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Obituary: Jack Elinson (1922-2011)
Comedy writer Jack Elinson died on November 17 at 89. Brief obits here and here list some of his many credits. Elinson was best known as a Golden Age gag writer for radio and early television, but to...
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Obituary: Walter Doniger (1917-2011)
Walter Doniger, one of the most exciting of the early episodic television directors, died on November 24 at the age of 94. He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for a number of years. A natural...
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Ben and Zal
Few things are as obnoxious as an obit think-piece, a lazy essay that tries to force connections between two people who happened to die around the same time. But Ben Gazzara and Zalman King died on...
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Obituary: Morgan Jones (1927?-2012)
Actor Morgan Jones died on January 13 at the age of 84. Jones logged more than a hundred appearances on television and in a few films from the early fifties through the mid-eighties. Like many...
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Obituary: Jerome Ross (1911-2012)
“I remember giving up smoking at the same time I was struggling with some script,” the television writer Jerome Ross told me some years ago. “The combination was rather difficult.” But the effort...
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Obituary: C. Lindsay Workman (1924-2012)
The actor C. Lindsay Workman (often billed without the “C.”) died on April 24 at the age of 88. Aptly named, Workman was a busy bit player in the sixties and seventies, most often playing authority...
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Obituary: Edward Adler (1920-2012)
Edward Adler, a television writer who lived in and wrote about New York City for most of his career, died on June 8, in Jenkinstown, Pennsylvania, at the age of 91. Adler, who was born in Brooklyn on...
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Susu
Any cinephile worth his or her salt has been made morose this week by news of the deaths of two great cult character actors of the seventies and eighties: Richard Lynch and Susan Tyrrell. Tyrrell was...
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Obituary: Michael Lipton (1925-2012)
Michael Lipton, a prominent Broadway and daytime television actor who dabbled in film and prime-time over the course of a five-decade career, died on February 10 at the Actors’ Fund Home in Englewood,...
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Obituary: Winrich Kolbe (1940-2012)
Winrich Kolbe, director of nearly fifty segments of the 1980s-1990s Star Trek series, including the two-part final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the pilot for Star Trek: Voyager, has...
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Obituary: Gerry Day (1922-2013)
Her father played the organ to accompany the silent The Phantom of the Opera at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. She watched Howard Hughes filming miniature dogfights for Hell’s...
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Obituary: Norman Borisoff (1918-2013)
The Writers Guild of America has noted the death of television writer Norman Borisoff on April 21, just five days short of his 95th birthday. Never especially prolific, Borisoff notched an odd grab...
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Obituary: Nate Esformes (1932-2013)
Character actor Nate Esformes died on June 19, according to the August edition of the WGA bulletin Write Now. Born on June 29, 1932, Esformes came to prominence in the late sixties and seventies,...
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Obituary: Gordon Hessler (1926-2014)
Gordon Hessler, the British-born director who was best known for his horror films but who had a longer career as a producer and director of American episodic television, died on January 19 at the age...
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Obituary: Stanford Whitmore (1925-2014)
In his thirtieth year, Stanford Whitmore published a well-reviewed jazz novel called Solo, signed copies at a book party attended by Studs Terkel and Dave Brubeck, sold the rights to Twentieth...
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Obituary: Noel Black (1937-2014)
Noel Black, director of the cult movie Pretty Poison as well as a number of television episodes and movies of the week, died on July 5 in Santa Barbara, according to his son, director and unit...
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Obituary: Jerry McNeely (1928-2014)
Jerry McNeely, one of the most erudite and underappreciated of the early episodic television writers, died on July 14 at age 86. Born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on June 20, 1928, McNeely entered the...
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The Fabulous Career of Stanley Chase
Today’s New York Times has an obituary for Stanley Chase, a producer best known for mounting a key Off-Broadway production, a staging of The Threepenny Opera that ran for six years in the late...
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Obituaries: Lionel E. Siegel (1927-2013); Ron Roth (1936-2013)
During my research for this fall’s Then Came Bronson article and this tangential follow-up on the lost Chrysler Theatre episode “Barbed Wire,” I learned of the recent deaths of two of the men who made...
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Obituary: Meg Mundy (1915-2016)
Meg Mundy, an actress with extensive film and theater credits who earned her greatest fame late in her career as a soap opera villainess, died on January 12 in an assisted living facility in the...
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