the father of Ed Stoppard, has died."

Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, playwright, was born on July 3, 1937. His death aged 88 was announced on November 29, 2025

QuoteThe Real Stanley Baxter described his long struggle with his sexuality. At the age of 94, he confirmed that he had always been gay but had initially hidden the truth to avoid arrest in the years before decriminalisation.
In fact, he had been arrested in 1962 and contemplated suicide rather than see his career in ruins. The charges were subsequently dropped.
He insisted that Moira - his wife of more than 45 years - had been fully aware of the situation. She had even given her blessing to Baxter bringing boyfriends home.
The couple married in 1951 but by the 1970s were living apart. They never divorced and lunched together almost daily.
Moira died in 1997 and Baxter's long-term partner, Marcus, died in 2016.
Baxter never came to terms with his sexuality. He told Brian Beacom: "I never wanted to be gay and I still don't. The truth is, I don't really want to be me."
And he once spoke of his feelings about fame and the work of the actor, telling a journalist:
"All this rubbish about the man behind the mask. I've had it again and again and again. The mask is what's important."

Quote from: Syt on December 17, 2025, 11:04:46 AMRIP Gil Gerard. :(

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Loved Buck Rogers season 1 as a kid (and still am fond of it). Even if it had a bit of a "We have Han Solo at home" quality. :D

Quotebob mortimer
@RealBobMortimer
So so sad.A lovely brilliant funny giant of a bloke. Oh Man....RIP Chris .. Boro legend forever. Love to family and friends.
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