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Actress Gena Rowlands, winner of three Emmy Awards and an Honorary Academy Award in addition to two nominations, died on Wednesday as confirmed by the office of her son, filmmaker Nick Cassavetes. She had been living with Alzheimer’s Disease for five years and was 94 years old.

Rowlands began her career on Broadway in the 1950s, appearing in productions of “The Seven Year Itch” and “Middle of the Night.” She worked in early television, including revered anthology programs like “Studio One” and “The United States Steel Hour.” She also appeared on the jazzy detective program “Johnny Staccato” opposite her husband John Cassavetes.

It was with Cassavetes and his troupe, including Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Seymour Cassel, that pretty much invented the prestige American independent film, with groundbreaking collaborations like “Faces,” “Minnie and Moskowitz,” and “Opening Night.” This led to Oscar nominations for her leading roles in “A Woman Under The Influence...

With the announcement for the 76th Primetime Emmys set for July 17th, let’s travel back 70 years and revisit the winners of the 6th Emmy Awards held Feb. 11, 1954 at the venerable Hollywood Palladium and telecast on Khj. New categories introduced that year included best new program and supporting actor and actress in a TV series. Prior to 1954, performers were nominated as individuals, but this year the program for which they were nominated was also included. NBC was nominated for 36 Emmys, while CBS placed second with 30 and ABC trailing far behind with just three.

CBS’s cherished “I Love Lucy’ won its second Emmy for best comedy series, while Vivian Vance took home her only Emmy for the show for her supporting role as Ethel Mertz. The other nominees for comedy series were CBS’ “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show,” NBC’s “Mr. Peepers,” CBS’ “Our Miss Brooks,” and CBS “Topper.

Marisa Pavan, the Italian actress and twin sister of Pier Angeli who received an Oscar nomination for her performance as the daughter of Anna Magnani’s seamstress in the 1955 drama The Rose Tattoo, has died. She was 91.

Pavan died Wednesday in her sleep at her home in Gassin, France, near Saint-Tropez, Margaux Soumoy, who wrote Pavan’s 2021 biography, Drop the Baby; Put a Veil on the Broad!, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Pavan also portrayed the French queen Catherine de’ Medici in Diane (1956), starring Lana Turner; an Italian girl who had an affair years ago with a corporate exec (Gregory Peck) in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956); and the love interest of a former cop (Tony Curtis) investigating the murder of a priest in the film noir The Midnight Story (1957).

In Paramount’s The Rose Tattoo (1955), an adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play that won four Tony Awards, including best play,...

Elliot Silverstein, who helmed episodes of such acclaimed TV shows as Naked City, The Twilight Zone and Route 66 before guiding Lee Marvin to a best actor Oscar in Cat Ballou, his feature directorial debut, died Friday in Los Angeles, his family announced. He was 96.

The Boston native also helmed A Man Called Horse (1970), which starred Richard Harris in the title role as an English aristocrat who eventually becomes the leader of the Native tribe that had captured and tortured him. The action movie spawned a couple of sequels.

Most importantly, Silverman was instrumental in the formation of the milestone Bill of Creative Rights for directors.

“Every director today owes a debt of gratitude to Elliot Silverstein,” DGA president Lesli Linka Glatter said in a statement. “No one ever worked harder or was more passionate about protecting artists from having their work and vision altered than Elliot.”

It was Silverstein...

Jerome Coopersmith, who received a Tony nomination for writing a 1965 Sherlock Holmes musical and penned more than two dozen episodes of the original Hawaii Five-o during the series’ first nine seasons, has died. He was 97.

Coopersmith died peacefully Friday in Rochester, New York, his family announced.

After earning a Purple Heart for his service during World War II, Coopersmith broke into television writing for quiz shows and historical programs. In the early 1950s, he and Horton Foote worked on the kids-focused Gabby Hayes Show and Johnny Jupiter, and the future Pulitzer Prize and Oscar winner behind To Kill a Mockingbird would become his mentor.

Coopersmith wrote 30 regular installments and two feature-length episodes of CBS’ Hawaii Five-o from 1968-76. Among those was the notable 1975 eighth-season installment Retire in Sunny Hawaii … Forever, which featured Helen Hayes in an Emmy-nominated guest-starring stint as the aunt of her real-life son, James MacArthur.

He then...

It’s appropriate that Netflix dropped the sixth season of “Black Mirror” on June 15, the same day that Emmy voting began. The series isn’t eligible for this year’s awards, of course, but it has been a dominant force at the Emmys for years, even sparking a rule change that affects a number of other anthology programs this year.

And because of that rule change, it’s going to be a lot harder for any of those other programs — which include “Documentary Now!” and “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities” — to be nominated for Emmys this year.

First, a little background. “Black Mirror,” created by Charlie Brooker and first airing in 2011, was inspired by the classic 1950s and ’60s series “The Twlight Zone,” in which Rod Serling used each episode to tell a different story — usually creepy or scary, usually with a twist, always with a moral. Back then,...

Arnold Schulman, who landed Oscar nominations for his screenplays for Love With the Proper Stranger and Goodbye, Columbus and found success with several incarnations of his Broadway hit A Hole in the Head, has died. He was 97.

Schulman died Saturday of natural causes at his home in Santa Monica, his son, Peter Schulman, told The Hollywood Reporter.

In two late-career triumphs, Schulman was recruited by Francis Ford Coppola to write the biopic Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), and he scored an Emmy nomination and a Humanitas Prize in 1994 for his teleplay for HBO’s And the Band Played On, an adaptation of Randy Shilts’ nonfiction book about the onset of AIDS.

An original member of the Actors Studio, Schulman in the 1950s worked alongside the likes of James Dean and Paul Newman on live television. In 1962, he quit as the original screenwriter on the never-completed Marilyn Monroe movie Something’s Got to Give,...

Click here to read the full article.

Clu Gulager, the real-life cowboy from Oklahoma known for his turns on The Tall Man, The Virginian, The Last Picture Show and horror movies including The Return of the Living Dead, has died. He was 93.

Gulager died Friday of natural causes at the Los Angeles home of his son John and daughter-in-law Diane, they told The Hollywood Reporter.

Gulager also portrayed the protégé of hitman Charlie Strom (Lee Marvin) taken out by a mob boss (Ronald Reagan) in Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964), a race-car mechanic opposite Paul Newman in Winning (1969) and a detective working alongside John Wayne’s character in John Sturges’ McQ (1974).

More recently, he showed up on the big screen in such critical darlings as Tangerine (2015), Blue Jay (2016) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Gulager’s performance in The Killers convinced Peter Bogdanovich to cast him as Abilene,...

Actor, producer and director Norman Lloyd, best known for his title role in Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” and as Dr. Daniel Auschlander on NBC’s “St. Elsewhere” and famously associated with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater, died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 106.

His friend, producer Dean Hargrove, confirmed his death and said “His third act was really the best time of his life,” referring to the many historical Hollywood retrospectives and events Lloyd had participated in over the past few decades. Lloyd often said his secret to his long and mostly illness-free life was “avoiding disagreeable people,” Hargrove recounted.

Lloyd was hand-picked by Alfred Hitchcock to play the title character and villain in 1942’s “Saboteur,” and it was his character who tumbled to his death from the top of the Statue of Liberty in the pic’s iconic conclusion.

But the hard-working multihyphenate gained his highest profile only...

Marge Champion, a dancer who achieved nationwide television fame in the 1950s with her husband and dance partner Gower Champion and even then had already contributed to cinema history as a movement model for three classic Walt Disney animated films, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 101.

Her death was announced by her son Gregg Champion. A cause was not specified.

The daughter of a Hollywood dance coach, Champion was already performing in public when she was recruited by Disney to serve as the movement model for the lead character in 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the same year she entered a three-year marriage to Disney animator Arthur Babbitt. Champion would also provide the movements for the Blue Fairy in 1940’s Pinocchio and the ballet-dancing hippos in 1940’s Fantasia.

But if her work had already been seen by millions, Champion didn’t become recognizably famous until the late 1940s,...

Tony Sokol Jul 10, 2019

Rip Torn, who played characters from Judas Iscariot to the producer on The Larry Sanders Show, dies at 88.

Respected and versatile character actor Rip Torn died Tuesday in Lakeville, Conn., according to Variety. Publicist Rick Miramontez did not release a cause of death, but said Torn was with his wife, Amy Wright, and two daughters, Katie and Angelica. He was 88.

Torn believed actors should “play drama as comedy and comedy as drama,” according to the statement, and the actor was equally at home both. He starred in comedies like Albert Brooks' Defending Your Life and the Men in Black films, as well as TV comedies 30 Rock, playing General Electric CEO Don Geiss, mentor to Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Torn won an Emmy for his part in HBO's The Larry Sanders Show, and was nominated for a Tony award in...

Actor Rip Torn, who earned Oscar and Tony nominations as well as an Emmy Award and two Obies, has died Tuesday in Lakeville Conn., his representative confirmed. He was 88.

Torn was equally at home in the comedy of the “Men in Black” film series or TV’s “The Larry Sanders Show” (for which he won his Emmy) and in the drama of “Sweet Bird of Youth” or “Anna Christie,” to name two of the numerous classic works of theater in which he appeared.

The actor was nominated for a supporting-actor Oscar in 1984 for his work as a father who confronts tragedy in Martin Ritt’s “Cross Creek,” one of many rural dramas in which he appeared during his career.

He drew a Tony nomination in 1960 for his first performance on Broadway, as the sadistic son of the town boss in Elia Kazan’s original production of Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of Youth.

Rest in peace, Charlotte Rae. The beloved Facts of Life and Diff’Rent Strokes star sadly died at age 92 in her La home on Sunday, Aug. 5, her rep confirmed to Entertainment Weekly. Charlotte had previously revealed that she had been diagnosed with bone cancer in April 2017. "Last Monday, I found out I have bone cancer. About seven years ago, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer — which is a miracle that they found it because usually, it’s too late. My mother, sister, and my uncle died of pancreatic cancer," the actress told People at the time. (Photo Credit: Getty Images) "After six months of chemotherapy, I was cancer-free. I lost my hair, but I had beautiful wigs. Nobody ever knew. So now, at the age of 91, I have to make up my mind. I’m not in any pain right now. I’m feeling so terrific and so glad to be above ground.

More synonymous with Camp Crystal Lake than even Jason Voorhees to many horror movie fans is Betsy Palmer, who unfortunately passed away last Friday at the age of 88.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Palmer died of natural causes in a Connecticut hospice center. In addition to playing Mrs. Voorhees in Friday the 13th and Friday the 13th Part 2, Palmer appeared in Knots Landing, Murder She Wrote, The United States Steel Hour, and numerous other TV shows. Her film credits include Death Tide, The Long Gray Line, and Mister Roberts.

Friday the 13th fans will forever remember Palmer for her all-in portrayal of a grieving mother standing on the moon-splashed shore of Crystal Lake. Our thoughts go out to Betsy Palmer's family and friends.

The post Betsy Palmer Has Passed Away appeared first on Daily Dead.

A few weeks ago HBO and then CBS announced that they would launch stand-alone online services in U.S. in 2015. Before that, Netflix had made known that it would start producing features, crushing theatrical release windows once and for all, after it had contributed to the change of the patterns of attention and the way TV series are made by releasing its House of Cards episodes all at once, as a 13-hour movie. ‘Now the real shakeout begins’, wrote Ted Hope in Hollywood Reporter. ‘We are witnessing the march from once lucrative legacy practices built around titles to a new focus on community.’ Michael Wolff, writing also in the Hollywood Reporter, disagrees: ‘Streaming services from the two networks don’t signal television’s capitulation to Netflix and the web; it’s actually the opposite, as the medium expands yet again to gobble up more revenue.’ And in that sense, he says,...

Mel Gibson took on a big movie star role with Ransom. We take a look back at Ron Howard's 1996 thriller...

If you were a regular cinemagoer around 1996, then you can't help but have seen the trailer for Ron Howard's Ransom. Inevitably, time has dampened its impact a little but it was a promo that quite superbly sold the film (which would go on to take more than $300m at the box office worldwide). At first glance a tale of a rich man whose son is kidnapped, the trailer showed how the tables were to be turned: instead of the ransom money being handed over to the kidnappers, Gibson's character offered it as a bounty on the kidnappers' heads instead. The hunt is then turned around, quite cleverly.

Watching Ransom at the time, I always thought that the film, whilst not without merit, never fully delivered on that idea.

The Wasteland:

Television is a gold goose that lays scrambled eggs;

and it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar.

Lee Loevinger

When people argue over the quality of television programming, both sides — it’s addictive crap v. underappreciated populist art — seem to forget one of the essentials about commercial TV. By definition, it is not a public service. It is not commercial TV’s job to enlighten, inform, educate, elevate, inspire, or offer insight. Frankly, it’s not even commercial TV’s job to entertain. Bottom line: its purpose is simply to deliver as many sets of eyes to advertisers as possible. As it happens, it tends to do this by offering various forms of entertainment, and occasionally by offering content that does enlighten, inform, etc., but a cynic would make the point that if TV could do the same job televising fish aimlessly swimming around an aquarium,...

In the Beginning Was the Word — Radio:

“I like doing radio because it’s so intimate. The moment people hear your voice, you’re inside their heads, not only that, you’re in there laying eggs”.

Doug Coupland

We can watch TV — or movies, YouTube videos, play videogames, exchange video phone calls — from anywhere and everywhere: on line at McD’s, from our seat on our commuter bus or train (usually annoying the hell out of the napping business professional next to us), even from a toilet stall (crass, I grant, but I’ve seen — , well, ahem, I mean, I’ve heard it done). It’s nearly impossible for a generation growing up immersed, submerged, and buried in portable visual media to imagine the magnetic hold radio had on its audiences back in its early days. Think about it, all you smartphone and ipad users, wi-fiers and Hopper subscribers: there...

Yesterday a true entertainment legend passed into the great beyond. Andrew Samuel Griffith, best known as Mayberry’s humble sheriff Andy Taylor, passed away at 7:00 am on July 3, 2012. Born in Mount Airy, North Carolina on June 1, 1926, Andy lived a true working class life. Although a shy student that didn’t immediately fit in, he soon learned how to make his fellow schoolmates laugh. He always had an interest in music, and originally studied to be a preacher at Unc, but changed his major to music and joined a theatre group. His early showbiz experience was as a monologist, his most famous story being “What it Was, Was Football”, told from the point-of-view of a backwoodsman trying to understand the sport. It was released as a single and reached number nine on the charts.

His first television appearance was in “No Time for Sergeants”, a teleplay on The United States Steel Hour,...

Ben Gazzara died on February 3 of pancreatic cancer. An alumnus of the famed Actors’ Studio, he had a long career on stage, TV, and film. Not just long, but accomplished.

On Broadway, he was the original Brick in the Tennessee Williams’ classic, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and then he eclipsed that triumph with another powerful stage performance as a junkie whose habit poisons his relationship with everyone who loves him in A Hat Full of Rain.

His TV career launched in the early 1950s and extended through the next five decades. His small screen credits included roles on the landmark live drama anthologies of the 50s, such as The United States Steel Hour, Kraft Theatre, and Playhouse 90, and such acclaimed productions as cop drama A Question of Honor (1982), one of network TV’s first attempts to address the then detonating AIDS epidemic in An Early Frost (1985), and the epic mini-series,...

He played leads – but never became a star. He played supporting parts – but was never considered a second-stringer. He moved between the big and little screen easily throughout much of his career without ever looking like he’d overreached (for the former), or was slumming (in the latter). The only thing that mattered – the one thing that was consistent whatever the vehicle, whatever the medium, whatever the size of the role – was the caliber of his work. By his own description, Cliff Robertson, who passed away this week one day after his 88th birthday, was a “utility player” who shone whatever his position.

Still in his 20s, he was already working regularly on TV during those early, hectic days of live broadcasting in the early 1950s, and just as immediately demonstrating the utility that marked his career. His range was limitless as he performed in everything from heavyweight drama anthology...

One of the true giants passed away this week: filmmaker Sidney Lumet, dead at 86 of lymphoma.

He was one of an incredibly talented class of directors who graduated from the early days of TV; a group which included such august talents as Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967), George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969), John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962), Arthur Hiller (The Hospital, 1971), Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton, 1970), Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night, 1967), Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962), Martin Ritt (Hud, 1963), and Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, 1969). Only Jewison is left, now, and as each has passed, mainstream American moviemaking has gotten a little louder, a little emptier, and a little dumber.

TV drama in the early days was almost like good theater: it was usually live, smart, provocative, rich with real-world character and sharp dialogue. Very early on, Lumet was considered one of the...

Caro Jones, a casting director for television, film and theater for more than four decades, died Sept. 3 in Los Angeles following a 14-year battle with multiple myeloma. She was 86.

Jones cast more than 1,000 TV shows, pilots, movies of the week and miniseries and worked on films including two from director John Avildsen: best-picture Oscar winner "Rocky" (1976) and "Save the Tiger" (1973) with Jack Lemmon in one of his two Academy Award-winning turns.

Jones began her career as an assistant casting director for the Theatre Guild in New York for its live television production "The United States Steel Hour." One of her first office assistants was Les Moonves, now president and CEO of CBS Corp.

On the dramatic anthology series, which ran from 1953-63 on ABC and CBS, Jones worked with many actors who were just starting their careers -- Johnny Carson, Carroll O'Connor, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn, George C. Scott,...

Horton Foote, the prolific playwright and screenwriter who gave enduring voice to the values of small-town America in such movies as "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Tender Mercies" and "The Trip to Bountiful" and plays like the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Young Man From Atlanta," died Wednesday in Hartford, Conn. He was 92.

Foote died in his sleep in his apartment. He was working on "The Orphans' Home Cycle," a collection of nine plays that will be presented next fall at the Hartford Stage, where his daughter, actress Hallie Foote, is now appearing in a production of "Mockingbird."

The Texas-born writer's career spanned more than 50 years in film, TV and theater. He earned two Academy Awards -- best adapted screenplay for 1962's "Mockingbird" and best original screenplay for 1983's "Mercies" -- and was nominated for a third for 1985's "Bountiful."

Robert Duvall won the best actor Oscar for "Mercies," and Geraldine Page took...

Paul Newman, who combined Method training with matinee idol looks to become the personification of the cool '60s rebel in such iconic roles as the reckless Hud, the defiant Cool Hand Luke and the hotshot Butch Cassidy, died Friday. Surrounded by friends and family, including his wife, Joanne Woodward, the actor and philanthropist passed away at his farmhouse home near Wesport, Conn., after a long battle with cancer. He was 83.

In a film career that spanned nearly six decades, Newman received seven Oscar nominations before he was finally presented with an Honorary Oscar in 1986 "in recognition of his many and memorable and compelling screen performances and for his personal integrity and dedication to his craft."

But then he pulled out a trump card of his own, winning the best actor Academy Award the following year for "The Color of Money," in which he reprised the role of pool shark Fast Eddie Felsen,...