Midyear memorials
A fortnight out from the solstice, this is as good a time as any to pluck a few random names from the many who left us in the past while. As always, these are ones that touched me particularly.
Teresa Banks (1965-2018)
Pamela Gidley passed away (peacefully, according to her family) at the age of 52 in her home in New Hampshire on April 16. Winner of New England’s “Little Miss Lovely” contest (at 4) and a Jordan Marsh model (at 6), she was the winner (at 19) of Dick Clark’s Most Beautiful Girl in the World contest. Her three-decade acting career consisted of a mixture of episodic television (Tour of Duty, Angel Street, Strange Luck, The Pretender, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Skin) and weird drive-in-type flicks (Thrashin’, Cherry 2000, Highway to Hell, Aberration, Mafia!). One role in particular, though, made her an object of note upon her untimely death. In the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, Teresa Banks is identified as a victim (a year earlier) of the same killer who murdered Laura Palmer. Teresa was not seen in the TV series, but David Lynch went so far as to cover all her travel and insurance costs for commuting between Seattle and the Bahamas—where she was filming another movie called The Crew with Viggo Mortensen and Donal Logue—so Gidley could play Teresa in the movie prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
Lois Lane (1948-2018)
A native of Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories, when young Margot Kidder landed in Los Angeles, she shared a home outside Malibu with fellow actor Jennifer Salt. It became a hangout for other aspiring talent, like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, with whom Kidder was in a relationship. De Palma cast the two women in his horror film Sisters, and Kidder’s career took off, with roles in Black Christmas, The Great Waldo Pepper, The Amityville Horror and Paul Mazursky’s comedic remake of Jules et Jim (with Kidder in the Jeanne Moreau role), Willie & Phil. Along the way, she married and divorced novelist Thomas McGuane, actor John Heard and filmmaker Philippe de Broca (King of Hearts). Of course, she will always be best remembered for playing Christopher Reeve’s love interest in four Superman movies, and there has definitely never been a better Lois Lane—even if she was mostly written out of Superman III for being “difficult.” She made a couple of sentimental visits back to the Superman universe in 2004 when she guest starred in the TV series Smallville. That was eight years after a very public breakdown in which she was found in a stranger’s garden with hacked hair and damaged teeth, babbling about CIA conspiracies. Personally, I will remember her mostly for an early role in Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx, in which she played an American student at Dublin’s Trinity College who becomes involved with an innocent working class local bloke (Gene Wilder). Also, for a strange little 1996 movie called Never Met Picasso, in which she played the mother of aspiring painter Alexis Arquette. At the age of 69, she left our planet from Montana on May 13.
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (1944-2018)
All of R. Lee Ermey’s obituaries focus on his Golden Globe-nominated performance as the vein-popping drill instructor in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. He was well prepared for the role, having served eleven years in the U.S. Marine Corps. You could say he was somewhat typecast, as his other roles included a helicopter pilot in Apocalypse Now and drill instructors in The Boys in Company C and Purple Hearts. He also had character roles in such movies as Leaving Las Vegas, Se7en, Dead Man Walking and Saving Silverman. I will always remember him, however, for one role in particular. In the pilot episode of my favorite western TV series of all time, he played the hero’s father, a famous marshal and western legend who is murdered by the escaping members of the John Bly gang, spurring his son and namesake (Bruce Campbell) to undertake a mission of revenge and justice. Yep, Ronald Lee Ermey (Gunny, to his friends) was Brisco County, Sr. At the age of 74, he received his discharge in California on April 15.
Robert Eroica Dupea’s prospective sister-in-law (1942-2018)
In the late 1960s and the 1970s, one of the most interesting and appealing actors in frequently unusual roles was Susan Anspach. Something about her caught the rebellious counterculture vibe of the era. Maybe that is why she played the good-girl-turned-hippie Sheila in Hair when it was still off Broadway. Her first film was The Landlord, in which Beau Bridges buys a building in an African-American neighborhood in Brooklyn. Her second film was Five Easy Pieces, in which she sleeps with her fiancé’s brother (Jack Nicholson). Other roles include Woody Allen’s shrewish ex-wife (seen in flashbacks) in Play It Again, Sam and a wife who leaves divorce lawyer George Segal for out-of-work songwriter Kris Kristofferson in Blume in Love. She continued to work as an actor up to around 2010, including such TV work as the series The Yellow Rose, Space and The Slap Maxwell Story, in which she played sportswriter Dabney Coleman’s independent wife. Her role that always sticks with me, however, is the one where she played a bored-verging-on-insane housewife in Sweden who runs off with bohemian Yugoslavian immigrants in Dusan Makavejev’s 1981 black comedy Montenegro, which ends with Shel Silverstein’s haunting song “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” sung by Marianne Faithfull. Anspach shuffled off this mortal coil in California on April 2 at the age of 75.
Mulan’s father (1932-2018)
Korean-born Soon-Tek Oh is best remembered for two roles. He voiced the character Fa Zhou, father of the titular hero, in Disney’s Mulan and its sequel, and he played Lieutenant Hip, who arrests James Bond (Roger Moore) but then becomes his ally in 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun. He had lots of other screen roles down through the years, notably the TV series Kung Fu, Hawaii Five-O, Charlie’s Angels, East of Eden, M*A*S*H and Magnum, P.I. among numerous others. Perhaps even more important were his contributions off-screen. He was a founder of the East West Players, one of the U.S.’s first Asian-American theater companies, and he created the Society of Heritage Performers, as per Variety, “with the hope of elevating Asian-American voices while counteracting stereotypical depictions of Asian-Americans as immigrants and victims of violence.” He gets remembered here also for donning alien prosthetics for a first-season episode of Babylon 5, called “TKO,” to play the Muta-Do of the Ingyo Mutai, who breaks precedent by allowing a human to take part in the Mutai’s martial-arts matches on the space station. Soon-Tek Oh passed beyond the rim at the age of 85 from California on April 4.
Florence Bickford (1926-2018)
At the age of 21, Quebec-born Allyn Ann McLerie drew attention when she played opposite Ray Bolger in Where’s Charley? on Broadway. Four years later she would appear in the film version. For half a century, she never seemed to be without work as an actor, whether on stage or in film or on TV. Big screen roles included The Desert Song, Calamity Jane, Phantom of the Rue Morgue, Battle Cry, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The Reivers, Monty Walsh, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Cinderella Liberty and All the President’s Men. As for the small screen, she was in the pilot of Young Dr. Kildare and appeared on The Waltons, The F.B.I, Medical Center, Lou Grant, Barney Miller and WKRP in Cincinnati. Many of a certain age will remember her as icy Miss Reubner, secretary to Judge Walter Franklin in the mid-1970s sitcom The Tony Randall Show. Even more of us will remember her as Florence Bickford, the no-nonsense Manhattan mother of a newly single thirtysomething woman finding her way in the city. Florence was one of the many delightful characters to populate Jay Tarses’s The Days and Nights of Molly Dowd from 1987 to 1991. McLerie passed away on May 21 at the age of 91 in North Bend, Washington, where she had been living with her daughter. McLerie was married to the actor George Gaynes, who died two years ago. Their son Matthew died tragically in a road accident in 1989. (He was a close childhood friend of the writer Matthew Hall, who has shared his memories of his friend on his excellent blog. Just to prove that I can effortlessly work every single one of my TV obsessions into a single blog post, I will note that Matthew Hall is the son of the Oscar-nominated actor Grayson Hall and the screenwriter Sam Hall. Sam was a main writer for the TV series Dark Shadows, on which Grayson was one of the principal stars.)
Montagist extraordinaire (1925-2018)
Listeners of BBC radio’s weekly movie program with Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode were touched in May when a letter from Anne V. Coates’s son was read out in tribute to the legendary film editor. When Lawrence of Arabia won seven Oscars in 1963, including for Best Picture, one of them went to her. The list of movies that were fashioned by her skill in cutting and mixing is nothing short of astounding. Here is just a partial sample: The Pickwick Papers, Becket, 11 Harrowhouse, Murder on the Orient Express, The Eagle Has Landed, The Elephant Man, What About Bob?, In the Line of Fire, Erin Brockovich—and even Fifty Shades of Grey! “Can you imagine a job,” she once said, “where you get paid to look in the eyes of George Clooney and Peter O’Toole?” She worked with the likes of Michael Powell, David Lean, Milos Forman, Sidney Lumet, David Lynch, Wolfgang Petersen and Steven Soderbergh. In addition to her 1963 Academy Award, she was nominated four other times and received an honorary Oscar in 2017. Anne V. Coates had barely stopped working when she passed away at the age of 92 in California on May 8.
Around the Dam Busters’ Run (1920-2018)
If you have ever heard the rousing theme music (by Eric Coates, no relation—as far as I can tell anyway—to Anne) from the 1955 war movie The Dam Busters, then it is surely still living in your head. That march is just one of the elements that has made the film a classic. The London-born director of that movie, Michael Anderson, was so determined to re-create authentically the daring bombing raid on the Ruhr Valley that he used the actual air base from which it was launched in Lincolnshire as a filming location. The stories of Anderson’s run-ins with the military brass there are legendary, as well as his stickler for historical detail. He refused to change the name of the dog of Wing Commander Guy Gibson (played by Richard Todd), which was a racial epithet. For the American release, a rhyming name (Trigger) was dubbed in. In a 1999 telecast, ITV just bleeped it out entirely. From his UK obituaries, you might think The Dam Busters was Anderson’s only significant movie—but you would be very wrong. His other works include the 1956 version of 1984, Around the World in 80 Days, Shake Hands with the Devil, All the Fine Young Cannibals, Operation Crossbow, The Shoes of the Fisherman and the 1976 sci-fi flick Logan’s Run. Michael Anderson’s mission ended in British Columbia at the age of 98 on April 25.
-S.L., 6 June 2018
If you would like to respond to this commentary or to anything else on this web site, please send a message to feedback@scottsmovies.com. Messages sent to this address will be considered for publishing on the Feedback Page without attribution. (That means your name, email address or anything else that might identify you won’t be included.) Messages published will be at my discretion and subject to editing. But I promise not to leave something out just because it’s unflattering.
If you would like to send me a message but not have it considered for publishing, you can send it to scott@scottsmovies.com.