Friday, 12 September 2014
Thursday, 11 September 2014
Richard Kiel RIP
Beau Maverick gets to grips with Richard Kiel
Richard Kiel obituary
Actor who played the terrifying villain's sidekick, Jaws, in two James Bond films, in which he used his steel teeth to chomp through electric cables – and human beings
Ryan Gilbey
The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/11/richard-kiel
Richard Kiel at the Interteen Fair with The Beach Boys at Burbank, April 1963. The other tall guy is 7' 3"" actor William Engessor. Carl Wilson is standing behind Kiel, looking at Brian, the top of whose head is emerging from Kiel's neck; Mike and Dennis are checking out the regular-sized chicks; David Marks is at Carl's right - that is, left as you look at the picture..
Actor who played the terrifying villain's sidekick, Jaws, in two James Bond films, in which he used his steel teeth to chomp through electric cables – and human beings
Ryan Gilbey
The Guardian
Thursday 11 September 2014
The James Bond films could turn out magisterial villains well enough: Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Auric Goldfinger. But they were business-class bores compared to the grotesque sidekicks who got their hands dirty snapping necks, hurling bodies from planes and generally doing their masters' gruesome bidding. Oddjob, whose bowler-hat concealed a razor-sharp rim, and Rosa Klebb, who wore the sort of deadly shoes a woman couldn't find at any old Freeman Hardy Willis, set the standard high in the 1960s. But for any cinemagoer coming of age in the 70s, there was no competition for the title of Most Terrifying Bond Villain's Accomplice. It was Jaws, played by the actor Richard Kiel, who has died aged 74.
Jaws was distinguished by his height (Kiel was 7ft 1.5in) and by his gnarled steel teeth, which could chomp through padlocks, electrical cables and, on special occasions, human beings. He was also the only accomplice to appear in two Bond movies. It had been intended that he would die at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and his death was even filmed, but positive audience reaction to his scenes ensured that he lived to bite another day.
He was employed on that first occasion by the dastardly Karl Stromberg, who hoped to trigger a nuclear apocalypse before starting a new underwater civilisation. But the balance of horror in the movie was skew-whiff: the third world war seemed like a picnic compared to being cornered at night by Jaws in an Egyptian catacomb, or trying to escape in a clapped-out van while he tore through the bodywork as easily as if it were flatbread.
Hugo Drax, the villain in Moonraker (1979), must have been alerted to Jaws's sterling work in the areas of looming, menacing and murdering when he began casting around for his own henchman – for here was Jaws popping up to try to finish Bond off in a thrilling confrontation on top of a cable car.
Kiel, who had played a thug with gold teeth only a year before The Spy Who Loved Me, in the 1976 Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor comedy-thriller Silver Streak, had been unenthusiastic initially about the role, for which David Prowse (Darth Vader in the Star Wars films) was also in the running. "I was very put off by the description of the character and I thought, 'Well, they don't really need an actor, he's more a monster part' ... I said if I were to play the part, I want to give the character some human characteristics, like perseverance, frustration." He brought even more than that. By the end of Moonraker, he had persuaded us not only that Jaws could renounce his psychotic ways, but also that he could find love, with a tiny blonde girl sporting Pippi Longstocking plaits.
Kiel was born in Detroit, Michigan. He was blind in one eye and also had the hormonal condition acromegaly, which causes excess growth hormones to be produced. He claimed not to have harboured any youthful ambitions to be an actor. Among his early jobs were cemetery plot salesman and nightclub bouncer. Even once he moved to California and began taking acting roles, he supplemented his erratic income by working as a night-school maths teacher.
His earliest acting roles were in the western series Klondike (1960) and Laramie (1961). Other television work followed in series including Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Wild Wild West and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He also appeared in small and sometimes uncredited parts in films, but attracted attention in Robert Aldrich's 1974 prison comedy-drama The Longest Yard (released in the UK as The Mean Machine) starring Burt Reynolds.
He played the title role in two 1977 television pilot episodes of The Incredible Hulk, but was replaced by the bulkier Lou Ferrigno when it was decided that girth rather than height was the order of the day. Following his success as Jaws, he enjoyed a run of parts as assorted heavies. He cited as a personal favourite his role as a good guy gone bad in the belated Guns of Navarone sequel, Force 10 from Navarone (1978). He was also a loan shark chasing Ryan O'Neal, who played the inventor of a pair of buttockless jeans, in the screwball comedy So Fine (1981)".
Aside from his voice performance in the 2010 Disney film Tangled, Kiel's most high-profile work outside the Bond movies was in Clint Eastwood's western Pale Rider (1985) and in the Adam Sandler comedy Happy Gilmore (1996). In the latter, he walked with a cane, having had his balance affected adversely in a car accident in 1992.
Though Kiel was known largely for acting, he co-wrote and produced the 1991 family film The Giant of Thunder Mountain, and starred in it alongside Hollywood's go-to grizzly, Bart the Bear.
Kiel is survived by his second wife, Diane (nee Rogers), whom he married in 1974, and their four children.
• Richard Kiel, actor, born 13 September 1939; died 10 September 2014
Jaws was distinguished by his height (Kiel was 7ft 1.5in) and by his gnarled steel teeth, which could chomp through padlocks, electrical cables and, on special occasions, human beings. He was also the only accomplice to appear in two Bond movies. It had been intended that he would die at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and his death was even filmed, but positive audience reaction to his scenes ensured that he lived to bite another day.
He was employed on that first occasion by the dastardly Karl Stromberg, who hoped to trigger a nuclear apocalypse before starting a new underwater civilisation. But the balance of horror in the movie was skew-whiff: the third world war seemed like a picnic compared to being cornered at night by Jaws in an Egyptian catacomb, or trying to escape in a clapped-out van while he tore through the bodywork as easily as if it were flatbread.
Hugo Drax, the villain in Moonraker (1979), must have been alerted to Jaws's sterling work in the areas of looming, menacing and murdering when he began casting around for his own henchman – for here was Jaws popping up to try to finish Bond off in a thrilling confrontation on top of a cable car.
Kiel, who had played a thug with gold teeth only a year before The Spy Who Loved Me, in the 1976 Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor comedy-thriller Silver Streak, had been unenthusiastic initially about the role, for which David Prowse (Darth Vader in the Star Wars films) was also in the running. "I was very put off by the description of the character and I thought, 'Well, they don't really need an actor, he's more a monster part' ... I said if I were to play the part, I want to give the character some human characteristics, like perseverance, frustration." He brought even more than that. By the end of Moonraker, he had persuaded us not only that Jaws could renounce his psychotic ways, but also that he could find love, with a tiny blonde girl sporting Pippi Longstocking plaits.
Kiel was born in Detroit, Michigan. He was blind in one eye and also had the hormonal condition acromegaly, which causes excess growth hormones to be produced. He claimed not to have harboured any youthful ambitions to be an actor. Among his early jobs were cemetery plot salesman and nightclub bouncer. Even once he moved to California and began taking acting roles, he supplemented his erratic income by working as a night-school maths teacher.
His earliest acting roles were in the western series Klondike (1960) and Laramie (1961). Other television work followed in series including Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Wild Wild West and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He also appeared in small and sometimes uncredited parts in films, but attracted attention in Robert Aldrich's 1974 prison comedy-drama The Longest Yard (released in the UK as The Mean Machine) starring Burt Reynolds.
He played the title role in two 1977 television pilot episodes of The Incredible Hulk, but was replaced by the bulkier Lou Ferrigno when it was decided that girth rather than height was the order of the day. Following his success as Jaws, he enjoyed a run of parts as assorted heavies. He cited as a personal favourite his role as a good guy gone bad in the belated Guns of Navarone sequel, Force 10 from Navarone (1978). He was also a loan shark chasing Ryan O'Neal, who played the inventor of a pair of buttockless jeans, in the screwball comedy So Fine (1981)".
Aside from his voice performance in the 2010 Disney film Tangled, Kiel's most high-profile work outside the Bond movies was in Clint Eastwood's western Pale Rider (1985) and in the Adam Sandler comedy Happy Gilmore (1996). In the latter, he walked with a cane, having had his balance affected adversely in a car accident in 1992.
Though Kiel was known largely for acting, he co-wrote and produced the 1991 family film The Giant of Thunder Mountain, and starred in it alongside Hollywood's go-to grizzly, Bart the Bear.
Kiel is survived by his second wife, Diane (nee Rogers), whom he married in 1974, and their four children.
• Richard Kiel, actor, born 13 September 1939; died 10 September 2014
Richard Kiel at the Interteen Fair with The Beach Boys at Burbank, April 1963. The other tall guy is 7' 3"" actor William Engessor. Carl Wilson is standing behind Kiel, looking at Brian, the top of whose head is emerging from Kiel's neck; Mike and Dennis are checking out the regular-sized chicks; David Marks is at Carl's right - that is, left as you look at the picture..
Last night's set lists
At The Habit, York: -
Ron Elderly: -
I'll See You In My Dreams
Wild Horses
Make You Feel My Love
Da Elderly: -
I Don't Want To Talk About It
You've Got A Friend
Tell Me Why
The Elderly Brothers: -
I've Just Seen A Face
Walk Right Back
Crying In The Rain
You Got It
You're Sixteen
Surfin' USA
Then I Kissed Her
People Get Ready
When You Walk In The Room
A packed house from the start: the punters were treated to rather indulgent solo sets from the Elderlys. The closing set induced a few folks to dance to the more upbeat numbers.
The after midnight unplugged jam was warmly applauded. Your humble minstrels were plied with drink, which fuelled even more terpsichorean delights from the late night revellers. A final shot of Fireball each finished off a most enjoyable evening in style!
Ron Elderly: -
I'll See You In My Dreams
Wild Horses
Make You Feel My Love
Da Elderly: -
I Don't Want To Talk About It
You've Got A Friend
Tell Me Why
The Elderly Brothers: -
I've Just Seen A Face
Walk Right Back
Crying In The Rain
You Got It
You're Sixteen
Surfin' USA
Then I Kissed Her
People Get Ready
When You Walk In The Room
A packed house from the start: the punters were treated to rather indulgent solo sets from the Elderlys. The closing set induced a few folks to dance to the more upbeat numbers.
The after midnight unplugged jam was warmly applauded. Your humble minstrels were plied with drink, which fuelled even more terpsichorean delights from the late night revellers. A final shot of Fireball each finished off a most enjoyable evening in style!
Wednesday, 10 September 2014
Monday, 8 September 2014
Love and Mercy - Brian Wilson biopic review
Love & Mercy review – a warm tribute to the extraordinary life of Brian Wilson
Bill Pohlad's biopic of the Beach Boys mastermind is immaculate and respectful, but the arc of growth and redemption is too neat
Henry Barnes
theguardian.com
Bill Pohlad's biopic of the Beach Boys mastermind is immaculate and respectful, but the arc of growth and redemption is too neat
Henry Barnes
theguardian.com
Monday 8 September 2014
What a shame it would have been had a biopic of Brian Wilson not been well orchestrated. Director Bill Pohlad arranges his film into two motifs that offer a warm, neat tribute to the Beach Boys mastermind. Made with Wilson's blessing, and spinning a full roster of Beach Boys hits, Love & Mercy cuts between Wilsons young and old, skipping the really ugly bits of an extraordinary life in favour of a clean arc of growth and redemption.
Paul Dano (packing on a few pounds of podge) plays Wilson in 1963. The songs in his head are coalescing into Pet Sounds. The voices in his head are only starting to get in the way. He's left the rest of the band to take their surf-rock schtick around the world. Bored of writing about "sun and summer and summer and sun", he stays in California, dabbling with LSD, coveting "ego-death", preparing an album that will change pop music forever.
Twenty years later, the balance between majesty and madness has swung against Wilson (now played by John Cusack). He's having trouble keeping his head on straight. Can't listen to Pet Sounds without feeling he's being smacked in the face. His therapist, Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), helped him to break years in isolation following the death of his abusive dad. But Landy has turned from protector to gatekeeper. He's taken the role of abusive patriarch for himself. He'll turn his fire on Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a car saleswoman whom Wilson met in the showroom, and who would eventually become his second wife.
Oren Moverman, Love & Mercy's screenwriter, also co-wrote Todd Haynes's multi-stranded I'm Not There, based loosely on the life of Bob Dylan. His Wilson story is less of an adventure, but it does a similarly fine job of avoiding oversimplification. Young Brian is manic and fragmented, even at his happiest. Songs float into his head uninvited. He can't stop the music, even when he wants to. He's worried that his brothers don't get him, he knows the Beatles are stealing his ideas. The pressure to make his records sound as good as he imagines them is hounding him.
Dano plays Wilson with the odd lapse into manic paranoia, but Moverman resists making the link between mental illness and creative freedom too strong. Similarly, the older Wilson isn't just a frightened drug casualty. He never loses his sense of wonder. There's a consistency between the character in the two stages of his life that smooths the jolt between the eras.
Both Dano and Cusack perform beautifully. The role suits their strengths. His shyness brings out a subtlely that Dano often lacks, while Cusack's dry charm gives the older man a sense of humour, as well as nobility. Banks and Giamatti's roles are more one-note. Landy quickly devolves into the kind of maniacal weasel we've seen Giamatti play too often. Banks is an angel of patience and understanding as Ledbetter, the only person who realises how unhealthy Landy's influence has become and the lone hero who can break Wilson free. The complexity of both characters is sacrificed, however, the grey areas of Wilson and Landy's relationship unexplored. Brian is a victim to be saved from a bad man by a good woman. It's all a bit too neat.
Wilson's life has been unusually rich. This biopic, like any biopic, is a cocktail of fact and myth. It's very sensitive to its subject, which can sometimes leave it feeling slight. There are areas of Wilson's story that are underplayed or ignored. Recreational drugs are present, but the idea of addiction, or even dependence, isn't addressed. The other Beach Boys are bit-parts in a life, which feels particularly unfair to Dennis, another complex character whose life drifted away from the fun-in-the-sun innocence of the band's early years.
There's a scene in the studio showing Wilson in his element. He wants the musicians playing in two different keys; he's happy for control room chatter to bleed onto his song. He's just recorded his dogs, Banana and Louie, singing backing vocals. His piano player hits a wrong note and Wilson loves it. The mistakes can make music perfect, he says. Love & Mercy – immaculate, respectful – doesn't follow that philosophy.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/08/love-and-mercy-review-brian-wilson-biopic
What a shame it would have been had a biopic of Brian Wilson not been well orchestrated. Director Bill Pohlad arranges his film into two motifs that offer a warm, neat tribute to the Beach Boys mastermind. Made with Wilson's blessing, and spinning a full roster of Beach Boys hits, Love & Mercy cuts between Wilsons young and old, skipping the really ugly bits of an extraordinary life in favour of a clean arc of growth and redemption.
Paul Dano (packing on a few pounds of podge) plays Wilson in 1963. The songs in his head are coalescing into Pet Sounds. The voices in his head are only starting to get in the way. He's left the rest of the band to take their surf-rock schtick around the world. Bored of writing about "sun and summer and summer and sun", he stays in California, dabbling with LSD, coveting "ego-death", preparing an album that will change pop music forever.
Twenty years later, the balance between majesty and madness has swung against Wilson (now played by John Cusack). He's having trouble keeping his head on straight. Can't listen to Pet Sounds without feeling he's being smacked in the face. His therapist, Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), helped him to break years in isolation following the death of his abusive dad. But Landy has turned from protector to gatekeeper. He's taken the role of abusive patriarch for himself. He'll turn his fire on Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a car saleswoman whom Wilson met in the showroom, and who would eventually become his second wife.
Oren Moverman, Love & Mercy's screenwriter, also co-wrote Todd Haynes's multi-stranded I'm Not There, based loosely on the life of Bob Dylan. His Wilson story is less of an adventure, but it does a similarly fine job of avoiding oversimplification. Young Brian is manic and fragmented, even at his happiest. Songs float into his head uninvited. He can't stop the music, even when he wants to. He's worried that his brothers don't get him, he knows the Beatles are stealing his ideas. The pressure to make his records sound as good as he imagines them is hounding him.
Dano plays Wilson with the odd lapse into manic paranoia, but Moverman resists making the link between mental illness and creative freedom too strong. Similarly, the older Wilson isn't just a frightened drug casualty. He never loses his sense of wonder. There's a consistency between the character in the two stages of his life that smooths the jolt between the eras.
Both Dano and Cusack perform beautifully. The role suits their strengths. His shyness brings out a subtlely that Dano often lacks, while Cusack's dry charm gives the older man a sense of humour, as well as nobility. Banks and Giamatti's roles are more one-note. Landy quickly devolves into the kind of maniacal weasel we've seen Giamatti play too often. Banks is an angel of patience and understanding as Ledbetter, the only person who realises how unhealthy Landy's influence has become and the lone hero who can break Wilson free. The complexity of both characters is sacrificed, however, the grey areas of Wilson and Landy's relationship unexplored. Brian is a victim to be saved from a bad man by a good woman. It's all a bit too neat.
Wilson's life has been unusually rich. This biopic, like any biopic, is a cocktail of fact and myth. It's very sensitive to its subject, which can sometimes leave it feeling slight. There are areas of Wilson's story that are underplayed or ignored. Recreational drugs are present, but the idea of addiction, or even dependence, isn't addressed. The other Beach Boys are bit-parts in a life, which feels particularly unfair to Dennis, another complex character whose life drifted away from the fun-in-the-sun innocence of the band's early years.
There's a scene in the studio showing Wilson in his element. He wants the musicians playing in two different keys; he's happy for control room chatter to bleed onto his song. He's just recorded his dogs, Banana and Louie, singing backing vocals. His piano player hits a wrong note and Wilson loves it. The mistakes can make music perfect, he says. Love & Mercy – immaculate, respectful – doesn't follow that philosophy.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/08/love-and-mercy-review-brian-wilson-biopic
John Constable - a Revolutionary Artist
Constable: A Country Rebel
The Haywain by John Constable is such a comfortingly familiar image of rural Britain that it is difficult to believe it was ever regarded as a revolutionary painting, but in this film, made in conjunction with a landmark exhibition at the V&A, Alastair Sooke discovers that Constable was painting in a way that was completely new and groundbreaking at the time.
Through experimentation and innovation he managed to make a sublime art from humble things and, though he struggled in his own country during his lifetime, his genius was surprisingly widely admired in France.
Through experimentation and innovation he managed to make a sublime art from humble things and, though he struggled in his own country during his lifetime, his genius was surprisingly widely admired in France.
Watch it on BBC iPLayer for the next seven days:
Sunday, 7 September 2014
Spike Milligan statue unveiled in Finchley
Terry Gilliam chats with Spike Milligan
Spike Milligan statue unveiled in north London
The life-size bronze by John Somerville shows the comedian sitting on a bench in his former home of Finchley
Mark Brown
The Guardian
Thursday 4 September 2014
No one, disappointingly, was dressed in a German helmet, battle dress, hobnailed boots and tutu at the unveiling of a new statue for one of Britain's most influential, funniest and unhinged comedians – Spike Milligan.
"That really would have made my day," said Michael Parkinson, recalling the bizarre outfit Milligan once wore when they met on a TV set.
There were plenty more stories as friends and admirers gathered in north London for a statue that has taken 10 years to be made. The life-size bronze, by the artist John Somerville, shows Milligan sitting on a bench and turning to speak to whomever might be there.
"It should have a little mechanism in it that you sit down and it farts," said the film director Terry Gilliam. He said he was hugely influenced by Milligan. "One of the reasons I came to England was I heard this thing on the radio called The Goon Show. I'd never heard anything like it. I thought: 'I want to go wherever that's coming from.'"
There was lots of affection for Milligan at the unveiling, but also an acknowledgement that he could be a difficult man. "You didn't know who you were going to be meeting, simple as that," said Gilliam.
Parkinson said Milligan was a boyhood hero of his. "He is responsible for my love of comedians, basically. He made me laugh more than anybody else as a kid growing up."
He interviewed Milligan several times. "He was the only man, when booked for a show, there'd be a sense of trepidation because you'd never know a) if he'd turn up, and b) what he would say."
Parkinson said there wasn't a single comedian at this year's Edinburgh festival fringe who would not have been influenced by Milligan.
He recalled recording a show for LBC once when an assistant came in to say there was a man downstairs calling himself Mr Spike Milligna and that he was a well-known typing error. Milligan was in his dressing gown and had turned up because he had heard the show and decided it was so bad be needed to liven it up. "He was indispensable, sometimes impossible and always glorious."
Other guests at the ceremony included Maureen Lipman, Roy Hudd, Denis Norden, Jeffrey Holland and Neil Pearson. The statue is in the gardens of Stephens House in Finchley, the north London suburb where Milligan lived for 19 years.
He was president of the Finchley Society. After his death in 2002, the society decided to honour a man who threw himself with some gusto into local affairs. "He didn't just say 'use my name'. He actually came to committee meetings," said the society's chairman, David Smith. "And he took it very seriously. He wasn't a Goon all of the time."
The statue has cost £60,000 and taken a long time to make happen. Barbara Warren, chair of the statue fund committee, first had the idea. It had, she said, been a long journey with financial disasters and refused grant requests.
Milligan joins a list of statue-honoured comedians that includes Eric Morecambe, Norman Wisdom and Laurel and Hardy.
No one, disappointingly, was dressed in a German helmet, battle dress, hobnailed boots and tutu at the unveiling of a new statue for one of Britain's most influential, funniest and unhinged comedians – Spike Milligan.
"That really would have made my day," said Michael Parkinson, recalling the bizarre outfit Milligan once wore when they met on a TV set.
There were plenty more stories as friends and admirers gathered in north London for a statue that has taken 10 years to be made. The life-size bronze, by the artist John Somerville, shows Milligan sitting on a bench and turning to speak to whomever might be there.
"It should have a little mechanism in it that you sit down and it farts," said the film director Terry Gilliam. He said he was hugely influenced by Milligan. "One of the reasons I came to England was I heard this thing on the radio called The Goon Show. I'd never heard anything like it. I thought: 'I want to go wherever that's coming from.'"
There was lots of affection for Milligan at the unveiling, but also an acknowledgement that he could be a difficult man. "You didn't know who you were going to be meeting, simple as that," said Gilliam.
Parkinson said Milligan was a boyhood hero of his. "He is responsible for my love of comedians, basically. He made me laugh more than anybody else as a kid growing up."
He interviewed Milligan several times. "He was the only man, when booked for a show, there'd be a sense of trepidation because you'd never know a) if he'd turn up, and b) what he would say."
Parkinson said there wasn't a single comedian at this year's Edinburgh festival fringe who would not have been influenced by Milligan.
He recalled recording a show for LBC once when an assistant came in to say there was a man downstairs calling himself Mr Spike Milligna and that he was a well-known typing error. Milligan was in his dressing gown and had turned up because he had heard the show and decided it was so bad be needed to liven it up. "He was indispensable, sometimes impossible and always glorious."
Other guests at the ceremony included Maureen Lipman, Roy Hudd, Denis Norden, Jeffrey Holland and Neil Pearson. The statue is in the gardens of Stephens House in Finchley, the north London suburb where Milligan lived for 19 years.
He was president of the Finchley Society. After his death in 2002, the society decided to honour a man who threw himself with some gusto into local affairs. "He didn't just say 'use my name'. He actually came to committee meetings," said the society's chairman, David Smith. "And he took it very seriously. He wasn't a Goon all of the time."
The statue has cost £60,000 and taken a long time to make happen. Barbara Warren, chair of the statue fund committee, first had the idea. It had, she said, been a long journey with financial disasters and refused grant requests.
Milligan joins a list of statue-honoured comedians that includes Eric Morecambe, Norman Wisdom and Laurel and Hardy.
Spike Milligan and me
At 16 years old, starstruck and vulnerable, I was lucky enough to find in the great Goon a hero worthy of worship – so I’m thrilled that we are finally unveiling a statue of him
Kathy Lette
The Guardian
At 16 years old, starstruck and vulnerable, I was lucky enough to find in the great Goon a hero worthy of worship – so I’m thrilled that we are finally unveiling a statue of him
Kathy Lette
The Guardian
Thursday 4 September 2014
Most teenagers are besotted with rebellious rock stars or cinematic love gods. But I was obsessed by a much more exotic, rare, enigmatic and entertaining species: the Milligan. At 16, I was madly in love with Spike. I knew all his poetry and books and songs by heart.
When I received news that he was touring Australia with a one-man show, I ran away from school and hitchhiked around the country after him, from Adelaide to Melbourne to Canberra. Hitchhiking, of course, means relying on the kindness of passing psychopaths, but I was willing to risk death just to be near the man I worshipped.
I bombarded the unsuspecting Goon with poems and songs written just for him - I even inflicted upon him my truly terrible first novel. (I was very busy at the time, I seem to remember, exhausting the literary possibilities of the labia.)
Instead of suggesting I put down my pen, Spike took me seriously and encouraged me to keep writing. He was the first grownup I’d ever met who wasn’t condescending. At that tender age, all a writer craves is reassurance that you’re not a member of the Illiterati, but I’d been sending snippets of my writing to publishers for over a year and had received a whole forest’s worth of patronising and pompous rejection letters from men who’d been at university so long they had ivy growing up their legs. They had all graduated in Advanced Pretension, especially to an aspiring female author in her teens. Spike was their antithesis.
Compassionate, passionate, profound and poetic, he was also exceedingly generous. Not just with praise, but also with practicalities. Having run away from Sylvania Maximum Security High School, I had absolutely no money. I was busking on street corners with a girlfriend for a living. Spike used to feed and water us and talk to us about life and literature, and even put us up in the odd hotel occasionally. It was like having a sugar daddy, but without the sex: a saccharine daddy. His manager, however, furious at the cost of another hotel room on the bill, brought round his undies and socks one night and demanded we wash them for him in the sink. But that was as dirty as it ever got on tour with the gentlemanly Spike Milligan.
As I watch the pathetic parade into court of famous men from the 1970s, courtesy of Operation Yewtree, it makes me respect my hero even more. Spike had two enamoured, spellbound 16-year-old girls in his grasp. Our devotion and naivety made us totally vulnerable. I remember the other men on his tour tended to look at us in the same way you might eye a fillet steak after a 10-day fast.
Spike could have used his celebrity power and emotional hold over us to his own advantage, and this tale would have ended very differently. Instead, we became such firm friends that he unofficially adopted us, drawing up the document on the back of a restaurant napkin. I have it still – my favourite memento of my favourite man. And when the black dog dragged him into the kennel, we sang him madrigals, lullabies and Celtic ballads ... until he got really depressed. No, until he picked up his ukulele.
It’s always perplexed me that the man who did so much to shape contemporary comedy – John Cleese, Maureen Lipman, Terry Gilliam, Barry Humphries, Joanna Lumley, Michael Palin and Denis Norden are all patrons of a memorial fund – has never had a plaque or some other lasting tribute to celebrate the joy he brought this nation. So it’s touching and thrilling that we are finally unveiling a statue today in London, near his Finchley home.
Considering how many male celebrities have recently been toppled from their elevated social positions, it seems even more deserved. For a man who liked to knock the pretentious off their pedestals, how deliciously appropriate that Spike finally ends up on one.
Most teenagers are besotted with rebellious rock stars or cinematic love gods. But I was obsessed by a much more exotic, rare, enigmatic and entertaining species: the Milligan. At 16, I was madly in love with Spike. I knew all his poetry and books and songs by heart.
When I received news that he was touring Australia with a one-man show, I ran away from school and hitchhiked around the country after him, from Adelaide to Melbourne to Canberra. Hitchhiking, of course, means relying on the kindness of passing psychopaths, but I was willing to risk death just to be near the man I worshipped.
I bombarded the unsuspecting Goon with poems and songs written just for him - I even inflicted upon him my truly terrible first novel. (I was very busy at the time, I seem to remember, exhausting the literary possibilities of the labia.)
Instead of suggesting I put down my pen, Spike took me seriously and encouraged me to keep writing. He was the first grownup I’d ever met who wasn’t condescending. At that tender age, all a writer craves is reassurance that you’re not a member of the Illiterati, but I’d been sending snippets of my writing to publishers for over a year and had received a whole forest’s worth of patronising and pompous rejection letters from men who’d been at university so long they had ivy growing up their legs. They had all graduated in Advanced Pretension, especially to an aspiring female author in her teens. Spike was their antithesis.
Compassionate, passionate, profound and poetic, he was also exceedingly generous. Not just with praise, but also with practicalities. Having run away from Sylvania Maximum Security High School, I had absolutely no money. I was busking on street corners with a girlfriend for a living. Spike used to feed and water us and talk to us about life and literature, and even put us up in the odd hotel occasionally. It was like having a sugar daddy, but without the sex: a saccharine daddy. His manager, however, furious at the cost of another hotel room on the bill, brought round his undies and socks one night and demanded we wash them for him in the sink. But that was as dirty as it ever got on tour with the gentlemanly Spike Milligan.
As I watch the pathetic parade into court of famous men from the 1970s, courtesy of Operation Yewtree, it makes me respect my hero even more. Spike had two enamoured, spellbound 16-year-old girls in his grasp. Our devotion and naivety made us totally vulnerable. I remember the other men on his tour tended to look at us in the same way you might eye a fillet steak after a 10-day fast.
Spike could have used his celebrity power and emotional hold over us to his own advantage, and this tale would have ended very differently. Instead, we became such firm friends that he unofficially adopted us, drawing up the document on the back of a restaurant napkin. I have it still – my favourite memento of my favourite man. And when the black dog dragged him into the kennel, we sang him madrigals, lullabies and Celtic ballads ... until he got really depressed. No, until he picked up his ukulele.
It’s always perplexed me that the man who did so much to shape contemporary comedy – John Cleese, Maureen Lipman, Terry Gilliam, Barry Humphries, Joanna Lumley, Michael Palin and Denis Norden are all patrons of a memorial fund – has never had a plaque or some other lasting tribute to celebrate the joy he brought this nation. So it’s touching and thrilling that we are finally unveiling a statue today in London, near his Finchley home.
Considering how many male celebrities have recently been toppled from their elevated social positions, it seems even more deserved. For a man who liked to knock the pretentious off their pedestals, how deliciously appropriate that Spike finally ends up on one.
Saturday, 6 September 2014
Andrew Victor McLaglen RIP
Andrew Victor McLaglen directing his father, Victor, and Clint Eastwood in Rawhide
Andrew McLaglen obituary
Film director whose collaboration with John Wayne extended the life of the western
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/04/andrew-mclaglen
Film director whose collaboration with John Wayne extended the life of the western
Ronald Bergan
The Guardian
The Guardian
Thursday 4 September 2014
Three long shadows lay heavily across the career of the film director Andrew McLaglen, who has died aged 94: those of two actors, his father, Victor McLaglen, and John "Duke" Wayne, and that of the director John Ford. By making mostly westerns, four of which starred Wayne, and by casting many actors from Ford's repertory company, such as Harry Carey Jr and Ben Johnson, McLaglen brazenly invited comparison with the great director. Yet he denied being influenced by Ford. "I never thought of John Ford at all. I knew Ford from the time I was 13 years old because my father worked with him. But once you direct, you become your own person," he said.
Nevertheless, take away Ford's eye for visual composition and poetry, and play up his machismo, slapstick and sentimentality, and you have a movie by McLaglen. With good scripts and Hollywood legends such as Wayne and James Stewart, McLaglen made some entertaining action movies and was able to extend the life of the western beyond the genre's sell-by date.
McLaglen was born in London, the year that his father, a former boxer, appeared in his first film, Call of the Road (1920). After establishing himself in about 20 silent British pictures, McLaglen senior was offered a Hollywood contract in 1924, and 18 months later was joined in Los Angeles by his wife, Enid (nee Lamont), daughter and five-year-old son. From a very early age, the young McLaglen was around movie people and on the sets of many of his father's films. Standing at 6ft 7in, he was even larger than his hulking father, who was a kind of talisman of Ford movies, of which he made more than a dozen.
Immediately after graduating from the University of Virginia, McLaglen entered the movies, as assistant director to Albert Rogell on Love, Honour and Goodbye (1945), a comedy featuring his father. In the cast was Veda Anne Borg, who became McLaglen's first wife the following year. He went on to be an assistant director to Ford on The Quiet Man (1952), in which Wayne and Victor McLaglen have an epic fist fight, and to William Wellman on four films, three of which – Island in the Sky (1953), The High and the Mighty (1954) and the anti-communist Blood Alley (1955) – starred Wayne.
Also featuring "Duke" was the McCarthyite Big Jim McLain (1952), which co-starred Borg and Wayne's protege James Arness; the latter was to star as Matt Dillon in the long-running television horse-opera Gunsmoke, of which most episodes between 1956 and 1965 would be directed by McLaglen. Arness played the lead in McLaglen's first film as director, Gun the Man Down (1956), a low-budget western, which was followed by a low-budget film noir, The Man in the Vault, in the same year; both were made for Wayne's Batjac company. McLaglen then got a chance to direct his father in The Abductors (1957).
If all of this has a hint of nepotism, McLaglen set out to prove he could make a career in his own right. In 1958, he signed a long-term contract with CBS, where he directed 96 episodes of Gunsmoke, 98 episodes of Have Gun – Will Travel and, in a rare departure from TV westerns, several episodes in the Perry Mason courtroom series. He also directed his father in his last role, in a Rawhide episode (1959).
McLintock! (1963) was McLaglen's first picture starring Wayne, whose sons Patrick (juvenile lead) and Michael (producer) were also involved. The boisterous western had Wayne as a cattle baron taming his shrewish wife (the Ford favourite Maureen O'Hara). When an interviewer suggested to McLaglen that Wayne was said to have all but directed many of his pictures, he replied: "I was lucky enough not to have that happen. I think that impression has to do with the respect John Wayne had for the director. He didn't force himself on the director."
Although McLaglen continued to direct for television, he concentrated on feature films from 1965, the year he made Shenandoah, arguably his best film.* Starring James Stewart at his most humane, it captured the heartbreak of the American civil war. Stewart was then paired with O'Hara in The Rare Breed (1966) and with Dean Martin in Bandolero! (1968), while Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark led a wagon train in The Way West (1967) – all proficient rather than inspired westerns.
McLaglen made three more westerns with Wayne. In The Undefeated (1969), Wayne is a Union colonel confronting a Confederate colonel, a moustachioed Rock Hudson. Chisum (1970) starts with Wayne silhouetted against the sky and ends the same way, though nothing in between quite justifies these iconic Fordian shots, while Cahill US Marshal (1973) has Wayne, looking every day of his 66 years, out to teach George Kennedy not to corrupt the youth of America.
McLaglen's several war movies suffered by comparison with better examples of the genre. The Devil's Brigade (1968) was similar to Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen, made in the previous year. The plot had a dour William Holden ordered to train a bunch of thugs to take on the Nazis in Norway. (In 1985, McLaglen took on the sequel to the Aldrich film, The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission.)
The Sea Wolves (1980), another second world war action picture, was somewhat reminiscent of The Guns of Navarone (1961), the similarity emphasised by using the same leads, Gregory Peck (attempting a British accent) and David Niven. Also cast was Roger Moore, who had appeared, with Richard Burton and Richard Harris, in McLaglen's The Wild Geese (1978), about mercenaries in Africa. Ostensibly promoting racial understanding, the film was shot in South Africa at the height of apartheid.
All of these rollicking adventures proved that, at the box office at least, familiarity breeds content. McLaglen's penultimate feature was Return From The River Kwai (1988), which again braved comparison with David Lean's 1957 classic.
McLaglen, who was married four times, is survived by a son, Josh, and a daughter, Mary, both film producers, who got their start on their father's films. His son with Borg, Andrew, died in 2006.
• Andrew Victor McLaglen, film and television director, born 28 July 1920; died 30 August 2014
Three long shadows lay heavily across the career of the film director Andrew McLaglen, who has died aged 94: those of two actors, his father, Victor McLaglen, and John "Duke" Wayne, and that of the director John Ford. By making mostly westerns, four of which starred Wayne, and by casting many actors from Ford's repertory company, such as Harry Carey Jr and Ben Johnson, McLaglen brazenly invited comparison with the great director. Yet he denied being influenced by Ford. "I never thought of John Ford at all. I knew Ford from the time I was 13 years old because my father worked with him. But once you direct, you become your own person," he said.
Nevertheless, take away Ford's eye for visual composition and poetry, and play up his machismo, slapstick and sentimentality, and you have a movie by McLaglen. With good scripts and Hollywood legends such as Wayne and James Stewart, McLaglen made some entertaining action movies and was able to extend the life of the western beyond the genre's sell-by date.
McLaglen was born in London, the year that his father, a former boxer, appeared in his first film, Call of the Road (1920). After establishing himself in about 20 silent British pictures, McLaglen senior was offered a Hollywood contract in 1924, and 18 months later was joined in Los Angeles by his wife, Enid (nee Lamont), daughter and five-year-old son. From a very early age, the young McLaglen was around movie people and on the sets of many of his father's films. Standing at 6ft 7in, he was even larger than his hulking father, who was a kind of talisman of Ford movies, of which he made more than a dozen.
Immediately after graduating from the University of Virginia, McLaglen entered the movies, as assistant director to Albert Rogell on Love, Honour and Goodbye (1945), a comedy featuring his father. In the cast was Veda Anne Borg, who became McLaglen's first wife the following year. He went on to be an assistant director to Ford on The Quiet Man (1952), in which Wayne and Victor McLaglen have an epic fist fight, and to William Wellman on four films, three of which – Island in the Sky (1953), The High and the Mighty (1954) and the anti-communist Blood Alley (1955) – starred Wayne.
Also featuring "Duke" was the McCarthyite Big Jim McLain (1952), which co-starred Borg and Wayne's protege James Arness; the latter was to star as Matt Dillon in the long-running television horse-opera Gunsmoke, of which most episodes between 1956 and 1965 would be directed by McLaglen. Arness played the lead in McLaglen's first film as director, Gun the Man Down (1956), a low-budget western, which was followed by a low-budget film noir, The Man in the Vault, in the same year; both were made for Wayne's Batjac company. McLaglen then got a chance to direct his father in The Abductors (1957).
If all of this has a hint of nepotism, McLaglen set out to prove he could make a career in his own right. In 1958, he signed a long-term contract with CBS, where he directed 96 episodes of Gunsmoke, 98 episodes of Have Gun – Will Travel and, in a rare departure from TV westerns, several episodes in the Perry Mason courtroom series. He also directed his father in his last role, in a Rawhide episode (1959).
McLintock! (1963) was McLaglen's first picture starring Wayne, whose sons Patrick (juvenile lead) and Michael (producer) were also involved. The boisterous western had Wayne as a cattle baron taming his shrewish wife (the Ford favourite Maureen O'Hara). When an interviewer suggested to McLaglen that Wayne was said to have all but directed many of his pictures, he replied: "I was lucky enough not to have that happen. I think that impression has to do with the respect John Wayne had for the director. He didn't force himself on the director."
Although McLaglen continued to direct for television, he concentrated on feature films from 1965, the year he made Shenandoah, arguably his best film.* Starring James Stewart at his most humane, it captured the heartbreak of the American civil war. Stewart was then paired with O'Hara in The Rare Breed (1966) and with Dean Martin in Bandolero! (1968), while Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark led a wagon train in The Way West (1967) – all proficient rather than inspired westerns.
McLaglen made three more westerns with Wayne. In The Undefeated (1969), Wayne is a Union colonel confronting a Confederate colonel, a moustachioed Rock Hudson. Chisum (1970) starts with Wayne silhouetted against the sky and ends the same way, though nothing in between quite justifies these iconic Fordian shots, while Cahill US Marshal (1973) has Wayne, looking every day of his 66 years, out to teach George Kennedy not to corrupt the youth of America.
McLaglen's several war movies suffered by comparison with better examples of the genre. The Devil's Brigade (1968) was similar to Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen, made in the previous year. The plot had a dour William Holden ordered to train a bunch of thugs to take on the Nazis in Norway. (In 1985, McLaglen took on the sequel to the Aldrich film, The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission.)
The Sea Wolves (1980), another second world war action picture, was somewhat reminiscent of The Guns of Navarone (1961), the similarity emphasised by using the same leads, Gregory Peck (attempting a British accent) and David Niven. Also cast was Roger Moore, who had appeared, with Richard Burton and Richard Harris, in McLaglen's The Wild Geese (1978), about mercenaries in Africa. Ostensibly promoting racial understanding, the film was shot in South Africa at the height of apartheid.
All of these rollicking adventures proved that, at the box office at least, familiarity breeds content. McLaglen's penultimate feature was Return From The River Kwai (1988), which again braved comparison with David Lean's 1957 classic.
McLaglen, who was married four times, is survived by a son, Josh, and a daughter, Mary, both film producers, who got their start on their father's films. His son with Borg, Andrew, died in 2006.
• Andrew Victor McLaglen, film and television director, born 28 July 1920; died 30 August 2014
*No. His one truly great film.
Friday, 5 September 2014
Thursday, 4 September 2014
Joan Rivers RIP
Joan Rivers, pioneering entertainer and comedian, dies aged 81
Rivers had been suffering complications after undergoing throat surgery last week
Amanda Holpuch
theguardian.com
.http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/sep/04/joan-rivers-pioneering-entertainer-comedian-dies
Joan Rivers: constantly in the limelight and pursued by controversy
Obituary: The comedian and show host once apologised for an incident concluding in her being taken off air: 'I'm sorry I fucking swore'
Michael Carlson
The Guardian
Rivers had been suffering complications after undergoing throat surgery last week
Amanda Holpuch
theguardian.com
Thursday 4 September 2014
The comedian Joan Rivers has died, her daughter announced on Thursday.
Rivers suffered a cardiac arrest during throat surgery on her vocal cords at a clinic in New York on 28 August. She was rushed to Mount Sinai hospital in the city, and was moved from its intensive care unit into a private room on Wednesday. She never recovered consciousness.
Melissa Rivers confirmed the news in a statement: “It is with great sadness that I announce the death of my mother, Joan Rivers. She passed peacefully at 1.17pm surrounded by family and close friends.”
Rivers had been hosting an online weekly talk show called In Bed with Joan and had just filmed her special award show episode of Fashion Police before being taken ill. She was regularly performing live stand-up performances and had finished the fourth season of the reality show in which she starred with her daughter: Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best.
“If there is a secret to being a comedian, it’s just loving what you do,”Rivers said in 2012. “It is my drug of choice. I don’t need real drugs. I don’t need liquor. It’s the joy that I get performing. That is my rush. I get it nowhere else.”
Melissa Rivers travelled to New York from Los Angeles with her son Cooper after her mother fell ill. “Cooper and I have found ourselves humbled by the outpouring of love, support and prayers we have received from around the world. They have been heard and appreciated,” Melissa Rivers said in a statement.
“My mother’s greatest joy in life was to make people laugh. Although that is difficult to do right now, I know her final wish would be that we return to laughing soon.”
The Brooklyn-born comedian worked the New York comedy scene alongside Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, George Carlin and Woody Allen. Her big break came with an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1965 and she has been a TV mainstay ever since.
She recently moved to California to be closer to her family, a move that like many other parts of Rivers’ life, was chronicled on Joan & Melissa.
Her caustic brand of humor frequently targeted celebrities, as well as herself. This no-holds-barred attitude would also push the line with comments that some people deemed insensitive.
Celebrities shared their condolences on Twitter shortly after Rivers’ death was announced. Fellow comedian Kathy Griffin said: “A legend, a friend, a mentor, an icon, and wildly funny. One of a kind. RIP”
“My friend Joan Rivers has passed away once again to quote Billy Crystal... There are no words. Bon Voyage Joan,” said Whoopi Goldberg.
The comedian Joan Rivers has died, her daughter announced on Thursday.
Rivers suffered a cardiac arrest during throat surgery on her vocal cords at a clinic in New York on 28 August. She was rushed to Mount Sinai hospital in the city, and was moved from its intensive care unit into a private room on Wednesday. She never recovered consciousness.
Melissa Rivers confirmed the news in a statement: “It is with great sadness that I announce the death of my mother, Joan Rivers. She passed peacefully at 1.17pm surrounded by family and close friends.”
Rivers had been hosting an online weekly talk show called In Bed with Joan and had just filmed her special award show episode of Fashion Police before being taken ill. She was regularly performing live stand-up performances and had finished the fourth season of the reality show in which she starred with her daughter: Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best.
“If there is a secret to being a comedian, it’s just loving what you do,”Rivers said in 2012. “It is my drug of choice. I don’t need real drugs. I don’t need liquor. It’s the joy that I get performing. That is my rush. I get it nowhere else.”
Melissa Rivers travelled to New York from Los Angeles with her son Cooper after her mother fell ill. “Cooper and I have found ourselves humbled by the outpouring of love, support and prayers we have received from around the world. They have been heard and appreciated,” Melissa Rivers said in a statement.
“My mother’s greatest joy in life was to make people laugh. Although that is difficult to do right now, I know her final wish would be that we return to laughing soon.”
The Brooklyn-born comedian worked the New York comedy scene alongside Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, George Carlin and Woody Allen. Her big break came with an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1965 and she has been a TV mainstay ever since.
She recently moved to California to be closer to her family, a move that like many other parts of Rivers’ life, was chronicled on Joan & Melissa.
Her caustic brand of humor frequently targeted celebrities, as well as herself. This no-holds-barred attitude would also push the line with comments that some people deemed insensitive.
Celebrities shared their condolences on Twitter shortly after Rivers’ death was announced. Fellow comedian Kathy Griffin said: “A legend, a friend, a mentor, an icon, and wildly funny. One of a kind. RIP”
“My friend Joan Rivers has passed away once again to quote Billy Crystal... There are no words. Bon Voyage Joan,” said Whoopi Goldberg.
Joan Rivers: constantly in the limelight and pursued by controversy
Obituary: The comedian and show host once apologised for an incident concluding in her being taken off air: 'I'm sorry I fucking swore'
Michael Carlson
The Guardian
Thursday 4 September 2014
The quintessential acerbic Noo Yawker, the comedian Joan Rivers, who has died aged 81, was identified by the rasping, fingernails-on-the-blackboard voice, which added a frisson to her signature phrase, "Can we talk?" As she aged, her face and her countless cosmetic operations became another trademark, but her cutting wit, often aimed at herself, was the core of her comedy and proved an asset as she moved into hosting talk shows. Later she found a niche, often alongside her daughter, Melissa, interviewing her fellow celebrities and criticising their fashions on the red carpets of the myriad awards ceremonies with which the entertainment industry honours itself.
Inevitably, her sarcasm proved too much for the egos of the stars, although she found a unique way of promoting her one-woman show based on those experiences when she went to London in 2008. Appearing on ITV's daytime gabfest Loose Women, to plug her show Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress, Rivers, then 75, said she didn't enjoy interviewing actors such as Russell Crowe. She turned to the camera, said "get the bleeper ready," then called Crowe "a fucking shit". There was, however, no bleeper. Although she bounced back with contrite quips, Loose Women proved rather tighter than advertised, and when the lineup returned from a commercial break, Rivers was gone.
Told that 48 viewers had called to complain, Rivers, aware of British television's vote-rigging scandals that year, demanded a recount. She called it "another milestone" for her career, saying it reminded her of her wedding night because "I got thrown out halfway through that, too." Later she issued an apology, saying: "I'm sorry I fucking swore."
This should not have caught anyone by surprise. As with some other US comedians, notably Jackie Mason, Britain helped to rejuvenate her career, perhaps because she reinforced British stereotypes of typical American behaviour. Reviewing the December 2007 Royal Variety performance, a livid Daily Mail counted Rivers's 13 swear words in her seven minutes before the Queen, starting with: "It's been a shitty day; everyone here's stealing my jokes."
Yet Rivers had longstanding form in Britain; her 1986 BBC chat show Can We Talk? lasted only six episodes and drew reviews ranging from bad to pitiful. She seemed unable to bring her usual acerbic wit to bear on her guests, often leaving her co-host Peter Cook playing straight man to the point of sycophancy, although the show did reunite Cook and Dudley Moore in one episode. Germaine Greer compared her interviewing style to "spiders copulating", while Spitting Image created a Joan Rivers puppet that was a skeleton.
She was born Joan Molinsky in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian immigrant parents, Meyer and Beatrice (nee Grushman). Her father's success as a doctor meant that she had a suburban upbringing in Westchester county. After three years at what was then Connecticut College for Women, she graduated from Barnard College, New York, in 1954 with a degree in English and anthropology. She worked as a department store buyer, and in 1957 married Jimmy Sanger, whom she described as the boss's son. The marriage was annulled after six months, lasting, in her words, "six months longer than it should have". Taking a job as a publicist for another store, Lord & Taylor, she began performing in New York clubs, billed as Pepper January.
Self-deprecation and marital discord were cornerstones of her act. "There is not one female comic who was beautiful as a little girl," she said. "My best birth control is to leave the lights on." She followed in the footsteps of Phyllis Diller, the pioneer of mainstream female standup comedy in America, but if Diller was the yenta (gossip) from hell, Rivers was the Jewish-American princess of your worst nightmares. "Trust your husband, adore your husband, and get as much as you can in your own name," she advised. She performed in a comedy trio, Jim, Jake and Joan, wrote material for the puppet mouse Topo Gigio, a sensation on the Ed Sullivan Show, and performed on The Jack Paar Tonight Show.
Her big break came in 1965, after Johnny Carson took over Tonight from Paar. That year she married the British-born writer and producer Edgar Rosenberg. Soon she was doing primetime shows such as Ed Sullivan, and by 1968, the year Melissa was born, she had her own short-lived talk show in syndication, and a small but excellent part in Burt Lancaster's film The Swimmer. She was a regular writer and performer on Candid Camera, but a play, Fun City, which she and Rosenberg wrote with Lester Colodny, bombed on Broadway, the first of a number of failures of projects she controlled. In 1973 she wrote a TV movie, The Girl Most Likely To ..., which starred Stockard Channing.
She became an in-demand guest for comedy and variety shows and a regular in Las Vegas, opening for the singer Helen Reddy, then one of the town's biggest attractions. Moving to Hollywood, she got the chance to write and direct the 1978 film Rabbit Test, starring Billy Crystal, about a man who gets pregnant. Like her play, it failed to capture an audience.
Again, Carson's Tonight show kept her in the public eye. Starting in 1983, she was Carson's replacement host of choice, a position she called "career Viagra". So much so that, in 1986, the new Fox Network offered Rivers her own late-night chat show. Carson was furious that she would take a competing show, and broke off contact with her; they never spoke again, and even his successors refused to book her. The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers lasted less than a year. Rosenberg, who produced her show, fell ill and in 1987 killed himself in a Philadelphia hotel room.
In her book Bouncing Back (1997), Rivers said she became bulimic after her husband's death, and contemplated taking her own life. The book became a made-for-TV movie, Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story (1994). She bounced back by starring in Pee-Wee Herman's 1988 Christmas special; Herman (Paul Reubens) had been the first guest on her Fox programme. In 1989 she began a syndicated daytime chat show that ran for five years. After a move back to New York, she hosted a radio show from 1997 until 2003.
Britain remained a welcoming market for her. She was interviewed by Dawn French for the BBC's Girls Who Do Comedy and was one of Channel 4's 50 Top Comedy Acts. Yet controversy predictably followed her around. Promoting a tour in 2003, she clashed with the broadcaster and columnist Darcus Howe on Radio 4's Midweek. When its host, Libby Purves, opined that Rivers's dream of intermarriage eliminating racism seemed "an American melting-pot approach", Howe snapped that America was "one of the most savagely racist places in the world". When he said Rivers was offended by the term "black", she became enraged. Calling Howe stupid, she attacked the documentary he was plugging as revealing him to be proud of being a poor husband and father, talking so incessantly that she left him struggling to return to championing his film.
British audiences were shocked when Rivers joked that the widows of 9/11 firefighters, who were compensated with $5m payments, would be disappointed if their husbands had been found alive. Defending herself, she pointed out that "my second husband committed suicide and I did suicide jokes". Even so, in 2005 Rivers was one of only four Americans invited to the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles.
By this point, Rivers's act had long since become primarily self-parody. Complaints about her looks had given way to jokes about plastic surgery: "I wish I had a twin, so I could see what I'd look like without it." She played herself on the American TV series Nip/Tuck, and in the cartoon series Futurama appeared as a talking head kept alive for thousands of years.
Her aggressive behaviour on the red carpet, which placed her firmly in the pantheon of gay icons, proved to be too much for both the E! Channel and the TV Guide Channel, which replaced her and Melissa with the anodyne actor Lisa Rinna. Only in America could Rivers reinvent herself as an aspirational brand; she sold her own-label clothing, jewellery, makeup and scent. But it was Britain that provided her with the most dubious highlight of her career; her appearance on Big Brother Celebrity Hijack (2007).
In 2010 she was the subject of a fascinating documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which was a hit at film festivals from San Francisco to London. The following year she moved in with her daughter as part of a reality television show, and co-hosted Fashion Police on E! In 2013 she launched an online chat show, In Bed With Joan.
Rivers once said that comedy was "an angry white man's game. Even if you're Chris Rock or Joan Rivers, you're an angry white man." Looking at one of her classics, "A man can sleep around, but if a woman makes 19 or 20 mistakes, she's a tramp," you can see what she meant.
She is survived by her daughter Melissa.
• Joan Rivers (Joan Alexandra Molinsky) comedian and talk show host, born 8 June 1933; died 4 September 2014
Last night's set lists
At The Habit, York: -
Ron Elderly: -
Streets Of London
No Expectations
My Hometown
Can't Help Falling In Love
Da Elderly: -
I'm Just A Loser
I Don't Want It All
Is It Only The Moonlight
Mellow My Mind
The Needle And The Damage Done
The Elderly Brothers: -
The Price Of Love
Walk Right Back
I've Just Seen A Face
Let It Be Me
Crying In The Rain
America
I Saw Her Standing There
Another odd night in The Habit, virtually empty for the first hour, then packed with punters until closing time. Two "new" songs from The Elderlys: The Beatles' I've Just Seen A Face and S&G's America. Both well received.
Ron Elderly: -
Streets Of London
No Expectations
My Hometown
Can't Help Falling In Love
Da Elderly: -
I'm Just A Loser
I Don't Want It All
Is It Only The Moonlight
Mellow My Mind
The Needle And The Damage Done
The Elderly Brothers: -
The Price Of Love
Walk Right Back
I've Just Seen A Face
Let It Be Me
Crying In The Rain
America
I Saw Her Standing There
Another odd night in The Habit, virtually empty for the first hour, then packed with punters until closing time. Two "new" songs from The Elderlys: The Beatles' I've Just Seen A Face and S&G's America. Both well received.
Tuesday, 2 September 2014
David Anderle RIP
David Anderle, record producer and music executive, dead at 77
Sept. 2, 2014
Tim Kenneally
2 September 2014
David Anderle, a record producer and music executive who worked with musical acts such as Frank Zappa, Judy Collins, The Doors, Sheryl Crow and the Circle Jerks, died Monday following a battle with cancer, a spokesperson for Anderle's family said Tuesday. Anderle was 77.
A lifelong Los Angeles resident, Anderle died peacefully while surrounded by his wife Cathy, son Jonathan and other family members.
Anderle began his music career as the West Coast Talent Director for MGM in 1964, later switching to West Coast Operations Director for Elektra Records in 1968. His longest run with a label was at A&M, where he served as senior vice president of A&R alongside Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss until his retirement in 1999.
Anderle also had a longtime friendship with Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson, which led to the creation of the first artist-run label, Brother Records.
While at A&M, Anderle served as music supervisor for a number of movies including "The Breakfast Club," "Pretty in Pink" and the Robin Williams film "Good Morning, Vietnam."
After his retirement from music, Anderle turned to painting, eventually realizing his lifelong dream of opening a one-man show, "Better Late Than Never," in 2007.
Memorial services for Anderle will be private.
http://music.msn.com/music/article.aspx?news=887076
Peter Lorre at the BFI
Peter Lorre: a great screen actor remembered
50 years after his death, a season of Peter Lorre's films at the BFI will show him as a versatile, captivating screen presence
Philip French
The Observer
You are being called back
To a country that has been destroyed.
And we have nothing more
To offer you than the fact that you are needed.
Life in exile was a challenge to a non-English speaker, but Lorre faced it bravely, finding immediate success typecast as professional central European assassins in two Hitchcock movies. In the first, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), he succeeded in convincing Hitch he could speak English and was deadly serious. Two years later, in Secret Agentand now speaking the language, he gave a brilliantly comic performance that somewhat showed up his stilted co-star John Gielgud. In between he worked in Hollywood, playing a deranged doctor who grafts the hands of a homicidal knife-thrower on to a disfigured pianist in the German emigre Karl Freund's horror movie Mad Love, and he was Raskolnikov in Josef von Sternberg's stolid Crime and Punishment. The former was a popular success, the latter a serious failure. Lorre's future was determined.
From that point on the story of Lorre's life was that of an industry lacking the imagination to make proper use of a great actor. It was also the tale of a formidably intelligent, good-humoured artist, cut adrift from his national moorings, acquiescing in his gifts – for tragedy, farce and everything in between – being marketed in small selective packages. Half a dozen colourful scene-stealing performances later, mostly in potboilers, Lorre reluctantly signed with 20th Century Fox to play a B-movie rival to the same studio's Charlie Chan. His Mr Moto, the Japanese super-sleuth, was invariably described as "the oriental Sherlock", and these eight efficient hour-length films made Lorre a household name in neighbourhood movie houses. He played with little makeup (just a pair of small glasses and brushed-back hair) and in a manner that mocked stereotypes. His quitting the role in 1939 coincided with the onset of the vogue for film noir, and Lorre appeared in what's now regarded as the first clearly identifiable example of the genre, Stranger on the Third Floor(1940). He virtually reprised his serial killer from M in an American setting.
Thus began the most satisfying period of his time in Hollywood. The second world war brought Americans together on the screen with aliens and exiles, and Lorre signed a contract with Warner Brothers. In The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca he became friends and screen partners with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet, and he was to work on eight movies with his physical and social opposite, the rotund, unflappable Englishman Greenstreet, and six with Bogart. In 1945 Lorre co-starred with Lauren Bacall in the film version of Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent (the only Hollywood version of his work Greene approved of) and advised Bogart to marry Bacall. "It's better to have five, 10, 15 years than nothing at all," he said.
Making his directorial debut with The Maltese Falcon, John Huston was initially disappointed after shooting the first encounter between Bogart's hard-boiled private eye Sam Spade and Lorre's cosmopolitan crook Joel Cairo. Then he saw the rushes and found that Lorre filled the screen with a nuanced, wheedling menace that was at once frightening and comic. A decade later, in 1953, Huston sought to recapture the spirit of Falcon in Beat the Devil, reuniting Bogart as an American adventurer in Italy with Lorre as a Chilean crook called Julius O'Hara and Robert Morley standing in for the late Greenstreet. Scripted by Truman Capote, it lost money but became a selfconsciously camp success.
In the 40s and 50s, Lorre had some small rewarding roles in big movies, most memorably as an alcoholic plastic surgeon opposite Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace and as a Soviet commissar keeping an eye on Cyd Charisse in Silk Stockings, the musical version of Ninotchka. And he was in demand on radio and then TV, where as Le Chiffre in the 1954 adaptation of Casino Royale he was the first villain (albeit in fuzzy monochrome on the small screen) to threaten James Bond with torture. But morphine (to which he was sporadically addicted since a botched intestinal operation in the 1920s), drink, chain-smoking, alimony and the failure of his own production company left him with serious worries.
19-41-09%5D.jpg)
He must also, as a friend of Brecht in the McCarthy era, have been anxious about being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. But now, as a naturalised American citizen, he saw little future in returning to Europe either to join Brecht's Berliner Ensemble in East Germany or to consort with the great Gustaf Gründgens, his co-star in M, who after a decade of close association with the Third Reich was now the dominant figure in West German theatre. In 1951, however, he did return to Germany for his one attempt at movie direction with the psychological thriller Der Verlorene ("The Lost One"). He played a guilt-ridden German scientist in a displaced persons camp, but to his great regret it was a major failure. A melancholy, visually striking movie in the expressionist manner, it's in need of re-evaluation and was certainly ahead of its time.
Lorre's career was to end with two series of movies. One strand was a succession of uninspired adaptations of Jules Verne novels scripted by an Englishman, Charles Bennett, who had written Lorre's two Hitchcock pictures. The other series, though he was not to know it, was to be remembered with affection. In the early 1950s I saw him on stage for the only time, when his career was at a low ebb, and he was touring British music halls. His act consisted of a comic monologue, sending up his own menacing persona, followed by a compelling performance of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart with eerie lighting and extravagantly contorted facial expressions. This I now see as anticipating those final low-budget black comedies based on Poe stories. Directed with great style by Roger Corman, they reunited Lorre with Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff and Vincent Price and were apparently a lot of fun to make. At the 1956 funeral of Bela Lugosi (with whom he had appeared along with Karloff in a 1940 haunted-house horror movie called You'll Find Out), Lorre turned to Vincent Price and whispered: "Do you think we should drive a stake through his heart, just in case?"
A season of Peter Lorre films runs at the BFI, London SE1 from 2 September to 7 Oct
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/31/peter-lorre-by-philip-french-m-huston-bogart-hitchcock-bacall
50 years after his death, a season of Peter Lorre's films at the BFI will show him as a versatile, captivating screen presence
Philip French
The Observer
31 August 2014
Many believe that all of the 80-odd movies featuring Peter Lorre are worth seeing, if only for his presence. An exception perhaps is The Patsy, an asinine comedy directed by its self-regarding star, Jerry Lewis, in which Lorre made his final appearance 50 years ago this summer. Looking ill and bloated, he died of a heart attack four days after shooting ended in late March 1964. It was the kind of role Lorre called "latrine duty" and it may well have ended his life. He was 59.
Born László Löwenstein in Rosenberg, Hungary, in 1904, Lorre grew up in Vienna where he left school to work as a bank clerk by day and to act at night in a theatre company that combined improvisation with Freudian therapy. The manager, probably inspired by Struwwelpeter, the shockheaded hero of a popular 19th-century children's book, gave him the name Peter Lorre. This was not inappropriate, because at 5ft 3in and with unruly hair and a face that was a series of circles (infinitely expressive saucer-like eyes, a round face, a neck that would often disappear) he cut something less than a stellar figure. Graham Greene, who thought him a genius, wrote in 1936 of his performance in Mad Love: "Those marble pupils in the pasty spherical head are like the eye-pieces of a microscope through which you can watch the tangled mind laid flat on the slide."
Within three years of settling in Berlin, Lorre was considered the capital's most exciting actor, acclaimed by Bertolt Brecht as the greatest exponent of his work. An essential figure in creating the playwright's concept of epic theatre, he was capable of miming with his body the opposite of what he was expressing in words. In M (1931), one of the first German sound films, Fritz Lang entrusted him with the demanding part of a sympathetic child murderer and later described Lorre's performance as "one of the best in film history and certainly the best in his life". Muncannily anticipates the coming of the Nazis, as the police and the underworld unite to pursue the hapless killer. It not only made Lorre world-famous but also trapped him for ever within a screen persona. Whatever he brought to subsequent roles by way of humour, pathos, pain and human kindness failed to conceal an insistent membrane of threat and danger.
The Jewish Lorre fled Nazi Germany in 1933, as did the half-Jewish Lang and the communist Brecht. All three ended up in Hollywood, but Lorre was to work with neither again. In 1947, however, Brecht wrote the scenario for a modern Macbeth to star Lorre, which no studio would back. A year later, after appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee and leaving for Europe, Brecht wrote the poem To the Actor PL in Exile, urging his friend to join him in creating a new theatre in Germany:
Many believe that all of the 80-odd movies featuring Peter Lorre are worth seeing, if only for his presence. An exception perhaps is The Patsy, an asinine comedy directed by its self-regarding star, Jerry Lewis, in which Lorre made his final appearance 50 years ago this summer. Looking ill and bloated, he died of a heart attack four days after shooting ended in late March 1964. It was the kind of role Lorre called "latrine duty" and it may well have ended his life. He was 59.
Born László Löwenstein in Rosenberg, Hungary, in 1904, Lorre grew up in Vienna where he left school to work as a bank clerk by day and to act at night in a theatre company that combined improvisation with Freudian therapy. The manager, probably inspired by Struwwelpeter, the shockheaded hero of a popular 19th-century children's book, gave him the name Peter Lorre. This was not inappropriate, because at 5ft 3in and with unruly hair and a face that was a series of circles (infinitely expressive saucer-like eyes, a round face, a neck that would often disappear) he cut something less than a stellar figure. Graham Greene, who thought him a genius, wrote in 1936 of his performance in Mad Love: "Those marble pupils in the pasty spherical head are like the eye-pieces of a microscope through which you can watch the tangled mind laid flat on the slide."
Within three years of settling in Berlin, Lorre was considered the capital's most exciting actor, acclaimed by Bertolt Brecht as the greatest exponent of his work. An essential figure in creating the playwright's concept of epic theatre, he was capable of miming with his body the opposite of what he was expressing in words. In M (1931), one of the first German sound films, Fritz Lang entrusted him with the demanding part of a sympathetic child murderer and later described Lorre's performance as "one of the best in film history and certainly the best in his life". Muncannily anticipates the coming of the Nazis, as the police and the underworld unite to pursue the hapless killer. It not only made Lorre world-famous but also trapped him for ever within a screen persona. Whatever he brought to subsequent roles by way of humour, pathos, pain and human kindness failed to conceal an insistent membrane of threat and danger.
The Jewish Lorre fled Nazi Germany in 1933, as did the half-Jewish Lang and the communist Brecht. All three ended up in Hollywood, but Lorre was to work with neither again. In 1947, however, Brecht wrote the scenario for a modern Macbeth to star Lorre, which no studio would back. A year later, after appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee and leaving for Europe, Brecht wrote the poem To the Actor PL in Exile, urging his friend to join him in creating a new theatre in Germany:
You are being called back
To a country that has been destroyed.
And we have nothing more
To offer you than the fact that you are needed.
Life in exile was a challenge to a non-English speaker, but Lorre faced it bravely, finding immediate success typecast as professional central European assassins in two Hitchcock movies. In the first, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), he succeeded in convincing Hitch he could speak English and was deadly serious. Two years later, in Secret Agentand now speaking the language, he gave a brilliantly comic performance that somewhat showed up his stilted co-star John Gielgud. In between he worked in Hollywood, playing a deranged doctor who grafts the hands of a homicidal knife-thrower on to a disfigured pianist in the German emigre Karl Freund's horror movie Mad Love, and he was Raskolnikov in Josef von Sternberg's stolid Crime and Punishment. The former was a popular success, the latter a serious failure. Lorre's future was determined.
From that point on the story of Lorre's life was that of an industry lacking the imagination to make proper use of a great actor. It was also the tale of a formidably intelligent, good-humoured artist, cut adrift from his national moorings, acquiescing in his gifts – for tragedy, farce and everything in between – being marketed in small selective packages. Half a dozen colourful scene-stealing performances later, mostly in potboilers, Lorre reluctantly signed with 20th Century Fox to play a B-movie rival to the same studio's Charlie Chan. His Mr Moto, the Japanese super-sleuth, was invariably described as "the oriental Sherlock", and these eight efficient hour-length films made Lorre a household name in neighbourhood movie houses. He played with little makeup (just a pair of small glasses and brushed-back hair) and in a manner that mocked stereotypes. His quitting the role in 1939 coincided with the onset of the vogue for film noir, and Lorre appeared in what's now regarded as the first clearly identifiable example of the genre, Stranger on the Third Floor(1940). He virtually reprised his serial killer from M in an American setting.
Thus began the most satisfying period of his time in Hollywood. The second world war brought Americans together on the screen with aliens and exiles, and Lorre signed a contract with Warner Brothers. In The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca he became friends and screen partners with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet, and he was to work on eight movies with his physical and social opposite, the rotund, unflappable Englishman Greenstreet, and six with Bogart. In 1945 Lorre co-starred with Lauren Bacall in the film version of Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent (the only Hollywood version of his work Greene approved of) and advised Bogart to marry Bacall. "It's better to have five, 10, 15 years than nothing at all," he said.
Making his directorial debut with The Maltese Falcon, John Huston was initially disappointed after shooting the first encounter between Bogart's hard-boiled private eye Sam Spade and Lorre's cosmopolitan crook Joel Cairo. Then he saw the rushes and found that Lorre filled the screen with a nuanced, wheedling menace that was at once frightening and comic. A decade later, in 1953, Huston sought to recapture the spirit of Falcon in Beat the Devil, reuniting Bogart as an American adventurer in Italy with Lorre as a Chilean crook called Julius O'Hara and Robert Morley standing in for the late Greenstreet. Scripted by Truman Capote, it lost money but became a selfconsciously camp success.
In the 40s and 50s, Lorre had some small rewarding roles in big movies, most memorably as an alcoholic plastic surgeon opposite Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace and as a Soviet commissar keeping an eye on Cyd Charisse in Silk Stockings, the musical version of Ninotchka. And he was in demand on radio and then TV, where as Le Chiffre in the 1954 adaptation of Casino Royale he was the first villain (albeit in fuzzy monochrome on the small screen) to threaten James Bond with torture. But morphine (to which he was sporadically addicted since a botched intestinal operation in the 1920s), drink, chain-smoking, alimony and the failure of his own production company left him with serious worries.
He must also, as a friend of Brecht in the McCarthy era, have been anxious about being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. But now, as a naturalised American citizen, he saw little future in returning to Europe either to join Brecht's Berliner Ensemble in East Germany or to consort with the great Gustaf Gründgens, his co-star in M, who after a decade of close association with the Third Reich was now the dominant figure in West German theatre. In 1951, however, he did return to Germany for his one attempt at movie direction with the psychological thriller Der Verlorene ("The Lost One"). He played a guilt-ridden German scientist in a displaced persons camp, but to his great regret it was a major failure. A melancholy, visually striking movie in the expressionist manner, it's in need of re-evaluation and was certainly ahead of its time.
Lorre's career was to end with two series of movies. One strand was a succession of uninspired adaptations of Jules Verne novels scripted by an Englishman, Charles Bennett, who had written Lorre's two Hitchcock pictures. The other series, though he was not to know it, was to be remembered with affection. In the early 1950s I saw him on stage for the only time, when his career was at a low ebb, and he was touring British music halls. His act consisted of a comic monologue, sending up his own menacing persona, followed by a compelling performance of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart with eerie lighting and extravagantly contorted facial expressions. This I now see as anticipating those final low-budget black comedies based on Poe stories. Directed with great style by Roger Corman, they reunited Lorre with Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff and Vincent Price and were apparently a lot of fun to make. At the 1956 funeral of Bela Lugosi (with whom he had appeared along with Karloff in a 1940 haunted-house horror movie called You'll Find Out), Lorre turned to Vincent Price and whispered: "Do you think we should drive a stake through his heart, just in case?"
A season of Peter Lorre films runs at the BFI, London SE1 from 2 September to 7 Oct
For details see: https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=peterlorre
Monday, 1 September 2014
Jimmy Giblets: The Butcher of Old Newcastle
Andrew 'Jimmy' Gibbons, known to one and all as Jimmy Giblets, was, for many years, the toast of Victorian Newcastle. This Jarrow-born lad rose to the top of his trade as a butcher and his store dominated the Grainger Market for over two decades. His chicken pies were nominated to represent the city in the prestigious Tartes du Monde competition in Paris in 1882 and he was rewarded for his services by receiving the royal stamp of approval when he was made Pie-Maker to the Queen in 1884, after which he revelled in his local nickname, the Butcher of Newcastle.
He was a personable, not to say jovial, man and many people swore by his products. No-one thought anything of his high turn-over of staff, until the morning that young Alice Fentiman, who, it was claimed, had a crush on Mr Giblets, arrived early for work to help him prepare for the day. To her horror, she saw him slipping an eyeball into one of his famous chicken pies. She screamed for help and the rest is history.
In court, when asked to account for 13 missing members of his staff over a period of 22 years, he sought to blame his behaviour on the pressures of the job, but his sort always do, don't they?
Sentenced to death by hanging, he was being transported to Durham Jail when a wheel came off his coach and it crashed into an embankment. In the ensuing melee, Mr Gibbons made clean his escape.
No-one knows for sure what happened to him, but it was rumoured he boarded a packet steamer for Morocco where he threw in his lot with the Barbary Coast pirates.
It is not thought that he ever returned to England, though if you are inclined to believe in the supernatural, the fate of Miss Fentiman might interest you. Shortly after her unfortunate discovery, she had moved out of Newcastle to the countryside around Hexham where she met and married a young farmer, James Henderson, but it would seem she was never able to exorcise those visions of horror that she had witnessed and she took to alcohol and then to the road. On the 13th of April, 1927, A local rector, walking to church, heard screaming from a field and when he looked up he saw, as he later described it, a black convulsing mass - so black it seemed to absorb daylight - covering the corner of a field. He ran towards it, but his vision was at first obscured by trees and when he entered the field, a ragged clamour of rooks broke in alarm from their scavenging and scattered into the sky. Curious as to what had attracted their attention, the rector, at first hesitantly, edged forward until he came upon the dead body of Alice Fentiman. Despite the undoubted presence of so many birds, he was careful to observe that the only signs of mutilation were that her eyes had been pecked out...
As late as the 1960s, renowned British folklorist Richard Mercer Dorson recorded young girls singing these words in a skipping rhyme in the Scotswood area:
"One, two, three, four:
Who's that knocking at the door?
It's Giblets Jim, Giblets Jim;
If there's eyes in the pies,
It's got to be him."
Food for thought, indeed...
More news about the murderous Mr Gibbons:
https://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.com/2017/10/happy-halloween-new-photo-of-notorious.html
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