For this last Friday night of 2008, I wanted to take a few moments to look back over the last year and raise a virtual toast to those who are gone, to those we lost in the last 12 months. It was a rough year for us, losing political heroes and Oscar winners. Our two most recent deaths, just on Christmas Day: Eartha Kitt spoke out against the Vietnam War; Harold Pinter spoke out against the Iraq War.
There is a list at the end of this diary, but below the fold, a tribute to three of those that I will miss most in film. There are a lost I will miss.
Although he was hardly a progressive hero by the end of his life, Charlton Heston was an advocate for Civil Rights in the early 1960s. And I was quite upset with the ill-considered remarks on his death, referring with some nastiness to his advocacy for the NRA (a stance that was certainly horrid, but frustratingly was the first thing that people tended to mention when his name came up). Indeed, it overwhelmed a lot of the appreciation of his film work. The night he died, I posted this diary with my thoughts on his death. In it, I refer to the moments (sadly rather few and far between) when a truly great actor emerged from the "being Chuck Heston" thing, the latest of which was a featured role in Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. The version I found of the speech of the "Player King" alone was unsynchronized. This one features the Charlton Heston portion beginning at 4:30 in (of course, the whole clip from Branagh's Hamlet is well worth watching!):
And someone who definitely WAS a progressive hero throughout his life, Paul Newman (who should have won an Oscar for his role in The Verdict), who was such a good guy, and so very pretty, was also one of thebest actors around. He aged beautifully, from the handsome lead in The Silver Chalice through to the roguish Butch Cassidy and Henry Gondorff in The Sting, and the architect hero in The Towering Inferno (I was such a sucker for him in these years), to The Color of Money, where he reprised his role as Eddie Felson. That was the one for which he won a well-deserved Oscar, but if he had not lost out to Ben Kingley in 1982's Oscars (Peter O'Toole missed out that year as well), it might have been his second. A truly fine actor, with amazingly beautful and lively blue eyes.
But because this is my diary, I am going to include the trailer for one of his less-fine films (but one in which he was riveting, anyway), Exodus:
Roy Scheider was the cool older brother to Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, the Bob Fosse stand-in in the 1979 film All That Jazz, and of course Chief "You're gonna need a bigger boat" Brody in Jaws. It would be easy to pick a clip of any of these (or The French Connection or Klute or the tv show "Seaquest DSV" (he wasn't bad, even though the show was insanely silly), but the one I wanted to include in this tribute is from one of his lesser-known roles, that of Dr. Heywood Floyd in 2010, the continuation of the story begun in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This particular scene I like because it allows his very expressive face to tell the story.
I actually looked for the opening sequence of All That Jazz (a dance sequence to George Benson's version of "On Broadway") but could only find one that was terribly truncated. This clip, however, has the advantage of honouring not just Roy Scheider, but also another of the great who passed this year, Arthur C. Clarke, honoured in a diary on this site by David Brin.
My (relatively) complete list including those discussed above:
Bernie Mac (1957-2008)
Heath Ledger (1979-2008)
George Carlin (1937-2008)
Paul Newman (1925-2008)
Charlton Heston (1923-2008)
Richard Widmark (1914-2008)
Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (1932-2008)
Van Johnson (1916-2008)
Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)
Estelle Getty (1923-2008)
Sydney Pollack (1934-2008)
Youssef Chahine(Egyptian film director)(1926-2008)
Suzanne Pleshette (1937-2008)
Roy Scheider (1932-2008)
David Groh (1939-2008)
Mel Ferrer (1917-2008)
Cyd Charisse (1921-2008)
Robert Mulligan, who directed the film To Kill a Mockingbird (1925-2008)
Paul Scofield (1922-2008)
Barry Morse (1918-2008)
Nina Foch (1924-2008)
Dick Martin (of tv's "Laugh In") (1922-2008)
Eartha Kitt (1927-2008)
Harold Pinter (1930-2008)
Isaac Hayes(1942-2008)