The RIP Famous Person Thread

[harrybarracuda]

Two of my favourites and one of them's gone.

[SEA Traveler]

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Sgt. Walter Ehlers, WWII Medal of Honor Recipient, Dies at 92
Staff Sgt. Walter Ehlers, a Medal of Honor recipient for his heroic actions during World War II, died Thursday at the age of 92.

Ehlers, who joined the armed forces in 1940, was the last living Medal of Honor recipient who stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day.

He earned his Medal of Honor "for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty" on June 9 and 10, 1944, according to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

During battle near Goville, France, Ehlers went ahead of his men to defend his squad against the enemy. He blocked his men from gunfire and even after he was wounded in the back, carried a rifleman to safety and then returned to the battleground to retrieve his rifle. Ehlers refused to leave his squad after his wound was treated.

“The Germans didn't leave much of me untouched," Ehlers said an interview with WWII Magazine in 2012.

Ehlers also earned three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star during his service with the 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Infantry Division.

After the war, Ehlers became an advocate for military veteran benefits and proudly worked as a security guard for Disneyland when it opened in California.

He is survived by his wife, Dorothy Ehlers; three children; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Cheers to a real hero. May the force be with you.

[harrybarracuda]

SAN FRANCISCO -- Jim Lange, the first host of the popular game show "The Dating Game," has died at his home in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 81.

He died Tuesday morning after suffering a heart attack, his wife Nancy told The Associated Press Wednesday.

Though Lange had a successful career in radio, he is best known for his television role on ABC's "The Dating Game," which debuted in 1965 and on which he appeared for more than a decade, charming audiences with his mellifluous voice and wide, easygoing grin.

He also played host to many celebrity guests. Michael Jackson, Steve Martin and Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others, appeared as contestants.

Even a pre-"Charlie's Angels" Farrah Fawcett appeared on the program, introduced as "an accomplished artist and sculptress" with a dream to open her own gallery.

The show's format: a young man or woman questions three members of the opposite sex, hidden from view, to determine which one would be the best date.

The questions were designed by the show's writers to elicit sexy answers.

"I've never been out on a date before. What do two kids like us do on a date?" a teenage Michael Jackson asked one of his potential dates on a 1972 episode of the show.

"Well, we'd have fun," the girl answered. "We'd go out to dinner, and then I'd go over to your house."

Lange was born on Aug. 15, 1932, in St. Paul, Minn., where at 15 he discovered a passion for local radio after winning an audition at a local station.

"They wanted a boy and a girl," he said in a 1992 interview with the Bay Area Radio Digest. "They wanted the boy to do sports and the girl to do the dances and stuff that was going on in the Twin Cities -- very sexist -- and play music once a week."

He hosted that show for two years before attending the University of Minnesota and doing a three-year stint in the Marines, according to the Bay Area Radio Museum.

His big break on network TV came in 1962 when he was made an announcer and sidekick on "The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show."

Later, after "The Dating Game" brought him national recognition, he also hosted the game shows "Hollywood Connection," ''$100,000 Name That Tune" and "The New Newlywed Game."

Lang also worked as a disc jockey for decades in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, and upon his retirement from broadcasting in 2005, he was the morning DJ for KABL-FM, which specializes in playing classics from the Big Band era to the 1970s.

"As much as he's known for his television work, his real love was radio," his wife said. "He loved doing local radio, especially before it was computerized."

Lange himself once told the Bay Area Radio Digest that he loved the medium because "you don't have to worry about lighting directors and cameramen or script writers and all that."

"Good radio is still the most fun," he said, "It always will be. Plus, you don't have to wear makeup and you don't have to shave."

Lange is survived by a sister, five children, two stepchildren and four grandchildren.

[harrybarracuda]

Actress-dancer Gail Gerber, a vivacious blonde with a shapely figure and a flair for comedy remembered most for her appearances in a few beach and Elvis films during the mid-’60s, died from complications of lung cancer in Sharon, Conn., on March 2. She was 76.

A Canadian, Gerber moved to Hollywood after in 1963 and quickly snagged the lead role in the play “Under the Yum Yum Tree.” She also appeared on TV series including “My Three Sons,” “Perry Mason” and “Wagon Train.” She made her film debut in “The Girls on the Beach” (1965), co-starring the Beach Boys, before her agent suggested she change her name and, as Gail Gilmore, she went on to appear opposite Elvis Presley in “Girl Happy” (1965) and “Harum Scarum” (1965). She then returned to the sands of Malibu to co-star with Edd “Kookie” Byrnes in “Beach Ball” (1965) before growing to gigantic proportions along with five other delinquent teenagers, including Beau Bridges and Tisha Sterling, who terrorize a town in “Village of the Giants” (1965).

Gerber had a minor role as a cosmetician in Tony Richardson’s black comedy “The Loved One,” and she met its screenwriter Terry Southern, who was riding high due to the success of his satirical novels “Candy” and “The Magic Christian” and the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” which he co-wrote. The two hit it off immediately and, despite their marriages to others, became inseparable. Gail even abandoned her acting career in 1966 to live with him in New York, then Connecticut, where she remained his longtime companion until his death in 1995. During that time she taught ballet for more than 25 years.

Gerber was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and began studying ballet at age 7; at 15 she became the youngest member of Les Grandes Ballets Canadiennes in Montreal. Quitting the ballet troupe in the late 1950s and abandoning a husband who was a jazz musician, she moved to Toronto to work as an actress. She appeared on stage and in many live CBC television dramas. As part of the act of vaudeville entertainers Smith and Dale (who were the basis for the Sunshine Boys), she appeared on “The Wayne and Schuster Show” and “The Ed Sullivan Show” before heading for Hollywood.

[Mr Lick]

Sean Potts - obituary

Sean Potts was the tin whistle player with The Chieftains, the band which put traditional Irish music on the map




Sean Potts, who has died aged 83, was best known for playing the tin whistle with The Chieftains, the traditional Irish band he helped found.

Sean Desmond Potts was born in the Dublin suburb of Drimnagh in 1930, into a musical family. His uncle John Potts was an uilleann piper from Wexford; other uncles included the multi-instrumentalists Tommy and Eddie Potts, and his aunt Teresa played the accordion.


His most significant musical grounding, however, came when he was recruited into Sean O’Riada’s group Ceoltoiri Chualann, which played Western classical music strongly influenced by Irish folk styles, and which played a key role in triggering the revival of Irish traditional music in the 1960s and 1970s.


With one of his great friends in the group, the uilleann piper Paddy Moloney, Potts often played at impromptu sessions and gigs, looking to hone his skills while earning some cash. In November 1962, having left Ceoltoiri Chualann, the pair teamed up with a group of other musicians to form The Chieftains, which over the next 30 years became Ireland’s best-known traditional group .


Moloney has something of a genius for marketing. In the 1990s this saw The Chieftains embark on an ambitious and eclectic range of collaborations with the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Ry Cooder and The Rolling Stones, among many others, helping to bring the total number of Grammys the band received to six




The Chieftains. Back row: Paddy Moloney, Peadar Mercier, Martin Fay, Derek Bell. Middle: Michael Tubridy, Front row: Sean Potts, Sean Keane

In the early days, however, the band’s success was achieved through relentless touring. They were an extremely popular live draw, but the rootless life did not suit Potts, as Moloney recalled recently while paying tribute to his band mate: “He and I were kind of the mainstay [of the Chieftains]. It got a bit much for him – he was on the road at that stage for three to four years, and the lifestyle on the road just was not what he wanted.”

After a particularly hair-raising episode flying through a storm while on tour in America in 1979, Potts left the Chieftains for good, opting for a quiet life with his wife Bernadette, an Irish traditional singer whom he had married in 1960.

He then founded the group Bakerswell (along with Peadar Mercier of The Chieftains) which, with some irony, he proceeded to take on tour to America, raising funds for Na Piobairi Uilleann (NPU) – a non-profit organisation dedicated to the promotion of the uilleann pipes and of which Potts was chairman and honorary president.

After retiring from professional music, Potts occasionally played at festivals in Ireland, and sometimes abroad. During this time he also worked for the broadcaster RTE. In 1989, the Irish government awarded The Chieftains the honorary title of Musical Ambassadors, in recognition of their success over three decades in taking traditional Irish music to a worldwide audience.

In 2000 Potts and Moloney released a joint album, Tin Whistles; the following year Potts released the solo album Number 6 (Ciernini Cladagh).

Sean Potts is survived by his wife and four children

[Mr Lick]

Bill Stevenson - obituary

Bill Stevenson was an author whose imaginative inside track on the world of espionage helped him write a bestseller in a week





Bill Stevenson, who has died aged 89, was a British-born Canadian journalist and author who used his espionage connections to write two bestselling books, A Man Called Intrepid and 90 Minutes at Entebbe.

The first of these, published in 1976, told the story of Sir William Stephenson (the similar names were coincidental), the Canadian-born intelligence operative who, under the codename Intrepid, acted as the head of British intelligence operations in the United States during the war.


Stevenson had first met the spymaster while training as a pilot in Canada, and in the post-war years he worked as a voluntary agent for Intrepid’s front company, the World Commerce Corporation. At the same time as he pursued a career at the Toronto Star, Stevenson assisted in the transfer of highly-sensitive intelligence documents from the British Security Coordination (BSC) headquarters in New York, while Sir William in turn suggested possible destinations of journalistic interest.


Stevenson’s unusual relationship with his near-namesake ensured that A Man Called Intrepid was criticised for the extravagant claims made on behalf of its subject, notably that Stephenson had played a central role in almost every successful intelligence operation of the war.


The espionage author Nigel West wrote that it was “almost entire fictional in content”, alleging that even the codename of Intrepid was given, not to Stephenson himself, but to the BSC’s New York operation; while Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had himself served in the Radio Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service during the war, wrote a particularly excoriating review in the New York Review of Books, suggesting that to hold Stevenson to account for his inaccuracies would be “like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels”.

For the general readership, however, Stevenson had tapped into a prevailing fascination with secrecy and intrigue, fuelled by that year’s Church Committee hearings into CIA activities worldwide. Translated into 13 languages, A Man Called Intrepid spent a year on the New York Times bestseller list and spawned a television miniseries starring David Niven.




Soon afterwards came 90 Minutes at Entebbe, an early example of the “instant book”. At 216 pages long, it recounted the spectacular rescue by Israeli forces of 100 hostages from Uganda’s Entebbe airport on July 4 1976, and was published by Bantam on July 26, receiving serialisations in The New York Times and other papers around the world. Stevenson had dashed off the manuscript in just over a week from a New York hotel room .

The son of a Scottish merchant marine sailor, William Henri Stevenson was born in London on June 1 1924. On the outbreak of war the family moved near to Bletchley Park, where his father was employed; meanwhile, Bill’s French mother trained Oxford students in the appropriate dialects for service in the French Resistance.

He left school at 16 and wrote his first book, Sarka the Seagull, before enlisting in the Royal Navy as a pilot and qualifying from the Service Flying Training School at Kingston, Ontario . Beginning as a Fleet Air Arm carrier pilot, from 1943 he moved into aerial reconnaissance, flying Sea Spitfires, Corsairs and Hellcats equipped with spy cameras over Japanese-occupied territory.

Questioned about the distinction between his dual role as agent and investigative reporter, Stevenson was very clear: “There is none. 'Spyglass’ is the word I’d prefer to use. All through the centuries, reporters of one kind or another have put the spyglass to events.”

The naval intelligence officer – and later James Bond author – Ian Fleming then urged him to “go somewhere exotic”. But Stevenson instead returned to Canada where, by 1950, he had risen to the foreign desk of the Toronto Star.

During the Indonesia-Malaysia confrontation of the early 1960s Stevenson worked for the Near & Far East News Agency (NAFEN), a front organisation belonging to the Foreign Office’s Intelligence & Research Department (IRD); and in 1965 he joined other observers of the Indo-Pakistani war. Further assignments took him to Korea, Maoist China, Taiwan, French Indochina and North and South Vietnam.

In addition to the two bestsellers, his other books included Intrepid’s Last Case (1983), a follow-up to his 1976 work, and Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (2006). The Bushbabies (1965), a children’s adventure story inspired by his experiences in Kenya, was adapted for film by MGM. He also wrote and produced several documentaries for CBC Television.

Stevenson’s autobiography, Past to Present: A Reporter’s Story of War, Spies, People, and Politics, was published in 2012. Narrated in the present tense, its style is characteristically anecdotal, a typical sentence beginning: “I rediscover Rena, the Polish news agency girl I first met in Mexico when I cornered Trotsky’s assassin.”

Other supporting characters include Vera Lynn, who was the daughter of a neighbouring plumber from Stevenson’s boyhood London street; the 14th Dalai Lama; and King Bhumibol of Thailand, subject of Stevenson’s 2001 biography The Revolutionary King.

Bill Stevenson is survived by his second wife, Monika, and by four children. A son predeceased him

[Mr Lick]

Henry Rollin - obituary

Henry Rollin was a psychiatrist who brought music to Britain’s mental asylums and insisted that the community 'did not care’





Henry Rollin, who has died aged 102, was an enlightened psychiatrist and champion of Britain’s asylums, which he helped transform from custodial institutions to therapeutic hospitals; during the war he served in the RAF and was required to distinguish between airmen suffering from mental illness and those suspected of cowardice.

At Horton Hospital in Surrey, where he was deputy superintendent from 1948, Rollin set out new therapies for his patients to replace the enforced idleness prevalent in turn-of-the-century care. Wards were redesigned on an open plan and railings removed. Intensely fond of music and theatre himself, Rollin instituted dance classes, inviting musicians and actors from outside to participate. He set up the hospital’s first outpatient clinic, and organised an active schedule of trips and sporting events for those who would otherwise have been confined. Under his leadership, Horton became the leading hospital in the country for music therapy.


Rollin was also a staunch critic of “care in the community”, as set out by Enoch Powell in 1961, frequently pointing out that the community “did not care”. While the then health minister painted a vividly gloomy picture of the era’s mental institutions, understaffed and run according to outdated ideals, Rollin saw a system in need of improvement and expansion, not widespread closure; the alternative facilities struck him as largely unworkable. By the end of the 1960s many of the beds at Horton had been lost, and Rollin left the NHS for a consultant forensic psychiatrist position with the Home Office in 1976.


Not that Rollin regarded the prevailing wisdom of the psychiatric community and its institutions as unassailable. He felt deep regret over many procedures that were accepted practice during his years at Horton, such as the prefrontal leucotomy – the severing of connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain, which often caused a chronic lack of inhibition in patients. The first psychoactive drugs, such as chlorpromazine, had alarming side effects; and he regarded the emerging fashion for Freudian psychoanalysis with suspicion, identifying in some of its proponents a “religious reverence” at odds with his own highly theoretical and practical frame of mind.


Above all, however, he had no patience for the authorities who devoted scant attention and slender resources to the provision of mental health services, while attempts at reorganisation proved fraught. “Doctors and their patients, may I remind them, are not packets of soap-flakes that can be moved from one shelf to the next shelf or from one shop to the next shop with impunity,” he wrote, to the British Medical Journal . “Do I sound disenchanted, disillusioned, or even a trifle paranoid? I am. I bloody well am.”


Henry Rapoport Rollin was born in Glasgow on November 17 1911. His father, a cabinet-maker from Lithuania and trade union leader who spoke four languages, instilled in Henry a lifelong enthusiasm for books and reading. The boy spent his formative years in Leeds and, at the encouragement of his family, studied Medicine at Leeds University, qualifying for clinical work in 1935. It was not a happy experience, and things did not improve with his first position, as a house surgeon for Oldham Royal Infirmary . To escape he enlisted as a ship’s doctor, and in June 1938 sailed to Japan and back on board the MV Memnon.

Still lacking direction after his return, he applied to become an assistant medical officer to the LCC mental health service, where he discovered psychiatry. He wrote his MD thesis on Down’s syndrome, studied psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital and published his first paper in the Journal of Mental Science (precursor to the British Journal of Psychiatry) in 1941.

After acquiring his diploma in Psychological Medicine he joined the RAF as a squadron leader, later rising to wing commander. Before long he was recruited to the team headed by Air Commodore RD Gillespie, one of country’s most eminent neuropsychiatrists, and posted to a WAAF depot with the task of eliminating recruits likely to break down under the stress of training. Later he was transferred to RAF medical headquarters in London, where he had the “agonising” job of distinguishing between genuine mental illness and “lack of moral fibre” among the patients.



Upon his discharge from the RAF he was posted briefly to Cane Hill Hospital, Surrey, where he completed his MD, before taking up the deputy superintendent post at Horton. A 1953 Fulbright fellowship to study psychoanalysis in the United States provided him with invaluable insight into the patient-led model of care, but confirmed his scepticism of the psychoanalyst’s prominence in treatment at the time.

Following his retirement from the NHS, Rollin was swiftly approached by the Home Office to work as a consultant forensic psychiatrist, a position he held for the next 10 years. He also served on numerous mental health tribunals, becoming only the second member of the Parole Board to hold a psychiatric qualification after its establishment by Roy Jenkins under the 1967 Criminal Justice Act.

In the same period he was the sessional psychiatrist at Brixton prison, where he became an authority on mentally abnormal offenders, once fending off attack from a former boxing champion whom he had been trying to assess. Though a skilled boxer himself in his youth, Rollin was able to defuse the situation without recourse to violence. His interest in the field resulted in a Gwilym Gibbon research fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford, with Professor Nigel Walker.

Rollin was elected a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1976 and a Fellow in 1983.

The author of three books and some 50 editorials in the British Medical Journal, he was also obituaries editor for the British Journal of Psychiatry until the year of his death. Throughout the 1970s he was a regular contributor to the now-defunct World Medicine, then one of the mostly widely read publications of its kind.

Rollin was a leading figure in the fundraising necessary to elevate the Royal Medico-Psychological Association to Royal College status and in the purchase of the college’s first home at 17 Belgrave Square. He built up the library there while serving on many committees and as Librarian for 10 years. Another of his roles was to lead study tours to Denmark, France, Italy and Mexico. A foundation Fellow, on his retirement he was elected to Honorary Fellowship, the College’s highest honour.

Shortly before his departure from the NHS, Rollin had, by his own account, “a late flowering” when he met Anna-Maria Tihanyi, a medical student who became a prominent consultant anaesthetist. They married in 1973 and had three children.

He continued to enjoy opera and theatre in London, followed by a salt beef sandwich, into his final year

[Mr Lick]

Major St Clair Tisdall - obituary

Major St Clair Tisdall was an officer awarded an Immediate MC after charging an enemy gun position



Wilfrid St Clair Tisdall



Major St Clair Tisdall, who has died aged 92, was awarded an MC in Holland in 1944, when he was commanding a troop of the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars (8 KRIH).


At two o’clock on the morning of October 22, the battle for s’Hertogenbosch began with a tremendous softening-up barrage. At first light, Tisdall’s squadron advanced up the sandy tracks to the south-east of the town in support of an infantry attack on the village of Middlerode. They came under heavy fire from an enemy position; two attempts were made to capture it but without success.


It was then decided that two troops of tanks should attack at the same time from different directions. Some of the tanks were knocked out by mines. Others were held up by a dyke. One of the troop leaders was wounded by a sniper.


In what was fast becoming a critical situation, Tisdall drove his troop forward at full speed. Despite being engaged by an anti-tank gun, he pressed on and overran the enemy position. Heavy fire was brought down on him, but he remained firing his guns until the infantry arrived to mop up.


He was awarded an Immediate MC. The citation for the award paid tribute to his courage and offensive spirit.

Wilfrid St Clair Tisdall, who came to hate his first name and always went by St Clair, was born on April 2 1921 at Altrincham, Cheshire. The son of a rural dean, he was educated at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, where he was head boy and captain of the rugby XV.




He went up to Wadham College, Oxford, to read Modern Languages and earned pocket money fire-watching at night on the roofs of prominent buildings. In 1942 he was commissioned into 8 KRIH and embarked in a troopship bound for Egypt. His bunk was in one of the empty swimming pools.

In Cairo he contracted diphtheria. After recovering, he rejoined the remnants of his regiment in the Libyan Desert. Two-thirds of the tank squadrons had been lost in action with the Axis forces.

While in command of a troop in the battle of Alam Halfa, he was dive-bombed by German Stukas when the screaming sirens did permanent damage to his hearing. At the Battle of El Alamein, he was ADC to Major-General (later Field Marshal Lord) Harding, GOC 7th Armoured Division. After the Eighth Army broke through, he navigated Harding across the desert using a sun compass.

When their armoured car was strafed near Benghazi and turned over, Tisdall suffered injuries to a leg and was treated in Cairo.

Back in England, 8 KRIH was re-equipped with Cromwell tanks and landed in Normandy shortly after D-Day. His tank was engaged by a well camouflaged, self-propelled anti-tank gun and set ablaze. Tisdall’s driver was killed, but he and the rest of his crew managed to get clear.

Promoted to captain on becoming regimental intelligence officer, one morning in April 1945 he was travelling by scout car to collect some important maps when the vehicle skidded into a tree. He was evacuated to England with a suspected fractured knee.

Tisdall saw active service in Korea between December 1950 and early 1952. After a spell instructing at the Driving and Maintenance School, Bovington, Dorset, he went to Staff College.

The following year he rejoined his regiment at Lüneburg, Germany, in command of a squadron and then moved to Bielefeld as Military Secretary to the Commander of the British Corps in BAOR.

In 1960 he was posted to HQ Land Forces Persian Gulf at Bahrain as a staff officer and military attaché. After 18 months at the Ministry of Defence, in 1965 he retired from the Army and became a preparatory schoolmaster teaching Latin and rifle shooting at Packwood Haugh School, near Shrewsbury.

St Clair Tisdall married, in 1947, Prue Dixon. She predeceased him and he is survived by their two daughters

[Mr Lick]

Alain Resnais - obituary

Alain Resnais was a French New Wave director celebrated for tackling in film Proustian themes of time and memory





Alain Resnais, the film director, who has died aged 91, was one of the most important, original, controversial and fashionable of the post-war generation of French film-makers known collectively as the New Wave.

Elliptical, elusive, literary and occasionally unintelligible, his films defied conventional forms of cinema storytelling in favour of complicated editing that sometimes took little account of plot or characterisation but created instead a compelling air of mystery and depth.


His two most famous works, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), made him the most intellectually difficult film director of his time. Above all he was an “auteur”, a director who stamped his personal style on every film he made, even though he might, as Resnais did with distinction, engage eminent authors, like Marguerite Duras or Alain Robbe-Grillet, to write his screenplays



Time and memory, illusion and reality, were Resnais’s favourite themes, and his stock characters were a sort of displaced person. Later in his career he found a rich vein of material to explore in the plays of Alan Ayckbourn

But while he was accused of obscurity and pretentiousness, and of academic coldness in expressing emotion, his films extended, if only for a while, the frontiers of 20th-century cinema. The editing of image and sound, sometimes overlapping, sometimes clashing, often merging, always amazing, challenged the imagination and stirred the critical faculties




And no fact of Alain Resnais’s life seemed to strike a stranger note than his assertion that the films which first inspired his ambition to become a film director were those in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced. Or was it Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler? He could never be sure. “I wondered if I could find the equivalent of that exhilaration,” he recalled.

If he never did it was perhaps because of his highly cultivated attitude to serious cinema. His character and temperament were more attuned to the theory of film and a kind of intellectual square dance which was far harder to bring to the screen with “exhilaration” than the art of Astaire and Rogers.

Alan Resnais was born at Vannes, Brittany, on June 3 1922, where his father was a pharmacist. A sickly child, he had a severe Jesuit education and was a voracious reader, consuming everything he could get his hands on from serious literature to thrillers and comics. As a schoolboy he made 8mm and 16mm amateur films

His fascination with Thirties Hollywood dance films determined the nature of his career. “They had a kind of sensuality of movement which really took hold of me,” he reflected. “I decided then and there that I was going to try to make films which would have the same effect on people.”

He moved to Paris and flirted with an acting career before studying film editing and directing at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques; after a year he left, to his later regret, without completing the course. In place of such formal training he drew instead on his appreciation of comic books. “What I know about cinema is learned as much from comics as from films,” he admitted. “The rules of how to cut, how to frame, are the same.”

During a year’s military service in 1945 he served entertaining Allied troops in Germany and Austria and after the Second World War made 16mm shorts and medium lengths films, beginning his career in professional film as an editor and cameraman.

Although two of his short early films were fiction – one featuring his neighbour, the actor Gérard Philipe – mostly they were documentary studies of modern painters, which he made in order to meet the artists concerned and to learn about their work

His distinct visual style emerged more fully in Toute la Mémoire du Monde (1957), which dealt with France’s national library and its miles of corridors and bookshelves.

Long, tracking shots conveyed Proustian preoccupations with remembrance of things past and contributed to an elevated, if oblique, view of the archives.

Two other documentaries, Le Mystère de l’Atelier Quinze (1957), which was about industrial illness, and Le Chant du Styrène (1958), about the production of polystyrene (with a witty commentary by the fashionable avant-garde writer Raymond Queneau) completed a series of finely imaginative and inventive short films which some of his critics still consider to be among his most accomplished pieces. Already his reputation was such that fellow New Wave icon Jean-Luc Godard was moved to describe Resnais as the “second greatest director in the world after [Sergei] Eisenstein”.

With his first full-length feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Resnais created something of a sensation. Collaborating again with a distinguished avant-garde writer (this time Marguerite Duras), he applied his elaborate editing technique to a stylised evocation of an affair in Hiroshima between a French film star and her Japanese lover, while also portraying her remembered love for a German soldier whom she had met in France earlier in the Second World War

“I wanted to compose a sort of poem in which the images would work only as a counterpoint to the text,” Resnais noted. His treatment of this story of sudden physical passion was neither sensuous nor sensual but highly intelligent, like all his work; criticism was principally about its emotional coldness, and if Resnais cared more for places and landscapes rather than people and character.

In his second and most resolutely surrealist feature film, L’Année Dernière A Marienbad (1961), scripted by the nouveau romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet, Resnais seemed to wallow in ambiguities. Mystery surrounded the film’s three principal characters, and after its release Resnais and Robbe-Grillet only added to the confusion by suggesting conflicting explanations for the plot.

Are the couple who meet so mysteriously in the elegant setting of a grand European spa-hotel former lovers or prospective lovers? Their dialogue and relationship remains as puzzling as their situation, which can be taken as a profoundly arresting exploration of time and memory, reality and imagination, or dismissed as beautifully photographed bunk.

Perhaps most significantly for Resnais, however, it got everybody talking about the art of the cinema and what the director would do with it next.

Muriel (1963) divided opinions sharply between those who admiringly and unquestioningly sat back and let the narrative, however foggy, float by, and those who found themselves running out of patience with the on-screen swirl of undefined relationships. Events were, it was true, somewhat less baffling than before. Based on a story by Jean Cayrol, they concerned a widow in Boulogne (Delphine Seyrig), who invites a former lover to dinner with her and her stepson; he accepts, arriving with his so-called niece. Again the editing – with its flashbacks and juxtapositions – filled the screen with implications and rumination

For some these uncertainties hinted at fracture and fragility in France’s national identity as the colonial war in Algeria reached a decisive moment; for many spectators, however, it again proved a tale of passion that was strangely and disappointingly passionless, and in which the presence of Delphine Seyrig proved the main consolation.

La Guerre Est Finie (The War Is Over, 1966) was Resnais’s most romantic film and featured Yves Montand reliving in his mind the Spanish Civil War. With a script by the political writer Jorge Semprun, a Spaniard, and with Ingrid Thulin as Montand’s mistress, it enjoyed modest success. Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime (1968), by contrast, was an all-out flop. Working with the Belgian writer, Jacques Sternberg, Resnais approached his favourite theme through science fiction, postulating a hero injected with a serum to see if he can relive a moment of his life. To audiences the result appeared more or less random, and no one knew whom to blame for the failure – the scriptwriter, the actors or Resnais himself

Half a decade would pass before Resnais’s work again made it to the screen.

Thankfully Stavinsky (1974), the story of a swindler who brings down the French government in the Thirties, was a hit. Paying homage to the era of Art Deco and to the style of film-making before the Second World War, Resnais evoked a vanished epoch without much fog or too much fanciful editing. A cast including Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles Boyer pointed up the theme of gambling as a way of exorcising fear of death, but also underlined the film’s commercial flavour.

This trend continued in Providence (1977), with which Resnais enjoyed a popular success. This he owed to two factors: first, the film was in English; and, secondly, it had a starry cast led by John Gielgud.

The celebrated actor played an ageing novelist sitting for most of the film on a garden lavatory, seeking a subject for his next book . The novelist’s family appear to him in various guises, and Resnais’s preoccupations report for duty once again: identity, time, place and whether what we are watching is real or imaginary. By this stage in his career few people were still trying to make literal sense of a Resnais film; it was a relief not to have to try.

Popular success continued with Mon Oncle d’Amerique (My American Uncle, 1980), a typically fragmented study of three French youths from different backgrounds observed by a professor of social behaviour. It won the Special Prize at Cannes, and earned considerable respect with audiences

Despite his recurring themes, however, Resnais’s work did evolve. From the early Eighties, often working repeatedly with the same actors, he incorporated musical and theatrical tropes into his work. La Vie Est Un Roman (Life is a bed of Roses, 1983) alternated song and dialogue to tell three stories set in different eras; L’Amour a Mort (Love unto Death, 1984), was a four-hander in which Resnais conceived of music as a “fifth character”. Meanwhile Gershwin (1992), a documentary; On Connait La Chanson (Same Old Song, 1997), which was openly indebted to the work of Dennis Potter; and the filmed operetta Pas sur la Bouche (Not on the Lips, 2003), all signalled his interest in popular song and theatrical form

On Connaît la Chanson | Same Old Song (1997) - Alain Resnais - Trailer - YouTube

The latter concern he had already made explicit in two films: Mélo (1986) an adaptation of a play from the Twenties, and Smoking/No Smoking (1993), from Alan Ayckbourn’s play Intimate Exchanges. Smoking/No Smoking saw all the female characters in the three distinct stories played by Sabine Azema, while another Resnais regular, Pierre Arditi, took on all male roles, as Resnais guided audiences through possible consequences of apparently trifling decisions.

Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places, 2006) was another Ayckbourn adaptation, as was his last project Aimer, Boire et Chanter (The Life of Riley, 2013) which was well received at the Berlin film festival last month. Though unlikely to convert many Resnais detractors, the film proved that the director had become an extremely graceful and skilful orchestrator of themes, that were, by their nature, convoluted and hard to portray.

Alain Resnais married, first, in 1969, Florence Malraux, daughter of the novelist Andre Malreaux. He married, secondly, in 1998, Sabine Azema.


Alain Resnais, born June 3 1922, died March 1 2014

[Mr Lick]

William Duff - obituary

William Duff was the right-hand man to Sheikh Rashid who helped transform Dubai from desert outpost to global megacity




William Duff, who has died aged 91, played a central role in the development of Dubai as right-hand man to the emirate’s long-time ruler, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed al-Maktoum.


When Bill Duff became financial adviser to Sheikh Rashid in 1960, Dubai — an ancient trading post on a creek of the Persian Gulf, once best known for its pearl diving — was part of the British protectorate of the Trucial States, which endured until the formation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971. Duff’s early tasks included establishing a customs department and overseeing the electrification and street-lighting of the town.


After offshore oil was discovered in 1966, the Sheikh conceived a vision of a modern city-state and entrepot whose prosperity would outlast the flow of oil revenues: without far-sighted investment, he feared, the desert would one day reclaim its territory and his descendants would ride camels as his forebears had done.




Dubai in the 1960s (POPPERFOTO)


It was Duff who helped manage the massive spending on transport infrastructure and public amenities that followed — and who played a key part in the planning and realisation of the Jebel Ali free trade zone that would eventually become one of the world’s busiest commercial ports, a Middle Eastern base for many international companies, and a haven for the US Navy in Gulf waters.


Straightforward, principled and transparent in his dealings, the self-effacing Duff never made a fortune for himself. But he was a shrewd steward of Dubai’s wealth — not least in keeping it out of the hands of the fraud-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which had strong connections in neighbouring Abu Dhabi. He was also a wise source of advice for British investors in the Gulf.

After Sheikh Rashid’s death in 1990, Duff remained an honorary adviser to the ruling family and a revered resident of a vastly expanded metropolis — in which the foundations he built with his mentor were overlaid by new, less stable developments based on offshore finance and luxury real estate.

William Robert Duff was born on May 13 1922 in Singapore, the son of Robert Duff, an Aberdonian who had set up in business there. Bill was sent home to be educated at Cheltenham College, and went up to Hertford College, Oxford, to read Classics before being called for war service.

His father, by then working for an engineering firm in Malaya, was interned by the Japanese in Singapore’s notorious Changi jail until 1945. Meanwhile Bill Duff was commissioned in 1st Battalion Princess Louise’s (Kensington) Regiment. He served in the Italian campaign, and later in Sudan and Palestine, where his fascination with the Arab world took root. He returned to Oxford to study Arabic, and perfected his fine command of the language at the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies at Shemlan in the Lebanon before joining what was then the Bank of Iran and the Middle East — originally the Imperial Bank of Persia and later, as British Bank of the Middle East, a subsidiary of HSBC.



Present-day Dubai (ALAMY)

He served the bank in several countries in the region before finding a new role, with British government encouragement, as financial adviser to the Kuwait royal family and then to Sheikh Rashid, who was 10 years his senior.

The strength of the friendship between the two men contributed to the evolution of Dubai as a relatively tolerant meeting place of Islamic and Western cultures — and Duff often acted as native guide for the Sheikh and his family on holidays in Scotland, based at the Gleneagles hotel. He also persuaded the Sheikh to endow a new library at Exeter University, later part of its Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies.

William Duff founded Dubai’s first English-curriculum school, which for many years was run by his wife, the Polish-born Irenka Trachimovic, whom he first met in Palestine in 1945; she survives him with their two daughters. He is buried in Dubai’s Christian cemetery

[Mr Lick]

Tabu Ley Rochereau - obituary

Tabu Ley Rochereau was co-creator of the Congo Rumba, recorded more than 100 albums and was known as 'the African Elvis’




Tabu Ley Rochereau , who has died aged 73, was a Congolese singer, band leader and sometime politician, and became a respected figure throughout Africa as one of the creators of the great pan-African dance sound the Congo Rumba, which dominated the continent’s airwaves for decades.


Known as “Rochereau” or even “Le Seigneur Rochereau”, he was short in stature, but with an imposing, even regal presence, recording more than 100 albums and fathering innumerable children – 68 is believed to be a conservative estimate. He gained his nickname at school when he was the only boy in his class able to name the general who led the French forces at Belfort during the Franco-Prussian War: Philippe Denfert-Rochereau. He was ribbed by classmates, and the name stuck .


Always elegantly turned out and expressing himself in immaculately enunciated French, Rochereau exuded a sense of cosmopolitan urbanity, while having about him, like every figure of substance in the African music industry, something of the Godfather.


While he has been described as “the African Elvis”, he and his arch-rival Francois Luambo Makiadi (aka Franco) can more accurately be compared to Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Rendering traditional Congolese rhythms and melodies on electric guitars, with Latin-American touches, gospel-infused harmonies and blaring horns, they created an aspirational, big-band sound that struck a chord with audiences across Africa, regardless of language or ethnicity.


Many great singers and musicians passed through Rochereau’s bands, including Papa Wemba, Sam Mangwana and the superstar-chanteuse Mbilia Bel. Yet his magisterial poise began to desert him long before the end. As his distinctive yearning tenor voice began to fade and his popularity waned under competition from a younger generation of musicians, he pinned his hopes on Bel, making the slinky diva the star of his all-singing, all-dancing shows. He also made the mistake of falling in love with her. After finding her with his guitarist Rigo Star (no connection to Ringo Starr) in flagrante at the Hotel George V in Paris, he chased her down the street brandishing a revolver.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=cdc1TIQcLoQ




Pascal-Emmanuel Sinamoyi Tabu was born on November 13 1940 in a small village near Bandundu in the then Belgian Congo, 200 miles north-east of the capital Leopoldville, now Kinshasa. He began singing in church and in school choirs, and there was a discernibly spiritual note to the keening delivery that was to earn him the soubriquet la voix des lumieres . It led him, at 14, to a place in a singing competition in front of 80,000 spectators in a Leopoldville stadium, after which he began sending self-penned compositions to the country’s top bandleader, Joseph Kabasele, aka le Grand Kalle.

On leaving school he joined Kabasele’s band African Jazz as singer, uncredited songwriter and occasional chauffeur – on one occasion driving the country’s future president Patrice Lumumba around Leopoldville in his boss’s Cadillac. Rochereau sang on the delightful Independence Cha-cha-cha, an anthem for the country’s release from colonial rule, a moment of exhilaration followed by a descent into chaos during which Lumumba was murdered.

In 1963 Rochereau and Kabasele’s guitarist “Docteur” Nico Kasanda, whose fluid, open-toned style defined the Congo Rumba sound, left to form their own band, African Fiesta. It split after two years into Rochereau’s African Fiesta National and Kasanda’s African Fiesta Sikisa. From then on Rochereau’s career was a matter of holding his large band together as his most talented musicians left to form their own bands – generally at the most inopportune moments – while he poached his rivals’ top players and introduced continual innovations to keep his audience hooked.

Impressed by Western pop he brought kit-drums into Congolese music, employed a troupe of pelvic-thrusting female dancers called the Rocherettes, and appeared at the epoch-defining FESTAC festival in Lagos in 1977 in an afro and bell-bottoms clearly influenced by James Brown.

With the drive for “authenticity” initiated by the Congo’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in the late Sixties – during which the country’s name was changed to Zaire – Rochereau Africanised his name to Tabu Ley, singing songs in praise of Mobutu. But his album Trop, c’est trop (“Too Much”) was banned as subversive, and in 1988 he decamped with his band to France, not returning permanently to the Congo until Mobutu’s downfall in 1997.

He became active in politics under the new president, Laurent Kabila, though while he hoped to become Minster of Culture, he had to settle for the post of Vice-Governor of Kinshasa. Rochereau suffered a debilitating stroke in 2008, and died in hospital in Brussels from complications arising from diabetes.

He had six children by his first wife Tete, and six more with the former-Miss Zaire, Jeanne Mokomo. His dozens of other children include the French rapper Youssoupha

[Mr Lick]

Peter Hearne - obituary

Peter Hearne was a pioneer of new electronic systems in both fighters and commercial aircraft




Peter Hearne, who has died aged 86, spent a lifetime involved in aviation, holding a number of senior posts in the British aircraft industry.


After spending his early working life as an aerodynamicist and project manager with British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and British European Airways (BEA), Hearne joined Elliott Brothers in 1959 to head one of the groups involved in the development of electronic systems for advanced aircraft.


When the company became part of GEC Marconi he was responsible for a number of ground-breaking technologies, including the introduction of the first “head-up displays” . These were installed in advanced fighters such as the Harrier and Tornado, and in the US F-16 “Fighting Falcon” and the F-22 stealth fighter.


Hearne also supervised the development of many new commercial aircraft systems, including the “fly-by wire” flight control system of the Boeing 777. These technical and marketing successes led to GEC’s penetration of the American aviation market. He was appointed president of US Operations and moved to Washington, where he was the principal GEC liaison with US Government departments and the British Embassy.


On return to Britain in 1986 he was appointed assistant managing director of GEC Marconi, overseeing all aviation operations of the GEC aircraft equipment factories, which had a workforce of more than 6,000 employees. He was later appointed chairman of GEC Avionics and retired in 1994.

Peter Ambrose Hearne was born in Sunderland on November 14 1927 and educated at Sherborne School.



Hooked on aviation after seeing the R 101 airship, he joined the Air Defence Corps (forerunner of the ATC) when war broke out. He spent many happy hours during his school holidays pushing Hurricanes around the local RAF station at Usworth, taking any opportunity to fly as a passenger.

At Loughborough College, where he studied Aeronautical Engineering, he learnt to fly both gliders and powered aircraft. In 1947 he spent two years at the College of Aeronautics at Cranfield, gaining a Master’s degree.

In 1949 he joined the development unit of BOAC, where he met the Technical Director’s secretary, Georgina Guthrie. They married in April 1952, returning from their honeymoon a day early in order to see the De Havilland Comet take off on its first BOAC commercial flight.

After joining BEA in 1954 he was promoted to run the experimental helicopter group where his task was to develop equipment and techniques to allow helicopters to fly at night and in low visibility. After five years he joined Elliott Brothers, where staff were working on new autopilot systems and navigation aids for the next generation of aircraft.

In retirement Hearne was very active as a consultant and as an expert witness in investigations and inquiries. He also appeared before select committees of the House of Commons and international tribunals.

Hearne’s great passion was gliding. He gained the coveted Fédération Aéronautique Internationale gold award with three diamonds, flew successfully in national competitions and owned a number of high-performance gliders.

He was a member of the London and Lasham Gliding Clubs and the Aéro-Club Alpin in France, where he flew from the airfield at Gap near his holiday home (he was once forced to bail out of his glider after a collision).

Peter Hearne was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Aeronautical Society and the Royal Institute of Navigation.

He was awarded the Diploma of Imperial College, and served as president of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1980-81 and of the Cranfield Society for four years.

He died at Lasham Gliding Club whilst attending the wake of one of his gliding friends.

He is survived by his wife and their three sons

[Mr Lick]

Professor Bryan Clarke - obituary

Professor Bryan Clarke was a geneticist who showed how predators help biological diversity and co-founded the 'Frozen Ark’




Professor Bryan Clarke,he geneticist, who has died aged 81, demonstrated the importance of the role of predators in maintaining biological diversity and co-founded the “Frozen Ark” project to preserve the DNA of threatened animal species.


In a 1962 paper entitled “Balanced polymorphism and the diversity of sympatric species” (polymorphic species have a variety of different forms, or “phenotypes”), Clarke coined the term “apostatic selection”. This describes a process whereby common forms of certain species of animal can lose out to less common forms (“apostates”) in ways which tend to maintain polymorphic diversity.


Much of his early research involved studying the English grove snail Cepaea nemoralis, whose shell colours and patterns can be highly variable — reddish, brownish, yellow or whitish, with or without dark brown colour bands.




The snail Cepaea nemoralis (ALAMY)


In 1926 a researcher looking at the C nemoralis population in sand dunes at Berrow, Somerset, had found two different shell patterns — single-banded and double-banded — of which the double-banded was much more common due to its greater reproductive fecundity. By 1960, however, 12 generations later, Clarke found that there had been a radical change. Now the single-banded snail was predominant. The reason, he surmised, lay in complex changes in the relationship between the snail and its environment


C nemoralis is preyed upon by thrushes. In 1926 the amount of predation by the birds at Berrow had been low, but in the intervening years the dunes had been invaded by sea buckthorn, which provides shelter for thrushes from predatory hawks. As a result the thrush population had increased, and with it the predation on C nemoralis. When it came to selecting their prey, however, the birds focused mostly on the more common double-banded snail, probably because, in Luuk Tinbergen’s phrase, they had a “search image” of the meal they were looking for.




Examples of Cepaea nemoralis, whose shell colours and patterns can be highly variable (ALAMY)

While having such a “search image” can increase the proficiency of a predator in finding a common phenotype, Clarke and others argued, it gives an evolutionary advantage to less common prey phenotypes. This has led to the hypothesis that apostatic selection explains why some species come in so many different morphological forms. For example, tropical insect species show a huge variety of colours and patterns because there is an evolutionary advantage in looking different; the insect variety that has the lowest density in a population are the ones that are preyed on the least. But this success leads to the rare phenotype increasing in abundance. Eventually the predator will change its “search image” to the new most common phenotype, a process that helps maintain a natural equilibrium and explains why we see such huge genetic diversity in small natural populations of certain species.

This phenomenon, also known as “frequency-dependent balancing selection”, is found in many different areas of biology, accounting, for example, for the phenomenon of sickle-cell anaemia, a hereditary disease most common among people whose ancestors came from Africa, which is maintained in the population by balancing selection due to its resistance to the malarial parasite. Clarke went on to argue that apostatic selection could explain polymorphism at a molecular level, in opposition to the so-called “neutral” theory of molecular evolution advocated by JL King, Thomas Jukes and others, which puts such variations down to random genetic drift.

Bryan Campbell Clarke was born on June 24 1932 and spent the early years of his life in Nottinghamshire, where his father was a leather dealer. Following the outbreak of war he was sent away to the Bahamas, where, running wild on the seashore, he developed an interest in shells and snails. Bryan’s father was killed in the 1941 bombing of the Café de Paris in London, and the family subsequently lost all their money — Bryan was sent to live with friends in Boston, Massachusetts.

Returning to Britain in 1945, he won a scholarship to Magdalen College School, Oxford.

After two years’ National Service as a pilot officer in the RAF, he read Zoology at Magdalen College, Oxford, then took a DPhil

Following three years as a Nature Conservancy research student at Oxford, in 1959 he moved to Edinburgh University, where he rose from assistant lecturer to reader in the Zoology department. In 1971 he was appointed Foundation Professor of Genetics at Nottingham University, where he remained until his retirement in 1997 (after which he became professor emeritus), serving as head of department from 1971 to 1976, and again from 1981 to 1993.



The Partula snail, which Clarke studied from the 1960s (NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/GETTY)

From the 1960s, with JJ Murray of the University of Virginia, Clarke carried out an extensive series of studies on speciation in land snails of the genus Partula inhabiting the volcanic islands of the Eastern Pacific, helping to throw light on the genetic mechanisms of evolution. In the course of these studies, Clarke noticed that the snail was disappearing at an alarming rate due to Euglandina rosea, another snail introduced to the islands from Central America in the 1970s in an attempt to kill off a colony of giant African snails that had escaped from a farm where they were being bred for the restaurant trade. The plan went wrong, however, as the introduced snails much preferred the indigenous Partula snails to the African species that they were meant to devour

As well as alerting conservationists to the crisis, Clarke rescued some of the Partula snails and took them back to his laboratory in Nottingham, where they thrived on a diet of porridge, lettuce and tissue paper. He managed to breed five of the seven species he brought back, sending specimens to zoos around the world, helping to establish an international breeding programme. In 1994 some of the snails were reintroduced to a specially-protected trial reserve on the Pacific island of Moorea. The experiment showed that the snails could be successfully reintroduced

Subsequently, following reports that 30 per cent of the world’s animal species are likely to become extinct in the next half century, Clarke was instrumental in founding the Frozen Ark project to save samples of frozen cells containing DNA from endangered species — the animal equivalent of the “Millennium Seed Bank” created by Kew Gardens to conserve the seeds of the world’s plants



The project now involves 22 major zoos, aquaria, museums and research institutions in eight countries . Inevitably its launch in 2004 prompted press speculation about the return of the dinosaurs — as in Jurassic Park — and it is possible that at some point in the future animals could be recreated from frozen cells. However, the more immediate priorities are to preserve genetic information for scientific research and to help currently endangered animals to remain healthy by increasing genetic variation within their populations.

Clarke served as an adviser or officer on many scientific bodies and research councils and edited the journal Heredity from 1978 to 1985. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982, he was awarded its Darwin Medal in 2010 “for his original and influential contributions to our understanding of the genetic basis of evolution”.

In 2003 he was awarded the Linnean Medal for Zoology and in 2008 the Darwin-Wallace Medal of the Linnean Society of London. He was a Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He married, in 1960, Ann Jewkes, who survives him with their son and daughter

[Mr Lick]

René Ricard - obituary

René Ricard was a cultural butterfly from Andy Warhol’s Factory who became a poet, painter and Chelsea Hotel habitué



Rene Ricard, as photographed by Allen Ginsberg



René Ricard, who has died of cancer aged 67, was a cultural provocateur in Andy Warhol’s circle of oddballs, transsexuals and aspiring “superstars”.


Art critic, actor, poet and painter, Ricard was a Renaissance man for the cocaine age.

However, he accepted that, by conventional terms, he had never worked a day in his life. “If I did,” he said in the 1970s, “it would probably ruin my career, which at the moment is something of a cross between a butterfly and a lapdog.”


Ricard’s contemplative, literary-minded nature was at odds with the more chaotic aspects of Warhol’s studio entourage at The Factory. To his famous mentor, he was “the George Sanders of the Lower East Side”. Not that Ricard was able to emulate the laconic Hollywood star: in Warhol’s 1965 film Kitchen, Ricard was seen washing dishes to the hum of a refrigerator while the director’s tragic muse, Edie Sedgwick, sneezed in the background (an attempt to cover her fudged lines). “It was a horror to watch,” stated Norman Mailer.


The following year Ricard starred in Chelsea Girls, Warhol’s split-screen portmanteau tribute to residents of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. The notorious landmark on West 23rd Street was, in reality, Ricard’s on-off home for more than four decades. In its cloistered confines he wrote poetry and art criticism, painted experimental oils and nurtured his reputation as a recluse. “Don’t call out 'René! René!’” he remonstrated with one visiting interviewer. “I know who I am. You have to knock and say, 'It’s Ariel’ so I know it’s you.





Rene Ricard and 'Homeland' star Claire Danes with one of his art works, 'What Every Young Sissy Should Know' (ALAN DAVIDSON)

Albert René Ricard (he was always known by his middle name) was born on July 23 1946 in Boston where, as a gay, gangly teenage aesthete, he later modelled for the city’s art schools. In the early 1960s he moved from Massachusetts to New York, quickly settling into life as a struggling poet, before meeting Warhol in 1964 through the artist Al Hansen.

Ricard’s time at The Factory saw him experiment with acting (including the title role in The Andy Warhol Story in 1967, a self-flagellating biopic made by its subject) along with free verse. He would sit at their “happenings” wrapped in furs. “The Factory was a cold, frightening, forbidding place,” recalled Ricard. “I mean, it was all silver. It was frigid. Andy never gave us money but he took us out to eat every night.

He’d take the whole Factory to a place called Emilio’s and would be so high on amphetamine that he couldn’t eat. He’d serve himself an olive and cut it into 36 slices with the knife and fork.”

In October 1978 the Chelsea Hotel became synonymous with debauchery when Sid Vicious was arrested in Room 100 for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. In the aftermath, Ricard penned a column for the New York Times justifying a bohemian hotel life fuelled by other people’s money. “I should be paid to go out,” he postured.

“You see, I’m good for business. I class up a joint.”

During the 1980s Ricard’s art criticism for Artforum and Paris Review promoted the fledgling talents of Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel. In 1981 he published a piece entitled “The Radiant Child” which introduced the work of Jean Michel-Basquiat, the black graffiti artist who would become the enfant terrible of the Manhattan art scene.

Ricard’s interests were unapologetically avant garde, although some journalists claimed he eschewed objective criticism in favour of “high-octane” appreciations built on “panegyric, vituperation and gossip”.



Andy Warhol behind the camera during filming of 'Camp' at The Factory in 1965. Ricard (partly obscured, at rear centre right) is beside the screen (GETTY)

His other art writing included a monograph on the Italian painter Francesco Clemente (a 1999 collaboration with the photographer Luca Babini) and exhibition catalogues for shows by William Rand (Bleeker Gallery, 1989) and Philip Taaffe (Gagosian Gallery, August 1999).

Life at the Chelsea was monastic; his apartment consisted of a single room and a shared bathroom (he ate out). “I don’t own anything,” he said in 2007. “I always manage to come up with the rent, knock wood. 'Poet’ is not a salaried occupation.

And anyone reading this who’s in need of a poem, we can talk.” Being a man of letters at the Chelsea was not, however, without its benefits. “He writes something and brings it downstairs,” said his neighbour Raymond Foye. “I type it up, he likes to revise. It’s a very rewarding relationship.”

Ricard published four volumes of poems: René Ricard 1979–1980; God With Revolver (1990), which included his artistic representations of the poems; Trusty Sarcophagus Co (1990); and Love Poems (1999), which collected his verse alongside drawings by Robert Hawkins. His poetry echoed the streetwise wisdom of Leonard Cohen’s songs.

In The Death of Johnny Stompanato (named after the gangster killed by the daughter of his lover, Lana Turner) Ricard detailed the aftermath of a punch-drunk romance:

“So you submit to that mild form of boxing called love.
Then, happy he’s earned his keep
He picks your pocket, drives off in your blonde Lincoln
And you pass out.”

A 2003 show of paintings and drawings in New York was followed, in 2008, by an exhibition of new work at London’s Scream Gallery, staged by Julian Schnabel. “He was this invisible force behind so many artists in the Eighties,” said Schnabel of Ricard, adding: “There’s a lifetime behind his work. He’s a grown-up.” In his late work he scrawled neon shades of green, orange and blue text over his and others’ oil paintings. One canvas has the adage “Sometimes it’s OK to throw rocks at girls” scribbled over a painting of a diamond ring. Collectors of his works include the model Kate Moss and the music producer Mark Ronson.

Ricard’s eclectic artistic trajectory was, he maintained, all intended “to amuse and delight, giving my rich friends a feeling of largesse, my poor friends a sense of the high life and myself a true sense of accomplishment for having become a fixture and a rarity in this shark-infested metropolis.”

[Mr Lick]

Bernard Perlin - obituary

Bernard Perlin was an artist who produced both propaganda and reportage in war then turned to Magical Realism in peace




Bernard Perlin, who has died aged 95, was an American artist whose wartime work morphed from propaganda to reportage as he confronted the stark realities of the conflicts in Europe and the Pacific. After the war he snubbed the rise of Abstract Expressionism in favour of the good life in Italy and New England.


As America entered the war Perlin joined the United States Office of War Information.

Placed in the Graphics Division, he produced bold, block-coloured posters and lithographs to rally the nation’s morale. His Let 'Em Have It sheets – in which a GI hurls a grenade while the public are called on to buy more war bonds – were to become ubiquitous across the stores and stations of the American home front.

Another, from 1943, declared that “Americans Will Always Fight for Liberty” and pictured contemporary American soldiers set against a backdrop of Benjamin Franklin’s Independence troops.


This patriotic delivery was to be diffused by his experiences embedded in an American commando unit in the Mediterranean. Here he drew and painted works for Time and Fortune magazines.





Chief Planning Center War Room of the B-29 Air Force (1945) by Bernard Perlin


His gouaches captured the struggle of Greek civilians – often Resistance fighters – caught behind German lines; blood-soaked operating theatres; and soldiers preparing for action picked out in the inky blue of moonlight. He explained that he would often relive a battle in his mind before committing paint to canvas. He also sketched out caricatures and portraits, including a deep-lined profile of General Douglas MacArthur.

He later covered the war in the South Pacific and Asia, where he was on board the “Mighty Mo” (USS Missouri) for the formal Japanese surrender, and remained in the region to record the war’s aftermath.



Bernard Perlin as a young man

Bernard Perlin was born in Richmond, Virginia, on November 21 1918 into a family of Jewish Russian-émigré tailors. In 1934, after his artistic promise had been spotted at high school, he enrolled at the New York School of Design. He then studied at the National Academy of Design Art School and the Art Students League before receiving a scholarship to develop his work in Poland.

On his return, Perlin was commissioned by the US Treasury to paint a vivid mural – depicting a late-1930s country scene – on a Post Office wall in the New Jersey village of South Orange (for which he was paid $2,000). It was a community project that would be a precursor to his Social Realist work during, and in the wake of, the war.

After his wartime experiences Perlin’s delivery turned towards Magical Realism, an informal school with an artistic lineage that can be traced from Frida Kahlo to Edward Hopper. His aim was to capture an “everyday magic” powered by both realism and surrealism.



War bonds poster by Bernard Perlin (HULTON/GETTY)

Perhaps his most famous painting was executed in this period. Orthodox Boys (1948) pictured two boys in their skull caps pondering a Hebrew text on a platform at Manhattan’s Canal Street subway. Behind them a wall displays a thousand doodles – from lovers’ declarations to notes by Nazi sympathisers. It is a snapshot of a specific time and culture given an almost sinister air.

The painting, now in the Tate’s collection, was to inform the development of the young British Pop artist, Peter Blake. “It was one of the first Magic Realist pictures I saw,” Blake said in 2001. “The whole school of Magic Realism was a great influence on my painting.”



Orthodox Boys (1948) by Bernard Perlin (TATE)

Perlin’s post-war career would be guided by an ever-shifting focus – both in terms of style and subject. In 1948, shortly after painting Orthodox Boys, he relocated to Italy, staying for six years, painting what he termed simply “beautiful pictures”. Social realism gave way to dreamlike images of Capri’s cliffs and the Spanish Steps in Rome and took on a new palette of deep reds and shocking greens.

Returning to New York, he was confronted by a transformed art scene. Punchy, beer-fuelled Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, lorded over the network of galleries and seduced – in all senses of the word – patrons such as Peggy Guggenheim. Perlin was repelled by this resolutely anti-figurative and incestuous hothouse environment. He moved to the haven of Ridgefield, Connecticut, “to escape the artificial, ego-pressured world of artists in New York, competing with each other to make the most money”. The leafy confines of New England forged an increasingly Impressionistic and contemplative approach – a 1968 portrait of Truman Capote depicts the author almost dissolving into the white sun-bleached haze of a drawing room.

In the 1970s Perlin stopped painting and, with his partner, later husband, Edward Newell, lived quietly, growing flowers in his small conservatory. It was a respite that would last for many years – he only returned to the easel late in life. “Every painting is like a book,” stated Perlin last year. “Every book is about something different, and has something different to say. That’s what painting is like. People always ask me why my paintings are so different they might have been done by several artists. Well, I’ve gone through many different phases of life — it’s been full of changes, so why would I stick to one technique?”

Perlin held teaching posts at the Brooklyn Museum Art School (1946-48) and Wooster School, Danbury, Connecticut (1967-69). His works are held in many of the world’s leading collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Edward Newell survives him

[FloridaBorn]

So they aren't famous unless you've heard of them eh?

Get over yourself.

Hate to say it but I agree with Koojo. But, Koojo you can lead the way and start the thread yourself and maybe the masses will follow. Could be an epic thread with your nik on it like this one.

Personally I'd say the intent of the thread is to recognize more world wide known personalities (which is the more common and widely understood definition of "famous" persons) instead of more locally recognized and that is the point Koojo is making.

[harrybarracuda]

Simple answer: If you don't know someone, skip past the post.

[harrybarracuda]

ENGLEWOOD, N.J. — The veteran stage, film and TV performer best known for playing Alice Kramden in the 1960s re-creation of “The Honeymooners” has died. Sheila MacRae was 92.
MacRae’s granddaughter, Allison Mullavey, on Friday told The Associated Press that the actress died Thursday at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J.
A singer, dancer and actress, she was married to “Oklahoma” star Gordon MacRae for 26 years and they appeared together in 1964 on “The Ed Sullivan Show” when the Beatles were featured.
In an earlier version, Audrey Meadows starred with Jackie Gleason as lovebirds and sparring partners Ralph and Alice Kramden in “The Honeymooners.” Sheila MacRae replaced Meadows as Alice in a later version from 1966-70 on “The Jackie Gleason Show.”
A native of London, MacRae made a cameo as herself on “I Love Lucy” in the 50s.

[Mr Lick]

Marion Thorpe - obituary

Marion Thorpe was a concert pianist whose life was defined by her two marriages: one Royal, one to Jeremy Thorpe



Marion Thorpe with her second husband Jeremy Thorpe in the garden of their Cobbaton home



Marion Thorpe, who has died aged 87, was a concert pianist and co-founder of the Leeds International Piano Competition, and destined for a brilliant career on the concert circuit; instead her life was defined by two high-profile marriages: to the Earl of Harewood, the Queen’s cousin, and to Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party.


Having grown up in the heady cultural hothouse of pre-war Vienna — where she met Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg referred to her as his “haselnüsschen” (“little hazelnut”) — she retained a lifelong rapport with musical masters (she would later become one of the closest female friends of Benjamin Britten, with whom she played both piano duets and tennis).


In 1961 Fanny Waterman, her son’s piano teacher, had the idea for an international piano competition based in Leeds and enlisted her support. Marion, who since 1949 had been the Countess of Harewood, was able to secure the patronage of her mother-in-law, the Princess Royal (Princess Mary), as well as opening the door to many other society contacts.


“The Leeds” was first held in 1963 and quickly established a reputation as one of the foremost classical music competitions, on a par with the International Tchaikovsky in Moscow and the International Van Cliburn in Texas. The roll-call of winners from its early days was spectacular — Radu Lupu, Murray Perahia and Dmitri Alexeev, among them — while those who took runners-up prizes was even more so: Mitsuko Uchida, András Schiff and Peter Donohoe, to name but a few.


Marion’s second marriage, to Jeremy Thorpe, the dashing leader of the Liberal Party, was overshadowed by accusations that he had conspired to murder Norman Scott, a former male model who claimed to have been Thorpe’s homosexual lover. Thorpe was acquitted at the Old Bailey in 1979, but his career was over; thereafter the couple remained largely out of the public gaze.




Marion and Jeremy Thorpe leaving the Old Bailey in 1979

She was born Maria Donata Nanetta Paulina Gustava Erwina Wilhelmine Stein in Vienna on October 18 1926, the daughter of Erwin Stein, a prominent Jewish musician and editor who had been a pupil of Schoenberg, and his wife Sophie. “My father’s circle was that of the so-called Second Viennese School,” she once said, recalling that Alban Berg — whose opera Lulu her father had arranged into a vocal score — was “enormously tall and dark and handsome”. Inter-war Vienna, she said, “considered itself the musical shrine of the world”.

As a child she was immersed in music, such as Mozart’s The Magic Flute, although her father deemed Don Giovanni, Carmen and La Bohème unsuitable. Mahler, with whom her father was acquainted, was another influence.

After the Anschluss in 1938 the family left Vienna; Erwin Stein joined Boosey & Hawkes in London, working as Britten’s publisher. When he was interned on the Isle of Man in 1940, Marion and her mother were forced to survive on a weekly allowance of only £3.

After schooling in Kensington she studied with Kendall Taylor at the Royal College of Music. Later she took lessons with Franz Osborn, while Clifford Curzon became something of a mentor .

She was 12 when she first met Britten, curtsying to him after a concert at the Queen’s Hall — something he teased her about for many years. When a fire destroyed the Steins’ apartment in 1944 the family lodged for 18 months with Britten and Peter Pears in St John’s Wood, although she later described the arrangement as “not always easy”.

She would play Schubert, Mozart and Mahler with Britten, and enjoyed a front-row seat during the preparations for his opera Peter Grimes, which opened at Sadler’s Wells in June 1945. However, playing tennis with the composer was frightening. “He was really very good… he hated losing,” she recalled of their matches at the Red House in Aldeburgh for a rare BBC interview last year to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth.

By 1948, the 21-year-old Marion was a noted beauty, and while attending Britten’s new music festival at Aldeburgh she met and fell in love with the festival’s president, the seventh Earl of Harewood, who was 11th in line to the throne. Britten counselled that “absolutely nothing should weigh in importance beside whether you really love him”. At first Queen Mary objected to their union. Lord Harewood summed up her view of his bride: “Not only Jewish … she doesn’t hunt”.



Marion Thorpe on her first wedding day in 1949

The couple married at St Mark’s Church, North Audley Street, in September 1949, the Royal Family interrupting their summer at Balmoral to attend the ceremony, which included the first performance of A Wedding Anthem by Britten. Five hundred policemen lined the streets of London and 900 guests attended the reception at St James’s Palace.

A few months earlier Marion had taken part in the premiere of The Little Sweep (part of Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera) at Aldeburgh. By all accounts she was a first-rate pianist, whose radiant personality was reflected in her sparkling performance. But after her children were born she retired from the concert platform. “I got so far, and let it go,” she once said. “I don’t regret it.”

Now chatelaine of the magnificent Palladian Harewood House, north of Leeds, she threw herself into organising events. In March 1950, for example, she created an opera-inspired fancy dress ball in aid of Britten’s English Opera Group, featuring Frederick Ashton and Moira Shearer dancing the tango from the ballet Façade. The following year Britten dedicated Billy Budd to the Harewoods.



Marion with her first husband George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, at the ICA in 1950

Between the first Leeds piano competition in 1963 — for which she persuaded Britten to write Notturno, a work that all the competitors were required to play — and the second in 1966, her marriage unravelled when Lord Harewood admitted adultery with Patricia Tuckwell, an Australian model. Britten ordered him to resign from Aldeburgh Festival; for many years he was not welcome at Court.

The couple were divorced in 1967. That same year Marion began to co-write, with Fanny Waterman, the Me and My Piano series of piano tutor books for beginners. A bestselling series for Faber’s musical list, they have sold more than two million copies.

In the early 1970s the pianist Moura Lympany introduced Marion to Jeremy Thorpe, the MP for North Devon, whose first wife, Caroline Allpass, had been killed in a car crash in June 1970. The couple married quietly at Paddington Register Office in 1973 and Marion now immersed herself in being a political wife.

But divorce from a member of the Royal Family was followed by further social ostracism when her husband was consumed by the scandal that ended his career.

The case centred on the claim by Andrew Newton, a former airline pilot, that he had been hired by Thorpe to kill Norman Scott, but in the event had only managed to shoot Scott’s Great Dane, Rinka, before his gun jammed (the scandal became known as “Rinkagate”).

Marion Thorpe supported her husband loyally throughout, never leaving his side. She was in court each day and shared his relief when, after considerable deliberation on the part of the jury, and a night in the cells for her husband, the court acquitted him.

The strain of the case seriously impaired Jeremy Thorpe’s health and it was not long after that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Marion nursed him for many years until prevented from doing so by her own infirmities.




Marion Thorpe with her husband Jeremy outside the Old Bailey in 1979

Although she kept a magnificent piano at their 16th-century thatched cottage in the hamlet of Higher Chuggaton, it was rarely used. The room in which it was housed was described by one visitor as “like a mausoleum”. To those who met her in later life, Marion Thorpe could seem cold and distant. But, as Barrie Penrose noted in Rinkagate, his book about the Thorpe scandal: “Friends said that this was no more than reserve... that she had had such a difficult life that she understood the pain of failure”.

After Britten’s death in 1976 she continued to serve as a trustee of the Britten Pears Foundation and in 1985 compiled a 75th birthday tribute book for Pears.

Marion Thorpe, who was appointed CBE in 2008, is survived by Jeremy Thorpe and by the three sons of her first marriage, the eldest of whom succeeded to the Earldom in 2011.


Marion Thorpe, born October 18 1926, died March 6 2014

[Mr Lick]

Peter Rona - obituary

Peter Rona was a deep-sea explorer who uncovered a hidden world of 'black smokers’, precious metals and bizarre creatures



Peter Rona emerging from a deep-sea submersible


Peter Rona, who has died aged 79, was a marine geologist who helped to pioneer the scientific exploration of the deep-sea floor; he discovered the world’s first “black smoker” hot springs — a kind of undersea volcano — and located giant submerged mineral deposits, while his quest for an elusive creature known as a Paleodictyon nodosum inspired an award-winning feature film.




A deep-sea "black smoker" hydrothermal vent on the Pacific Juan de Fuca Ridge (SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)


Until the discovery of plate tectonics in the 1960s, the oceans were generally regarded as a big bathtub — a system of linked containers for minerals washed off the continents. Over more than 40 years of research, Rona, a Professor of Marine Geology and Geophysics at Rutgers University, New Jersey, dived inside 11 of the world’s 13 deep-sea submersible research vessels. His voyages of discovery to the deepest regions of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans helped to overturn the notion of the oceans as passive receptacles for the products of erosion.


A major success came in 1985, when he led an expedition to the mid-Atlantic Ridge, part of a mountainous outcrop of solidified lava which snakes more than 35,000 miles along the bottom of the world’s oceans and is the largest geographic feature on earth.

What he and his colleagues discovered was a vast system of natural undersea “dynamos”, fuelled by hot springs, with rising currents shimmering, as he put it, “like heatwaves on desert sand”. These produced not only valuable deposits of gold, silver and other precious metals, but also habitats for unique, heat-loving organisms, most of them unknown to science, a whole ecosystem of strange-looking sea worms, shrimp, crabs — and microorganisms that take their energy not from the sun via plants but from the chemicals discharged from the Earth’s interior.






Deep sea creatures: Deep ocean worm Nereis sandersi (SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

“Now we know that the Earth’s crust, most of it under the ocean, is cracked into plates that move and allow heat and materials from the earth’s interior to escape,” Rona wrote in an overview of current thinking in Science in 2003. “As a result we know that most of the minerals on the sea floor probably come from sources under the sea floor.” In fact, there was probably as much water circulating under the sea floor as in the oceans themselves: “Cold, dense seawater seeps for miles downward through the crust. When it reaches hot layers in the mantle, the water heats and rises with force, dissolving metals from surrounding rocks and blasting out of the sea floor at 650 degrees Fahrenheit. Often the jets are so dense with minerals we call them 'black smokers.’”

Over the last 40 years marine biologists have identified hundreds of new species in deep-sea hydrothermal vent ecosystems, of which more than 95 per cent are new to science. They include snails covered with plates of iron armour, shrimps with infrared light detectors on their backs instead of eyes, long-necked barnacles thought to have died out with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, albino crabs and even an octopus with head fins that look like an elephant’s ears, leading Rona to describe deep-sea volcanic springs as “as rich and abundant with life as rainforests”. Scientists have theorised that the deep-sea hot-spring ecosystem incubated the first life forms on earth billions of years ago.



A "Dumbo octopus" Grimpoteuthis, discovered on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY/REX)

On average a new species is discovered every 10 days. But as Rona observed in his Science article, perhaps the most exciting discovery has been that of heat-loving microbes, which can survive temperatures of up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit and live in waters saturated with heavy metals which are highly acidic and would be lethal to 99 per cent of life on Earth. Some of these have been found to be capable of astounding feats of chemistry useful to man. For example, one of the enzymes derived from these heat-loving microbes is used in DNA fingerprinting. Others are being developed for detergents, food preservation, oil-drilling and pharmaceuticals.

From 1999 to 2003, Rona and his colleague Richard Lutz served as science advisers on Volcanoes of the Deep Sea (2003), directed by Stephen Low – the first film to take an up-close look at deep-sea vents and their ecosystems. The movie won an award at the Paris Film Festival and drew audiences in their millions, though it was not shown in some parts of the United States for fear that its discussion of the role of deep-sea vents in evolution might offend creationists.



Sea-bed burrows of Paleodictyon nodosum

The narrative peg for the film was Rona’s Captain Ahab-like search for a marine worm whose ancestors were some of the planet’s earliest forms of complex life. In the mid-1970s, while exploring the Atlantic, Rona had spotted a tightly-packed series of small holes in the seabed mud arranged in a hexagonal pattern — identical to the fossilised burrows of a creature known as Paleodictyon nodosum which supposedly became extinct 50 million years ago. Over the next 30 years he photographed thousands of hexagons — some with as many as 200 to 300 holes. During a dive in the deep Atlantic in 2003, the robot arm of his submersible squirted water at one such hexagon, revealing an array of subsurface tunnels identical to those of the fossilised burrows. But despite years of sifting through seabed mud, he never found a living specimen.

Peter Arnold Rona was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on August 17 1934 and collected rocks and minerals from an early age. After taking a degree in Geology from Brown University in 1956 and a Master’s from Yale in 1957, he worked as an oil company prospector. In 1958, however, he met some oceanographers and was so inspired by their stories of a new world under the sea that he returned to Yale to take a PhD in Marine Geology and Geophysics.



He began his deep-sea adventures while mapping the seabed of the Atlantic for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1987 the US Commerce Department awarded him its gold medal for exceptional scientific contributions. He joined Rutgers University in 1994.

Rona wrote hundreds of scientific papers, published an atlas of the central North Atlantic seabed and in recent years worked as a consultant to the United Nations on sea floor mineral resources.

The discovery of mineral wealth on the ocean floor sparked something of a modern-day gold rush. In 1998 geologists discovered a $2 billion trove of gold and silver in the crater of an active undersea volcano 250 miles south of Tokyo, and mineral-rich volcanic fields have been found in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans. Though the technology has not yet been developed that would allow these resources to be fully exploited, Rona became increasingly concerned about the possible impact of seabed mining on deep-sea ecosystems, and in 2003 delivered a keynote address at a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, proposing a “constitution” for the management of the oceans.

Rona’s wife, Donna, died last year. He is survived by a daughter

[Mr Lick]

Stefan Baluk - obituary

Stefan Baluk was a Polish SOE agent who escaped from the Nazis through the sewers of Warsaw

Stephan


Stefan Baluk, who has died aged 100, was one of the last survivors of the elite SOE agents of Poland’s Home Army, and survived capture by both Nazi and Soviet occupiers.


On the night of April 9 1944, Baluk was flown from Brindisi, in the liberated heel of Italy, and dropped into Poland. In Warsaw he found bunkers and checkpoints everywhere and, as a spy, he could not make contact with any members of his family.


He began working with the Armia Krajowa (AK), the Home Army. Moving stealthily around the city he took photographs of German military installations. On August 1, the Home Army gave the signal for the start of the Warsaw uprising. Baluk’s speciality was making forged documents for the resistance fighters.


Communications were a problem. Fighters in one part of the city lacked the correct radio crystals to maintain contact with their comrades in another. On one occasion, he and his unit volunteered to deliver crystals to a commando group. This involved crossing railway lines which were under water and heavily guarded. It was dark, but a sentry heard the splashing and opened fire. Baluk said afterwards that they were only able to get away because an aircraft came over and the sentry engaged it.


As the net around them was drawn tighter, the resistance fighters took to the sewers. Baluk travelled the length of the city through the filth. His worst moment, he said, was when his leg became trapped. Switching on his flashlight, something that was only permitted in emergencies, he discovered that the limb was in a pincer-like grip between the ribs of a dead body.

Stefan Klemens Baluk was born in Warsaw on January 15 1914. He was studying Law when he was called up and enlisted in the 10th Motorized Cavalry Brigade. After Poland was overwhelmed by the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg, he escaped through Hungary and joined the Polish armed forces in France under General Sikorski.


When France fell he was evacuated to England. Having volunteered for the SOE, he was posted to Scotland and trained in sabotage, unarmed combat and guerrilla operations. He was sent on a course in parachuting and in forging German identity documents.

The Soviet authorities encouraged the Polish underground to stage an insurgency but the Red Army failed to come to their aid. After 63 days of desperate fighting, the Home Army split into small groups and, when their supplies were exhausted, they were forced to surrender.

The Germans deported most of the population and destroyed the city.

Baluk was taken prisoner and sent to Oflag 11-D in Gross Born, Pomerania. He escaped in January 1945 and rejoined the Home Army in Poland. Once again, he made false documents but this time for those resisting Poland’s new masters, the Communists.

In November he was betrayed and arrested by the NKVD for being a member of the Home Army and was sentenced to four years in prison. In 1947 he was, however, released under an amnesty. Thereafter, he was stripped of his rights as a citizen and regularly arrested and interrogated by the secret police.

He worked as a taxi driver for many years and it was not until 1971 that his friends managed to get him work as a professional photographer. During the Warsaw Uprising, he had taken thousands of photographs which he hid and recovered after the war.

In 1989, when Poland became a democratic country, his achievements were finally recognised. In 2006, he was promoted to honorary brigadier general. He was also awarded the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest military decoration for gallantry. His memoirs were translated into English in 2009 and appeared as Silent and Unseen: I was a WWII special ops commando.

Stefan Baluk married, first, “Lala” Krzyczkowska. He married, secondly, Barbara Kostrzewa. His third marriage was to Danuta Orzeszko, who survives him with a son and two daughters, and a daughter of his second marriage. A son of his second marriage predeceased him

[harrybarracuda]

WTF Did Marion Thorpe ever do apart from marry a bum bandit?

[Mr Lick]

^ Concert pianist, wed the Queen's cousin and a little later upped her credibility by marrying a queen.

[harrybarracuda]

Stretching it a bit there mate (which funnily enough is what Norman Scott said).

[xanax]

Stretching it a bit there mate (which funnily enough is what Norman Scott said).

Simple answer: If you don't know someone, skip past the post.