Category Archives: Tributes

Comics / Graphic Novels, Tributes

Stan Lee dead at age 95

Dozens of tributes to Stan Lee on line. This one is from this morning’s Montreal Gazette.

Comic book legend Lee dead at age 95

Creator of the universe of Marvel superheroes helped us dream big, Mark Daniell writes.
  • Montreal Gazette ,
EMERGING ENTERTAINMENT

Stan Lee, seen surrounded by images of his many iconic superhero creations, died on Monday. He was 95.

“I hope your nephew enjoys the Avengers.” That’s how my one and only interview with comic book legend Stan Lee ended on a rainy afternoon in Boston. Lee, the dynamo who helped co-create Spider-Man, Black Panther, Daredevil, Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, X-Men and The Incredible Hulk, among others, was rushed early Monday morning to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles where he was declared dead, said Kirk Schenck, a lawyer for Lee’s daughter, J.C. Lee. He was 95. In recent years he had been plagued by several health issues, including a battle with pneumonia, but he was still full of life. In this business, I’ve had the chance to meet a lot of my idols, but sitting across from the man who was the architect of many of my childhood dreams and who helped me fall in love with comic books was a pinch-me moment. When we spoke in 2015, the Marvel Cinematic Universe — which has given big-screen life to many of his creations — was in full swing. But, as always, he was looking ahead. Lee, who rose to prominence in the 1960s, name-checked Black Panther, which was released earlier this year, as one of the titles he was most looking forward to seeing. In rat-a-tat-tat fashion, he listed off sequels to the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Captain America as other instalments he was anticipating. Then he got into Daredevil (telling me he envisioned it on the small screen long before Netflix acquired the property), the Inhumans and Ant-Man. He also raved about Spider-Man joining the MCU. “I think it’s one of the best things to happen,” Lee said. “Now he’ll be able to appear in any of our other movies. It’s going to be great.” And just like the rest of us, he was on the edge of his seat wondering what characters might be coming soon to a theatre near you. “I don’t even know how (Marvel) decides what to do next, because every one of them is so exciting and the public is waiting for them … I don’t think there has ever been anything like this in the movies before where you see one company turning out hit after hit. It’s kind of nice.” Asked to name a favourite film, he was coy. “I don’t have a favourite. Every single one of them I see I like better than the last one. I love them all.” An elder statesman in the comic book world, Lee is credited with helping turn superheroes into a form of art. It’s rumoured that he dreamed up a new story every day for a decade. Still, he could name his favourite Spider-Man cameo without hesitation. “I did a story years ago where I teamed Spider-Man, briefly, with the Fantastic Four,” he said. “Spidey decided he didn’t want to run around capturing bad guys for nothing; he wanted to get paid. So he thought he’d join the Fantastic Four and make some money. He swung into their window and said, ‘Hi, I want to join you. What do you pay?’ And when he found out they don’t get paid, he swung right out again.” Lee created the Fantastic Four with artist Jack Kirby in 1961 and it almost didn’t happen. He wanted to do character development at a time when no one else in comic books was interested in that. He almost quit. It was his wife — Joan, who died last year — who encouraged him to try one more comic book idea — the Fantastic Four. His success with that team helped him imagine the series of heroes we all know and love. But it was perhaps Spider-Man who resonated the most. “For some reason, young people seem to prefer Spider-Man. Everywhere I go I see Spider-Man costumes,” he said. Lee was warm and effusive as I gushed over his creations. And when I asked him about DC’s failure to connect with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, he was diplomatic. “More power to them,” he said. Lee, who was born Stanley Martin Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, in New York, worked well into his 90s on films, TV and a slew of internet ventures. He made cameos in all the Marvel movies and when we spoke he declared his appearance in Avengers: Age of Ultron his favourite. On top of that, up until recently, he was a regular on the convention circuit. And it turned out staying busy was his key to a long and fruitful life. “Just keep busy,” he told me, when I asked him his motto. “I think the most important thing is to be busy, because if you have work occupying you, you don’t have time to worry about the other serious problems in life.” Rest well, Mr. Lee. Thank you for helping us all dream big.

Tributes

Harlan Ellison (1934-2018)

From Locus Magazine on line:

Harlan Ellison (1934-2018)

Award winning editor and author Harlan Ellison, 84, died in his sleep on June 28, 2018.

Harlan Jay Ellison was born May 27, 1934 in Cleveland OH. His first stories, “The Gloconda” and “The Sword of Parmagon”, appeared in 1949 in the Cleveland News. He attended Ohio State University from 1951-53 before being expelled and moved to New York City in 1955 where he lived in the same boarding house as Robert Silverberg. He served in the army from 1957-59 and afterwards moved to Chicago, working as editor of Rogue Magazine. In 1962, Ellison moved to Southern California. He was married five times: to Charlotte B. Stein from 1956-60; Billie Joyce Sanders from 1960-63; Loretta Patrick for seven weeks in 1966; Lori Horowitz from 1976-77; and Susan Toth from 1986 until his death.

Ellison produced over 1,000 works, among them Hugo Award winners “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967), Star Trek teleplay “The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967) , “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World” (1968), “The Deathbird” (1973), “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38°54’N, Longitude 77°00’13″W” (1974), and “Paladin of the Lost Hour” (1985), as well as stories which won both Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards: “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965) and “Jeffty Is Five” (1977). Other awards include the Milford for lifetime achievement in editing; Life Achievement World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards; 18 Locus Awards; an unprecedented four Writers Guild of America Awards for solo teleplays; two Edgar Allan Poe Awards; two P.E.N. International Silver Pen Awards; a SFWA Grand Master Award in 2005; and a Bradbury Award for the NPR radio series 2000X — Tales of the Next Millennia. He was the editor of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, and his own story collections range include Ellison Wonderland (1962), Deathbird Stories (1975), Slippage (1997), and The Essential Ellison (2001). His biography A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison by Nat Segaloff was released in 2017 and was a Locus Awards finalist. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2011 and received the Eaton Award for lifetime achievement the same year.

His television work included scripts for Star Trek, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and Babylon 5. Essays on media criticism and other non-fiction were collected in The Glass Teat (1970) and The Other Glass Teat (1975).

He is survived by his wife, Susan. An obituary, with photos and appreciations, will appear in the August 2018 issue of Locus. Additional information is available at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Tributes

Ursula K. Le Guin, Obituary

Ursula K. Le Guin, Acclaimed for Her Fantasy Fiction, Is Dead at 88

By GERALD JONAS

Author Ursula Le Guin at home with her cat, Lorenzo, in 1996. The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.” Credit Jill Krementz, All Rights Reserved

Ursula K. Le Guin, the immensely popular author who brought literary depth and a tough-minded feminist sensibility to science fiction and fantasy with books like “The Left Hand of Darkness” and the Earthsea series, died on Monday at her home in Portland, Ore. She was 88.

Her son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause but said she had been in poor health for several months.

Ms. Le Guin embraced the standard themes of her chosen genres: sorcery and dragons, spaceships and planetary conflict. But even when her protagonists are male, they avoid the macho posturing of so many science fiction and fantasy heroes. The conflicts they face are typically rooted in a clash of cultures and resolved more by conciliation and self-sacrifice than by swordplay or space battles.

Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Several, including “The Left Hand of Darkness” — set on a planet where the customary gender distinctions do not apply — have been in print for almost 50 years. The critic Harold Bloom lauded Ms. Le Guin as “a superbly imaginative creator and major stylist” who “has raised fantasy into high literature for our time.”

In addition to more than 20 novels, she was the author of a dozen books of poetry, more than 100 short stories (collected in multiple volumes), seven collections of essays, 13 books for children and five volumes of translation, including the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu and selected poems by the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral. She also wrote a guide for writers.

“The Left Hand of Darkness,” published in 1969, takes place on a planet called Gethen, where people are neither male nor female.

Ms. Le Guin’s fictions range from young-adult adventures to wry philosophical fables. They combine compelling stories, rigorous narrative logic and a lean but lyrical style to draw readers into what she called the “inner lands” of the imagination. Such writing, she believed, could be a moral force.

“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” she told The Guardian in an interview in 2005. “Little kids can’t do it; babies are morally monsters — completely greedy. Their imagination has to be trained into foresight and empathy.”

The writer’s “pleasant duty,” she said, is to ply the reader’s imagination with “the best and purest nourishment that it can absorb.”

She was born Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, Calif., on Oct. 21, 1929, the youngest of four children and the only daughter of two anthropologists, Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodora Quinn Kroeber. Her father was an expert on the Native Americans of California, and her mother wrote an acclaimed book, “Ishi in Two Worlds” (1960), about the life and death of California’s “last wild Indian.”

At a young age, Ms. Le Guin immersed herself in books about mythology, among them James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough,” classic fantasies like Lord Dunsany’s “A Dreamer’s Tales,” and the science-fiction magazines of the day. But in early adolescence she lost interest in science fiction, because, she recalled, the stories “seemed to be all about hardware and soldiers: White men go forth and conquer the universe.”

She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951, earned a master’s degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Columbia University in 1952, and won a Fulbright fellowship to study in Paris. There she met and married another Fulbright scholar, Charles Le Guin, who survives her.

Author Ursula K. Le Guin in July 1996. Credit Jill Krementz, All Rights Reserved

On their return to the United States, she abandoned her graduate studies to raise a family; the Le Guins eventually settled in Portland, where Mr. Le Guin taught history at Portland State University.

Besides her husband and son, Ms. Le Guin is survived by two daughters, Caroline and Elisabeth Le Guin; two brothers, Theodore and Clifton Kroeber; and four grandchildren.

By the early 1960s Ms. Le Guin had written five unpublished novels, mostly set in an imaginary Central European country called Orsinia. Eager to find a more welcoming market, she decided to try her hand at genre fiction.

Her first science-fiction novel, “Rocannon’s World,” came out in 1966. Two years later she published “A Wizard of Earthsea,” the first in a series about a made-up world where the practice of magic is as precise as any science, and as morally ambiguous.

The first three Earthsea books — the other two were “The Tombs of Atuan” (1971) and “The Farthest Shore” (1972) — were written, at the request of her publisher, for young adults. But their grand scale and elevated style betray no trace of writing down to an audience.

The magic of Earthsea is language-driven: Wizards gain power over people and things by knowing their “true names.” Ms. Le Guin took this discipline seriously in naming her own characters. “I must find the right name or I cannot get on with the story,” she said. “I cannot write the story if the name is wrong.”

Ms. Le Guin speaking in 2014 at the University of Oregon. Credit Jack Liu

The Earthsea series was clearly influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. But instead of a holy war between Good and Evil, Ms. Le Guin’s stories are organized around a search for “balance” among competing forces — a concept she adapted from her lifelong study of Taoist texts.

She returned to Earthsea later in her career, extending and deepening the trilogy with books like “Tehanu” (1990) and “The Other Wind” (2001), written for a general audience.

“The Left Hand of Darkness,” published in 1969, takes place on a planet called Gethen, where people are neither male nor female but assume the attributes of either sex during brief periods of reproductive fervor. Speaking with an anthropological dispassion, Ms. Le Guin later referred to her novel as a “thought experiment” designed to explore the nature of human societies.

“I eliminated gender to find out what was left,” she told The Guardian.

But there is nothing dispassionate about the relationship at the core of the book, between an androgynous native of Gethen and a human male from Earth. The book won the two major prizes in science fiction, the Hugo and Nebula awards, and is widely taught in secondary schools and colleges.

Much of Ms. Le Guin’s science fiction has a common background: a loosely knit confederation of worlds known as the Ekumen. This was founded by an ancient people who seeded humans on habitable planets throughout the galaxy — including Gethen, Earth and the twin worlds of her most ambitious novel, “The Dispossessed,” subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia” (1974).

As the subtitle implies, “The Dispossessed” contrasts two forms of social organization: a messy but vibrant capitalist society, which oppresses its underclass, and a classless “utopia” (partly based on the ideas of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin), which turns out to be oppressive in its own conformist way. Ms. Le Guin leaves it up to the reader to find a comfortable balance between the two.

“The Lathe of Heaven” (1971) offers a very different take on utopian ambitions. A man whose dreams can alter reality falls under the sway of a psychiatrist, who usurps this power to conjure his own vision of a perfect world, with unfortunate results.

“The Lathe of Heaven” was among the few books by Ms. Le Guin that have been adapted for film or television. There were two made-for-television versions, one on PBS in 1980 and the other on the A&E cable channel in 2002.

Among the other adaptations of her work were the 2006 Japanese animated feature “Tales From Earthsea” and a 2004 mini-series on the Sci Fi channel, “Legend of Earthsea.”

With the exception of the 1980 “Lathe of Heaven,” she had little good to say about any of them.

Ms. Le Guin always considered herself a feminist, even when genre conventions led her to center her books on male heroes. Her later works, like the additions to the Earthsea series and such Ekumen tales as “Four Ways to Forgiveness” (1995) and “The Telling” (2000), are mostly told from a female point of view.

In some of her later books, she gave in to a tendency toward didacticism, as if she were losing patience with humanity for not learning the hard lessons — about the need for balance and compassion — that her best work so astutely embodies.

At the 2014 National Book Awards, Ms. Le Guin was given the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She accepted the medal on behalf of her fellow writers of fantasy and science fiction, who, she said, had been “excluded from literature for so long” while literary honors went to the “so-called realists.”

She also urged publishers and writers not to put too much emphasis on profits.

“I have had a long career and a good one,” she said, adding, “Here at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river.”

Correction: January 24, 2018
An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the surname of the social anthropologist who wrote “The Golden Bough.” He was James Frazer, not Frazier.

Tributes

Paddy Russell 1928-2017

One of the great pioneering Television Directors of her generation, Paddy Russell, has died at the age of 89.

Patricia Russell, known to all as Paddy, had a long and distinguished career as one of the first female Directors in British television. She trained as an actor attending the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Before long she realised that she was more at home behind the scenes moving to become a stage manager.

In the 1950’s Television was crying out for theatre staff to work in the new medium and Russell was recruited as a production assistant, working with the famed director Rudolph Cartier. Acting as the director’s eyes and ears on the studio floor, Russell worked on some of the most innovative and pioneering dramas of the day including the Quatermass science-fiction serials as well as the 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four starring Peter Cushing.

In 1963 she became a director herself, directing many episodes of the soap opera Compact. Over the next twenty years, she worked on many of the best known classic television series.

Her first encounter with Doctor Who came in 1966 when she became the first female Director to work on the show. She helmed the First Doctor story The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve. One advantage the newish Director had when faced with the notoriously irascible William Hartnell was the fact that for the majority of the story he was not playing The Doctor, but another character, The Abbot of Amboise.

READ MORE about Paddy Russell and Dr Who

In a way, I still think ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ was the best one I did. It was the hardest to do – a complete beast and I suppose I accepted it for the challenge. The biggest difficulty was deserted London which we got around by going out at five one Sunday morning.

Tributes

Milt Stevens (1942-2017)

Tributes pouring in for BNF Milt Stevens. I’m re-posting the tribute by Mike Glyer, File 770.

Milt Stevens (1942-2017)

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Milt Stevens and Craig Miller in 1981. Photo by Dik Daniels.

Past Worldcon chair and fanzine fan Milton F. Stevens died October 2 of a heart attack, after entering the hospital with pneumonia and other medical problems.

Milt attended his first Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society meeting in 1960 at the age of 17. “I’d been reading science fiction for years before that, so the slide into real fanac was easy,” he wrote. He discovered the club through fan-news columns in the prozines.

Milt Stevens in the 1960s

During the Vietnam War he served in the Navy. Milt always attributed his baldness to shiptime service in the smoking-hot climate of the South China Sea.

By 1970 Milt was President of LASFS — he signed my membership card when I joined. He was somebody to look up to who also became a good friend.

Milt won the Evans-Freehafer Award for service to the club in 1971. He was on the LASFS, Inc. Board of Directors for a couple of decades, and was Chair for around five years. After the original LASFS clubhouse was bought in 1973 Milt dubbed himself the “Lord High Janitor,” having taken on the thankless task of cleaning the place.

An exception at the usually inward-focused LASFS, Milt was among the club’s few nationally-active fanzine publishers and fanpoliticians. He put out an acclaimed perzine called The Passing Parade. He coedited and bankrolled later issues of my fanzine Prehensile. For many years he was a member of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA).

1965 APA-L photocover — Milt Stevens is in the lower right corner.

Milt was a gifted humorist, dry and cynical, as though he was equipped with a set of glasses where one lens showed him what should ideally be happening in a set of circumstances, while the other showed him what was really happening, and he could juxtapose these two visions in a provocatively funny way. Milt would subtly include himself among the targets of his joking criticism on some level, however, people who didn’t know him rarely recognized that, and he struggled with the fact that such humility no longer defused people’s wrath in the internet age.

For awhile in the 1970s, Milt, Craig Miller, Elst Weinstein and I got in the habit of meeting for dinner at Mike’s Pizza in Van Nuys. Ed Cox or Ed Finkelstein joined us a couple of times – so that the rubric for these get-togethers became (1) always invite somebody named Ed, and (2) always order “pizza ala cruddo” (as we called pizza with everything). Being a comparative newcomer to the club, I looked forward to hearing Milt reveal all the inside LASFS lore – the Chart, Coventry, The Game of Fandom, and why never to mention spaghetti to a certain member.

He also gave us some early insights into conrunning and bidding for conventions. He was Chair of LA 2000, the original Loscon (1975), and later the 1980 Westercon. And he co-chaired L.A.con II (1984) with Craig, which still holds the attendance record.

Milt worked for LAPD for 32 years, mainly as a civilian crime analyst, a career that gave him a fund of cop stories — all punctuated with violence — like the one about a legendary detective who had (cumulatively) fired his gun five times and killed six people. “How was that?”, listeners always asked. The sixth was in a fight after taking away the guy’s knife. His job also unexpectedly put him in the position of attending a training session where the speaker analyzed the “Satanic symbolism” of such things as – the artwork on the cover of the 1984 Worldcon Souvenir Book.

The most indelible memory I have about Milt’s character is something that happened when the first LASFS clubhouse was on Ventura Blvd., near a T-intersection with Tujunga Ave. One evening a driver took the turn onto Ventura too fast and flipped his car. It skidded on the roof and came to a stop just a few yards down from the clubhouse, engine still turning, and smelling of leaking gasoline. I was with the people who collected at a safe distance, replaying in our imaginations TV show stunts of exploding auto wrecks. Milt, on the other hand, ran to the driver’s side and got him out. That’s what a man’s supposed to do.

Appreciation for his fannish contributions came when Milt was made GoH of Loscon 9 (1982) and Westercon 61 (2008).

I personally had Milt to thank for getting me to start working out at a gym, as he did. For a few years in the Eighties I lost weight and looked as good as I ever would.

He remained active in LASFS all his life. I got to share a table with Milt, Marc Schirmeister and Joe Zeff at the LASFS 75th Anniversary dinner in 2009.

And we were together on a panel at the 4,000th meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in 2014, representing various decades in club history — June Moffatt spoke for the 40s; Bill Ellern, the 50s; Milt Stevens, the 60s; myself, the 70s; Karl Lembke, the 80s; Cathy Beckstead, the 90s; Peter Santell, the 2000s; Mimi Miller, the 2010s.

Dan Goodman, Kara Dalkey, Tom Digby, and Milt Stevens at LASFS in 1976.

Earlier this year he programmed the 2017 Corflu, the convention for fanzine fans, when it met in Los Angeles. (See Milt’s conreport here.) The chair, Marty Cantor, announced today, “I will say it here, he personally paid off the con’s $1200+ budget deficit, and he did so happily as he felt that Corflu was a fannish good and he wanted this series of cons to continue.” Other fans wrote on Facebook about how much they appreciated the conversations they had with him about fanhistory. Milt was passing the torch, and those younger fans learned from him the stories behind fandom’s traditions and legends.

Tributes

Legendary Monster Artist Basil Gogos (1939-2017)

Legendary Monster Artist Basil Gogos passed away September 14, aged 78.

Basil Gogos (March 12, 1939 – September 14, 2017) was an American illustrator best known for his portraits of movie monsters which appeared on the covers of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine in the 1960s and 1970s.

Google “basil gogos” images, and see an amazing array of art you will almost certainly recognize even if you never heard his name before.

76 images of his art can be found on this site:

http://churchofhalloween.com/basil-gogos/

Wikipedia bio is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Gogos

 

Tributes

Obits for Robert Hardy and Hywel Bennett

Robert Hardy (1925-2017): British actor, died August 3, aged 91, best known to fans as Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter movies. He was best known to me as Siegfried in All Creatures Great and Small.

Something I didn’t know, although I read a lot about the Mary Rose at the time:  Robert Hardy was a keen military historian who loved the longbow and played a large role in raising the Tudor warship, The Mary Rose.

http://www.imdb.com/news/ni61372566/

Hywel Bennett (1944-2017): British actor, died July 25, aged 73. One of his earliest television appearances was as Rynian, the Aridian in The Death of Time, the second episode of the William Hartnell story The Chase.  He is best remembered as James Shelley in the Thames Television series Shelley.

http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2017/08/hywel-bennett-1944-2017.html

 

Tributes

Doctor Who Companion Debbie Watling Dies

Doctor Who Companion Debbie Watling Dies

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Watling with an Ice Warrior in a 1967 episode of Doctor Who.

By Steve Green: Deborah (Debbie) Watling (1948-2017): British actress, died 21 July aged 69 Best-known for playing Patrick Troughton’s companion “Victoria” in Doctor Who (40 episodes, 1967-68), her other genre appearances included H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (11 episodes, 1958-59), Out of the Unknown (1966 adaptation of John Rankine’s ‘The World in Silence’), Where Time Began (a 1977 animated adaptation of Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth). She reprised her Doctor Who role in the 1993 Comic Relief minisode Dimensions in Time and the non-BBC Downtime (1995), then appeared as herself in the 2013 spoof The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, directed by former timelord Peter Davison.

She was a five-time guest at Gallifrey One, the Los Angeles Doctor Who con. Her first visit was in 1991.

Tributes

Martin Landau, passed away aged 89

A MASTER OF DISGUISE

Landau had chameleon-like abilities

  • Montreal Gazette DAISY NGUYEN
CHRIS PIZZELLO/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Martin Landau, seen here with his North by Northwest co-star Eva Marie Saint in 2009, died on Saturday of unexpected complications during a hospital stay in Los Angeles.

Martin Landau, the chameleon-like actor who gained fame as the crafty master of disguise in the 1960s TV show Mission: Impossible, then capped a long and versatile career with an Oscar for his poignant portrayal of aging horror movie star Bela Lugosi in 1994’s Ed Wood, has died. He was 89.

Landau died Saturday of unexpected complications during a short stay at UCLA Medical Center, his publicist Dick Guttman said.

Mission: Impossible, which also starred Landau’s wife, Barbara Bain, became an immediate hit upon its debut in 1966. It remained on the air until 1973, but Landau and Bain left at the end of the show’s third season amid a financial dispute with the producers. They starred in the British-made sci-fi series Space: 1999 from 1975 to 1977.

Landau might have been a superstar but for a role he didn’t play — the pointy-eared starship Enterprise science officer, Mr. Spock. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had offered him the half-Vulcan, half-human who attempts to rid his life of all emotion. Landau turned it down.

“A character without emotions would have driven me crazy; I would have had to be lobotomized,” he explained in 2001. Instead, he chose Mission: Impossible, and Leonard Nimoy went on to everlasting fame as Spock.

Ironically, Nimoy replaced Landau on Mission: Impossible.

Continue reading Martin Landau, passed away aged 89 →

Tributes

Adam West has passed away

Posted by Variety, June 10, 2017 | 08:19AM PT

Adam West — an actor defined and also constrained by his role in the 1960s series “Batman” — died Friday night in Los Angeles. He was 88. A rep said that he died after a short battle with leukemia.

“Our dad always saw himself as The Bright Knight, and aspired to make a positive impact on his fans’ lives. He was and always will be our hero,” his family said in a statement.

With its “Wham! Pow!” onscreen exclamations, flamboyant villains and cheeky tone, “Batman” became a surprise hit with its premiere on ABC in 1966, a virtual symbol of ’60s kitsch. Yet West’s portrayal of the superhero and his alter ego, Bruce Wayne, ultimately made it hard for him to get other roles, and while he continued to work throughout his career, options remained limited because of his association with the character.

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